The sale also includes the signed typescript of ten of the 25 “Lara” poems which appear in Dr Zhivago.

This is an important addition to our understanding of a novel of great literary and political significance.” The prize was not, however, awarded to anybody else that year and 30 years later, Pasternak’s son Yevgeny was able to collect it at a ceremony in Stockholm.īonhams Director of Business Development for Books and Manuscripts in New York, Tom Lamb said, “Examples of manuscript chapters of Dr Zhivago very rarely become available. The novelist was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature which he initially accepted until the Soviet government forced him to turn it down. Recognising its propaganda value, the CIA arranged for a Russian translation and Pasternak was denounced in his homeland as anti-Soviet. The novel and its author then became pawns in the Cold War. The first English translation appeared in the USA in 1958. Rejected by the literary magazine Novy Mir for deviating from the tenets of Social Realism, the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Italy in 1957. Through the experiences of its central characters, the novel offers a complex and nuanced account of the period, especially the October 1917 revolution and its aftermath. ’.ĭr Zhivago is set in Russia between the 1905 Revolution and the Civil War of the early 1920s. Pasternak wrote on the cover of the composition book ‘Olga please save as is. The recipient of the notes - which cover events in chapters three and four of the published work - was Pasternak’s mistress, the poet Olga Ivinskaya, who worked at Noyi Mir, a leading literary magazine.

The book’s author, Boris Pasternak (1890-1860), gave the notes for safe-keeping to the woman who inspired the novel’s central character, Lara, and whom had been imprisoned in the gulags under Stalin. Handwritten working notes for two chapters of one of the 20th century’s most controversial novels, Dr Zhivago, are among a host of fascinating literary gems at Bonhams Fine Literature Sale in New York on 11 April.

Pasternak dr zhivago