PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH. 1890-1960.


Typed Manuscript, carbon copy, "Doktor Zhivago" (being volume one only of the entire novel), 177 pp, 8vo, Moscow, 1948, some corrections in type throughout, magenta wrappers bound with raw yarn; preserved in an embossed black paper-covered "Dlya bumag" [For Papers] portfolio, some wear and tear with loss of the top and bottom of spine.Provenance: Sergei Spassky (1898-1956, gift of the author).RARE CARBON COPY OF THE FIRST DRAFT OF THE FIRST VOLUME OF DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. This early text was written nearly a decade before the book's publication and presented by the author to Leningrad poet and friend Sergei Spassky. The subtitle (and an early working title of the novel) present here: Kartiny poluvekobogo obikhoda (Scenes of a Half-Century of Daily Life), was later discarded. Although he had been working on the story off and on since the 1910s, Boris Pasternak (known primarily as a poet) started writing a novel in 1945. On September 9, 1946, Pravda denounced Pasternak as "an author lacking in ideology and remote from Soviet reality." That very evening the author gave a private reading from the first part of the manuscript that perplexed several of his listeners, including critic and translator Kornei Chukovsky. Another, literary scholar Korneli Zelinsky, later denounced it. Anna Akhmatova too did not care much for it when she attended another reading. But Pasternak insisted he was not writing for the intelligentsia: he wanted his book to also be devoured by every Russian, "even a seamstress or a dishwasher. For his part, Spassky, unlike Akhmatova, was enthusiastic, finding in it a new source of "patent, unconcealed energy," as he told Pasternak, "Quite simply, you're entire poetic arsenal is now in play" (Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Life, vol 2, p 255).