Description:

BORIS PASTERNAK Samizdat, Author Signed, 1958

Boris Pasternak: V PERERYVE, (During a Break). Poems from 1945-1957. [Moscow, The author, 1958]. Quarto 20x12.3 cm. in a calico binding, [2]. 1-51, [2], 52-100, [6] p. 20 x 12.3 cm. With Pasternak's penciled notes on p. 61 and p. [106]. 

PROVENANCE
From the collection of the heirs of Zoya A. Maslenikova

LOT NOTES
Pasternak had no poems published publicly during this time in Russia. However, he issued a number of self-published, hand-printed pamphlets of his poetry which he shared with friends. These never exceeded 15 to 25 copies in number. The present work is the largest of these, and features poems that are found in Doctor Zhivago, hence they are the first appearance in any form to be released by the author in Russian to fellow Russians. The novel had reached Italy and was first published by Feltrinelli in 1957 in Italian translation, then in Russian and soon in other languages, but there was block on it in the USSR*. The present work was issued in the same year that the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which incited the condemnation from the Communist Party. The circulation of these poems under such circumstances had to be clandestine and discreet.

In addition to some of the poems that appear in Dr Zhivago, there are many in the present work that were unpublished in the poet's lifetime. Pasternak was ousted from the Writer's Union and not allowed to publish his work aside from translations. All of his other work would not appear in Russia until well after his death. Extreme pressure was applied to punish the writer for sending his great novel to the West, including house arrest, KGB presence and harassment. His mistress Olga lvinskaya was accused of negotiating for profits and collecting them from sales in hard currency. Already having served four years in the gulag from her first arrest, after the poet's death in 1960 she was arrested, tried and sentenced to eight years of which she served four, all in retribution for her relationship with Pasternak.

A sheet with a dedication is glued to the front endpaper: "To dear Zoya Afanasyevna Maslennikova, intelligent, courageous, talented, in memory of our meetings and conversations and of how her sculptural work progressed in the autumn of 1958. B. Pasternak. Peredelkino, 30 September 1958." The recipient of the autograph is Zoya Afanasyevna Maslenikova (1923-2008) - a sculptor, artist, poet, writer and translator. Associate of Alexander Men. Maslenikova made sculptural portraits of Anna Akhmatova and other luminaries at the time. In the last years of Boris Pasternak's life, she created several of his sculptural portraits which were published in the book "Portrait of Boris Pasternak" (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1990).

*The CIA published an adulterated Russian language edition in 1958 which was displayed at the Brussels International Exposition that year, and the first "cleaned up" Russian version published by the University of Michigan in 1959. Pasternak was posthumously reinstated to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1967, and Zhivago published for the first time in the USSR in 1968.

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