"In June 1934, Stalin allegedly called Boris Pasternak and they spoke about the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. A telephone call from the dictator was not something necessarily relished, and in the complicated world of literary politics it would have provided opportunities for potential misunderstanding and profound trouble. But this was a call one could not ignore. Stalin wanted to know what Pasternak thought of the idea that Mandelstam had been arrested....

Drawing on newly declassified files, this is the story of how a book forbidden in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout paid a visit to Russia's greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the manuscript of Pasternak's first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak...

"The poems in this volume represent all Pasternak's later work, and may therefore be reckoned the successor to In early trains, a small collection which the poet published in 1942. The present collection is divided into two sections, the first of which includes the poems of Doctor Zhivago, previously published as a part of the novel; and the second of which includes the full text of the cycle When the skies clear (Kogda razgulyaetsya)."--Page xiii....

Portrait of Pasternak as novelist, poet, and political thinker with an examination of his short stories and poems.