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This article discusses the evolution of the cultural-civilizational self-identification of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poet, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960), the 1958 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. Analyzing an extensive range of materials, the author shows that Pasternak positioned himself as a particular type of "Russian European," a "man of the North," a "winter man," continuing a fruitful lineage in the Russian cultural tradition (Gavriil Derzhavin, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Blok). The literary thinker himself repeatedly testified to his own "northernness," including in his autobiographical works Safe Conduct and "People and Propositions." The "winter theme" dominates many of Pasternak's poems, as well as his prose works, including his novel Doctor Zhivago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author examines the work of Boris Pasternak, primarily his novel Doctor Zhivago, in the context of his Marburg experience and Kantian ideas as the basis of his moral-aesthetic position. Pasternak tried to live and write over the barriers that a totalitarian era had erected in human life. His late novel managed to tell Russia and the rest of humanity about this tragic century in Russian history, using as the basis of his reflections a Russian intellectual who grew up on the pathos of a Christianity rethought in early twentieth-century Russia. What happened in Russia in 1917 was not only a social pogrom, but also an intellectual one. Pasternak's novel was a unique attempt to cope with this intellectual catastrophe by relying on Christianity. The very name of the protagonist, Zhivago, has a rhyme in the Gospels. It was not by chance that Pasternak shared with the Christian thinker Fyodor Stepun that he had written about Doctor Zhivago while working on a translation of Goethe's Faust, that great mystery-drama. He recounted Russia's historical tragedy through the fate of a single man, a doctor and poet. Pasternak won the battle against the darkness that had engulfed his homeland, preserving a soul capable of grieving for loved ones despite restrictive barriers, for the starry heavens above and the moral law within made the core of his personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of my contribution is to underline the role of the novel Doctor Zhivago by the Russian author Boris Pasternak during the Cold War. Particularly, I would like to point out how the novel and the Nobel Prize given to its author were used by the US intelligence as a "soft power" weapon against Soviet Union, with the collaboration of two Italians: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and The Vatican. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new interpretation of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago in the cultural and historical context of the first half of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the interrelationship between religion and philosophy of history in the text. Doctor Zhivago is analysed as a condensed representation of a religious conception of Russian history between 1901 and 1953 and as a cyclical repetition of the Easter narrative. This bipartite narrative consists of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ as symbols of violence and renewal (liberation). The novel cycles through this narrative several times, symbolically connecting the 'Easter' revolution (March 1917) and the Thaw (the spring of 1953). The sources of Pasternak's Easter narrative include the Gospels, Leo Tolstoy's philosophy of history and pre-Christian mythology. The model of cyclical time in the novel brings together the sacred, natural and historical cycles. This concept of a cyclical renewal of life differs from the linear temporality of the Apocalypse as an expectation of the end of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]