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In her interviews and essays, Ulitskaya has often alluded to the great effect that Pasternak's poetry, and especially Doctor Zhivago, has had on her. In one of the episodes of her novel The Big Green Tent, she describes a first encounter with Pasternak's novel; the teacher of literature who plays a decisive role in the lives of the main characters reads a manuscript copy of the novel and describes it as a worthy continuation of 19th-century Russian prose. The parallels between the novels The Big Green Tent and Doctor Zhivago have already been the subject of scholarly attention but the connection between Jacob's Ladder and the Pasternak novel has not been studied so far. In this study, I examine this connection: on the one hand, at the level of macrostructures, the chronotope, the patterns of the heroes' fates and the principal thematic elements, and on the other hand, at the level of certain microstructures. The latter are linked to the present-day plot of Ulitskaya's novel and, more specifically, Nora's life. Nora reads the correspondence and notes that her grandfather left for her as well as the KGB documents about Yakov Osetsky towards the end of her life (and the plot itself). As a result of this, she wishes to write the novel that her grandfather Yakov could not due to the historical situation. The process of Nora's confrontation with the past and her becoming a writer are coded in Ulitskaya's text by two of the poems of the Zhivago cycle Winter Night and August and also in the related episodes of Pasternak's novel. All of these have biographical relevance and present creation as a fundamental element of life, which is closely linked to love and death as well as metaphysical experience. The symbolic parallel of this in Zhivago's August is the transfiguration of Jesus and "the light without a flame" that blinds the disciples. This symbolism appears in Jacob's Ladder on two levels: first, in the stage set that Nora creates for King Lear, and second, as a concomitant of her confrontation with the past and her becoming a writer. It is in this way that the fundamental elements of Pasternak's life and poetry play a crucial role at the level of microstructures: they provide the context and symbolism of the central question of Ulitskaya's novel, the nature of "the essence" of the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In 2008, Robert N. St. Clair and Wei Song published a book entitled The Many Layers of Culture Within Each City, applying their analytical framework to case studies of Harbin, Rio de Janeiro, Venice and Lisbon (St. Clair & Song, 2008). Invited to write a preface to their book, it struck me that a number of other cities could have been included. This influenced me to revisit an earlier text I had written in 1995 on the Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) and his novel Doctor Zhivago, which won him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958. My text was concerned with Pasternak's literary prowess, especially his stylistic use of anthropomorphisms which are so typical of his style, and which infuse life into the prose and poetry parts of this great novel (Vaagan, 1996). But there were also many other ideas I had to set aside, including the role of the capital Moscow as a possible main character or heroine in the novel. Few would question the existence of many layers of culture in Moscow with its complex history, but is there enough justification to consider the city as the main heroine of the novel? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the tight relation between “art” and “immortality” in Boris Pasternak's author's ideology on the basis of a newly found letter to his second wife Zinaida Nikolaevna Neigauz, written in the beginning of 1931. This letter, preserved only in a copy, sheds new light upon one of the most important points of the author's ideology. In this document, Pasternak explains his views on the unacceptability of suicide. The letter is closely related to his autobiographical work Safe Conduct , the final part of which was written soon after the suicide of Vladimir Maiakovskii. It is possible to draw a line from the letter to the novel Doctor Zhivago . The ends of two protagonists' lives, Iurii Zhivago and his antipode Pavel Antipov-Strelnikov, are compared. The main protagonist dies, leaving behind his poetry. For Pasternak, it is the way of continuation, “life after death”, and the symbol of creative immortality of a poet. On the contrary, Antipov committed suicide, an end consistent with his life position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]