Pasternak was acclaimed as a major poet some 30 years before Doctor Zhivago (1955) made him world famous. After first pursuing promising careers in music and philosophy, he started to write around 1909 and published his first collection of verse in 1914. His first genuine triumph came with the collection My Sister, Life (1917), in which a love affair stimulates a rapturous celebration of nature. The splendid imagery and difficult syntax of this volume are a hallmark of the early Pasternak. During the 1920s, Pasternak tried to accept the reality of the new society and moved from the lyric to the epic, taking up historical and contemporary subjects. The long poem The Year 1905 (1926) is an… example. While tolerated by the literary establishment, Pasternak turned increasingly in the 1930s to translation rather than original verse. He was a prolific translator; his versions of major Shakespeare plays are the standard texts used in Soviet theaters. From the start, however, prose was an important focus for Pasternak. The most notable early work is the story "Zhenia's Childhood," written in 1918, which explored a girl's developing consciousness of her surroundings. There is also his artistic and intellectual autobiography Safe Conduct (1931). But Pasternak's greatest prose achievement came later with the novel Doctor Zhivago, written over a number of years and completed in 1955. Its hero, a physician and poet, confronts the great changes of the early twentieth century including world war, revolution, and civil war, and travels a path through life that creates a parallel between his fate and that of Christ. (The theme of preordained sacrifice is strengthened by the cycle of poems included as the last section of the book.) Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication but appeared in 1957 in the West and won its author worldwide acclaim. A Nobel Prize followed in 1958. This led the Soviet authorities to launch a major public campaign against Pasternak and to make his personal life even more difficult. So successful were they that the poet officially turned down the award. After that, he was left in relative peace and died two years later. He was but the first of many writers in the post-Stalin period to challenge the Soviet state. During the 1970s and 1980s, Pasternak's heritage was cautiously brought into public purview in the Soviet Union. The Gorbachev period saw the removal of all restrictions on his work, and publication of Doctor Zhivago followed at long last. Several major editions of Pasternak's writings have appeared.
John Oliver Bayley was born on March 27, 1925 in Lahore, India. He was educated at Eton College and Oxford University and served in the Grenadier Guards during World War II. He became a fellow of New College at Oxford in 1955, teaching English, and later joined the faculty of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1973. He was a literary critic and author. His works included The Power of Delight, Tolstoy and the Novel, Shakespeare and Tragedy, and The Red Hat. He wrote three memoirs involving his life from when his wife, novelist Iris Murdoch, was struck by Alzheimer's disease until after her death. The memoirs were entitled Elegy for Iris, Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire,… and Widower's House: A Study in Bereavement, or How Margot and Mella Forced Me to Flee My Home. Elegy for Iris was adapted into a film entitled Iris. He was a frequent contributor to several publications including The Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. He died from heart insufficiency on January 12, 2015 at the age of 89.