![[Americana.]](/_next/image.jpg?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg2.bonhams.com%2Fimage%3Fsrc%3DImages%252Flive%252F2006-09%252F22%252F7332891-4-1.JPG%26width%3D650&w=2400&q=75)
This auction has ended. View lot details
You may also be interested in
Lot 25
PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH. 1890-1960. Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Boris Pasternak" in Cyrillic) and Inscribed, being a draft of chapters 3 and 4 of vol 1 part IV of Dr. Zhivago, 13 pp recto and verso, small 4to, n.p., c.1956,
11 April 2016, 10:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$77,500 inc. premium
Looking for a similar item?
Our Books & Manuscripts specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot
Client Services (Los Angeles)
Client Services (San Francisco)
Client Services (New York)
PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH. 1890-1960.
Autograph Manuscript Signed ("Boris Pasternak" in Cyrillic) and Inscribed, being a draft of chapters 3 and 4 of vol 1 part IV of Dr. Zhivago, 13 pp recto and verso, small 4to, n.p., c.1956, in Russian, written in violet ink in a composition book with original pink wrappers, with typescript of a poem laid in, ring stain on front wrapper and some internal soiling.
Provenance: Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya.
PRESENTATION COPY OF TWO MANUSCRIPT CHAPTERS OF DR. ZHIVAGO TO HIS LOVER OLGA IVINSKAYA, the inspiration for the character Lara in the novel. Inscribed on the front wrapper (in translation): "Olga please save as is. Boris Pasternak 7 May 1956." Doctor Zhivago was one of the one most controversial novels of the 20th Century. After it was rejected by Novyi mir for not adhering to Social Realism, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia and published in Italy. It became an international sensation and the English translation was published in the United States in 1958. The CIA published the very first edition in Russian. John Maury, chief of the CIA's Soviet Russia division, recognized the novel as "the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin's death." Perhaps the novelist's greatest champion in America was Edmund Wilson who in The New Yorker said that it was "one of the very great books of our time...a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit." Pasternak was denounced in Russia as being "anti-Soviet" and the pressure was only increased after he was named winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. He was forced not to accept it. These working notes for Chapters 3 cover the troubled courtship of Lara and Pasha while those for Chapter 4 hastily outlines their wedding and the departure for the Urals. Some sentences in this rough draft ended up in the final novel.
Olga Ivinskaya (1912-1995) was a poet in her own right and the real Lara in Doctor Zhivago. Many of Zhivago's poems were addressed to her. The two met in the Novyi mir offices and immediately fell in love, but Pasternak refused to divorce his wife. The draft of an untitled unfinished poem beginning "Na dereve svistit sinitsa..." [A whistling tit upon a tree...] with revisions in ink is laid in the back of the booklet. Olga fondly recalled it in her memoir. The two verses 4 and 6 appear as verses 4 and 5 in "Lara" poem 12, "Osen" [Autumn], as published in Doctor Zhivago:
Мы сядем в час и встанем в третьем,
Я с книгою, а ты с вязаньем,
И на рассвете не заметим,
Как целоваться перестанем.
We'll sit at one. By three, we'll rise,
I--with my book, you--with the sewing.
There won't be time to realize
How we stop kissing in the morning.
Еще пышней и бесшабашней
Шумите, осыпайтесь, листья,
И чашу горечи вчерашней
Сегодняшней тоской превысьте.
The leaves, spontaneous and vast,
Will rustle, gliding though the air
To fill the cup of sorrows passed
Once more, with present day despair ...
(Translated by Andrey Kneller).
Pasternak crossed out the fourth verse in the typescript but then restored it by initialing it "B. P." "Osen" was one of Olga's favorite poems by Boris. He composed the first stanza just a month before Ivinskaya's arrest by Stalin. He believed they prosecuted her to get her to provide incriminating evidence against him but she never betrayed him. On her return from the prison camp after Stalin's death in 1953, Pasternak often repeated the poem to her. A longer version of the original lesser known poem "Na dereve svistit sinitsa ... " was published posthumously in Pasternak's collected works. Some lines found in the early typescript were altered in the final published version. See https://sites.google.com/site/poetryandtranslations/boris-pasternak/autumn. Examples of manuscript chapters of Dr. Zhivago are very rare on the market.
Provenance: Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya.
PRESENTATION COPY OF TWO MANUSCRIPT CHAPTERS OF DR. ZHIVAGO TO HIS LOVER OLGA IVINSKAYA, the inspiration for the character Lara in the novel. Inscribed on the front wrapper (in translation): "Olga please save as is. Boris Pasternak 7 May 1956." Doctor Zhivago was one of the one most controversial novels of the 20th Century. After it was rejected by Novyi mir for not adhering to Social Realism, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia and published in Italy. It became an international sensation and the English translation was published in the United States in 1958. The CIA published the very first edition in Russian. John Maury, chief of the CIA's Soviet Russia division, recognized the novel as "the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin's death." Perhaps the novelist's greatest champion in America was Edmund Wilson who in The New Yorker said that it was "one of the very great books of our time...a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit." Pasternak was denounced in Russia as being "anti-Soviet" and the pressure was only increased after he was named winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. He was forced not to accept it. These working notes for Chapters 3 cover the troubled courtship of Lara and Pasha while those for Chapter 4 hastily outlines their wedding and the departure for the Urals. Some sentences in this rough draft ended up in the final novel.
Olga Ivinskaya (1912-1995) was a poet in her own right and the real Lara in Doctor Zhivago. Many of Zhivago's poems were addressed to her. The two met in the Novyi mir offices and immediately fell in love, but Pasternak refused to divorce his wife. The draft of an untitled unfinished poem beginning "Na dereve svistit sinitsa..." [A whistling tit upon a tree...] with revisions in ink is laid in the back of the booklet. Olga fondly recalled it in her memoir. The two verses 4 and 6 appear as verses 4 and 5 in "Lara" poem 12, "Osen" [Autumn], as published in Doctor Zhivago:
Мы сядем в час и встанем в третьем,
Я с книгою, а ты с вязаньем,
И на рассвете не заметим,
Как целоваться перестанем.
We'll sit at one. By three, we'll rise,
I--with my book, you--with the sewing.
There won't be time to realize
How we stop kissing in the morning.
Еще пышней и бесшабашней
Шумите, осыпайтесь, листья,
И чашу горечи вчерашней
Сегодняшней тоской превысьте.
The leaves, spontaneous and vast,
Will rustle, gliding though the air
To fill the cup of sorrows passed
Once more, with present day despair ...
(Translated by Andrey Kneller).
Pasternak crossed out the fourth verse in the typescript but then restored it by initialing it "B. P." "Osen" was one of Olga's favorite poems by Boris. He composed the first stanza just a month before Ivinskaya's arrest by Stalin. He believed they prosecuted her to get her to provide incriminating evidence against him but she never betrayed him. On her return from the prison camp after Stalin's death in 1953, Pasternak often repeated the poem to her. A longer version of the original lesser known poem "Na dereve svistit sinitsa ... " was published posthumously in Pasternak's collected works. Some lines found in the early typescript were altered in the final published version. See https://sites.google.com/site/poetryandtranslations/boris-pasternak/autumn. Examples of manuscript chapters of Dr. Zhivago are very rare on the market.