Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Belknap Press)
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) symbolized the predicaments of Russia’s intellectual class. Published abroad in defiance of officialdom, the novel was a sensation that resonated with a generation’s yearnings to free itself from communist control. Zubok’s cultural history covers how those aspirations worked out until the mid-1980s, especially in searches for sources of inspiration to recover from the stultifications of Stalinism. Should writers look to Russia’s pre-revolutionary cultural and religious traditions? Should they awaken communist idealism from the totalitarian nightmare? Should artistic trends in the West, like jazz music, be emulated instead? Zubok’s summaries of the cultural responses to such questions in novels, poems, theatrical productions, and literary criticism recount the revival of Russia’s intelligentsia under Khrushchev’s “thaw,” while his sketches of such personalities as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Alexander Solzhenitsyn underscore incompatible philosophies in play within the intelligentsia. Shifts in political wind, Zubok shows, posed to intellectuals serious dilemmas of conforming and dissenting, especially during the less free-wheeling Brezhnev era. Students of 1960s cultural ferment, Russian-style, will find much substance in Zubok’s account. --Gilbert Taylor