The Nobel Prize

by Yuri Krotkov

Translated from thr Russian by Dr Linda Aldwinckle

Hamish Hamilton, 1980, [First Edition], ISBN 0241102405, hardcover, dust-jacket

Very good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, no inscriptions, dust-jacket minor edge and shelf wear with minor rubbing and creasing (see photographs)

"In October 1958, Boris Pasternak, the great Russian poet and author of one of the world's supreme classics, Dr Zhivago, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and became the reluctant object of world-wide attention.  In the last twenty months before his death in May 1960, Pasternak was caught in the crossfire of two hostile ideologies that forced him to decline the honour he coveted for himself and for all Russians, and to watch, appalled, as his reputation as a writer in his beloved Russia, his friendships, his passionate relationship with his mistress, Olga, and the security of his marriage to Zina Pasternak, were threatened and shaken by the waves of anger stirred up by the Kremlin.
The author, whose real identity cannot be revealed, is a writer in the Russian tradition of Gogol and Turgenev.  He is also a man who not only knew Pasternak well, but was close to the highest and most powerful figures in the government of the USSR.  In this dramatic book, he plumbs the psychological and political motivation of the main protagonists: Pasternak, the unwilling tragic hero, and Nikita S. Khrushchev, hiding his shrewdness behind a mask of buffoonery."