Description of the book
In Inside the Zhivago Storm. The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece, Paolo Mancosu, professor at Berkeley University, recounts with historiographical rigor and great narrative and philological skills the story of the first world publication of Doctor Zhivago and the history of subsequent Western editions in Russian.
This volume publishes for the first time the entire correspondence between Boris Pasternak and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli from 1956 to 1960 and a series of contemporary letters and documents that complete it. Thanks to research conducted in the Feltrinelli Archives and in public and private archives in Europe, Russia and the United States, Mancosu reconstructs the relationship between Boris Pasternak and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the history of the translation into Italian, the pressure exerted by the Soviet government on the writer so that the novel was published for the first time in the Soviet Union, and those on Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, exercised directly and through the secretariat and management of the Italian Communist Party in which Feltrinelli was then active, to prevent its first worldwide publication in Italy.
Mancosu retraces Feltrinelli’s hard and obstinate battle to publish Doctor Zhivago and protect Pasternak from possible retaliation by the Soviet authorities, reconstructs the history of the manuscripts, the worldwide success of the novel, the relationships between Feltrinelli, who held the publishing rights, and the other publishers interested in publishing in the West, the role of Olga Ivinskaya, the history of Russian-language editions that appeared in the West and that of pirated editions. The editorial story is included in a careful historical reconstruction of the period.
Know the author
Paolo Mancosu. It is Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy all’Università della California, Berkeley. He published in the “Annali” of Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli an english version of his research on Doctor Zhivago, accompanied by allsocuments in the original language and in the english translation. He published with Feltrinelli “Zhivago nella tempesta. Le avventure editoriali del capolavoro di Pasternak” (2015) and “Pasternak e Ivinskaja. Il viaggio segreto di Zhivago” (2020).