Czechs Publish Part of ‘Dr. Zhivago’
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PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia — A literary weekly has published for the first time in this country excerpts from “Dr. Zhivago,” the 1955 novel by Soviet author Boris Pasternak.
The journal also carried an article complaining about stagnation in Czechoslovak culture.
Passages from “Dr. Zhivago,” a book banned for decades throughout the Soviet Bloc, were published in the latest issue of Kmen (Trunk), the weekly of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union.
In the same issue, Radko Pytlik, a literary historian, wrote that in Czechoslovak prose of 1987 “there did not appear a work which would signal movement forward, nor one which would cause so much as a ripple, let alone agitate, the smooth surface of our prose.”
Kmen said that the “Dr. Zhivago” passages had already been published in the Soviet magazine Ogonyok and that the entire novel was being serialized by the Soviet journal Novy Mir (New World).
It has also been published in Bulgaria. A Hungarian translation of the novel is due to be brought out this May.
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