Zhivago's Children Paperback – 1 Nov 2011

Review

Using Zhivago as a metaphor for the postwar intelligentsia, Zubok presents a compelling, well-written, and well-researched history of an important but neglected aspect of Soviet history.--Deborah Hicks"Library Journal" (06/15/2009)

Students of 1960s cultural ferment, Russian-style, will find much substance in Zubok's account.--Gilbert Taylor"Booklist" (05/01/2009)

Vladislav Zubok takes us into the creative and intellectual world of all Zhivago's children: that generation of artists, scientists and thinkers who came after Boris Pasternak and Stalin. Zubok has no illusions about them. In the end they may not have lived up to the hopes they inspired or have met the standards of generations of Russian intellectuals that went before. But it was an idealistic generation as well and, in the end, they paved the way for end of the Soviet regime.--Steven Carroll"The Age" (06/27/2009)

In his moving "Zhivago's Children", historian Vladislav Zubok chronicles the rise and fall of this generation of Russian intellectuals, a group he calls "the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak's noble doctor.."..The players in Zubok's fascinating study come from all corners of the Soviet intelligentsia, from leftist socialist true believers to right-wing patriots. The result is a thorough, scholarly examination of a vital era in Russian history whose themes of human rights, freedom and dissent will resonate among experts and lay readers alike.--Alexander F. Remington"Washington Post Book World" (07/05/2009)

Zubok has done a thorough and worthwhile job in recounting the fate of Zhivago's children, drawing on their own numerous diaries and memoirs, but also on archives and personal interviews with them.--Geoffrey A. Hosking"Times Literary Supplement" (07/10/2009)

This book is a worthy tribute to the history of a unique, and uniquely important, feature of modern Russian life.--Harold Shukman"Times Higher Education" (08/06/2009)

In this magnificent book, Zubok eviscerates the reductive opposition of communist and anti-communist, of hard-liner and dissident, of being for or against the regime, categories that are far too crude to capture the nuances of Soviet life. Zhivago's Children were never entirely communist or anti-communist, and they were simultaneously Soviet and anti-Soviet.--Michael Kimmage"Dissent" (05/04/2010)

Zubok is a reliable and prodigiously well-informed guide to the opinions, attitudes, and changing fortunes of loyal Soviet intellectuals during the approximately twenty years between the early 1950s and 1970s...Zubok tells his story with a density of detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable. Ranging across the entire spectrum of Soviet cultural life, he carefully plots the rise and fall of magazines, publishing houses, and cultural institutions, together with the changing consciousness of the intellectuals--writers, editors, scholars, government bureaucrats--as they adjusted to ongoing revelations about the past, digested each new crisis, and tried to take advantage of the new freedoms they appeared to promise...Zubok has done a fine job of characterizing a slice of Russian intellectual life over a couple of turbulent decades of Soviet history...[An] intelligent and engrossing book.--Michael Scammell"New York Review of Books" (01/14/2010)

An epic story indeed! Zubok tells the checkered tale of the Soviet intelligentsia with critical acumen and admirable compassion. He pursues their agonies and aspirations through the terrors and thaws of Soviet history as the intelligentsia rose to an apogee of hope in the years of glasnost, only to fall into today's abyss of market banditry.--Richard Stites, Professor of History, Georgetown University

"Zhivago's Children" charts the generation of educated Russians coming of age after Stalin's death whose socialist idealism ultimately helped bring down the Soviet state. An absorbing and important account of civic hopes and disillusionments that continue to resonate today in Russia and beyond.--Jochen Hellbeck, author of "Revolution on My Mind"

About the Author

Vladislav Zubok is Professor of History at Temple University