Muchnic Helen. From Gorky to Pasternak: Six Writers in Soviet Russia

New York: Vintage Books, 1961. — 439 p. — ISBN-10: 1111127174; ISBN-13: 978-1111127176.In Helen Muchnic’s literary landscape, the road from Gorky to Pasternak leads through Blok, Mayakovsky, Leonov, and Sholokhov. To each man she devotes an extensive essay which seeks to create a poetic biography from the points where his art, thought, and life, fashioned by a thematic monad, all interlink: Gorky’s optimistic anger at life’s cruelty; Blok’s trinitarian Search, Road, and Vision; Mayakovsky’s rebellion; Leonov’s savor of life as an adventurous game; Sholokhov’s lyrical passion; Pasternak’s living of art as a record of reality "displaced by feeling.” This kind of criticism is not fashionable today; it belongs to the age of the leisurely appreciative essay; but when illuminated with a sensibility as keen as Miss Muchnic’s it is eloquent. Her Leonov and Sholokhov are probably the best critiques in English so far; her Pasternak is a fine-textured analysis of the interplay of poetry, prose, and aesthetic theory.Maxim Gorky
Alexander Blok
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Leonid Leonov
Miikhad Sholokhov
Boris Pasternak and the Poems of Yurii Zhivago