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Collections include the papers of novelists, poets, and playwrights; interviews, publications, and ephemera.
Although literary collections have not been the curatorial focus of the Hoover Institution, the papers of novelists, poets, and playwrights can be found in the archives. Highlights include letters by Czech novelist Josef Škvorecký, speeches by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writings by Pulitzer Prize–winner Allen Drury, science fiction by Cordwainer Smith, and, especially, the papers of Boris Pasternak and his family. The Firing Line Broadcast Collection also features interviews with authors such as Jack Keruoac, Eudora Welty, Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bret Easton Ellis.
Papers of Leonid Pasternak; his son, Boris Pasternak; and others
Czech-Canadian novelist
Russian-American literary historian
Soviet literary critic and dissident
US novelist; author, Advise and Consent
US author
Russian novelist
Russian-Latvian poet
Materials about Joseph Brodsky, Isaak Babel', and Boris Pasternak
Russian poet
Polish-American novelist
Science fiction writer "Cordwainer Smith"
Russian novelist
Research materials for his novel, The Preacher and the Slave
Television series hosted by William F. Buckley, 1966–99
See more in Searchworks
See more in Searchworks
On the Firing Line: Where have you gone William F. Buckley Jr.?
by Jean McElwee Cannon
On September 27th the Hoover Library & Archives exhibition Unpacking History: New Collections at the Hoover Library & Archives opened in the Herbert Hoover Exhibition Pavilion with a public reception and remarks by Eric Wakin, Robert H. Malott Director of the Library & Archives.
A new exhibition, Unpacking History: New Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, celebrates the variety, range, and historical significance of Hoover’s holdings by featuring rare and intriguing items from select collections acquired in recent years. The exhibition opens Tuesday, September 27, 2016, and runs through February 25, 2017.
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives exhibition Civil Discourse: William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line, 1966–1999 commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of William F. Buckley Jr.’s legendary television program. Television’s longest-running political talk show with a single host, Firing Line featured William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative and recognized master of debate, in conversation with many of the most remarkable—and often the most radical—public figures of his day.
Sergio d’Angelo was an Italian journalist and a member of the Italian Communist Party who worked in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. He also helped the Italian publisher Feltrinelli find new works by Soviet authors that might attract a Western audience. D’Angelo’s small but significant collection covers his acquaintance with Boris Pasternak and his role in getting Doctor Zhivago published in the West.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Marchenko, a Russian émigré writer best known under the pen name Nikolai Morshen, taught Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and wrote poetry in his spare time. His father, Nikolai Vladimirovich Marchenko, pen name Nikolai Narokov, is known for two novels: Mogu! and Mnimye velichiny, translated into English as The Chains of Fear (Chicago: Regnery, 1958).
Paul M.A. Linebarger had the international pedigree and double life of a John le Carré character. Born to Sun Yat-sen’s American adviser, Linebarger grew up in China, Germany, and the United States, spoke six languages, and received his doctorate at twenty-three. After teaching at Duke, he was hired by the US War Department to serve as the Far East Asian specialist of the Psychological Warfare branch.
Recently the Hoover Institution Library and Archives acquired more than seventy boxes of archival materials from the estate of the late Mihajlo Mihajlov (1934–2010), a Serbian writer, political activist, and dissident who was imprisoned for his critiques of Tito’s Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This collection, which augments an earlier donation made during Mihajlov’s lifetime, contains correspondence, publications, and audiovisual media that document the breadth of Mihajlov’s public career.
This collection of Boris Pasternak’s letters to his parents and sisters after they had left Russia offers vivid insights into what it was like for so gifted and honest a poet to live and work in Soviet Russia. We see Pasternak coping with everyday survival; looking after others; trying to understand history; alternately enduring and foiling “the terrible forbearance of the authorities” (p. 238); and being preoccupied by attempts to write something utterly new. Click here to read Livingstone’s review or here for information about the book launch.
In The Russian Review, Christopher J. Barnes, from the University of Toronto, reviewed Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence, 1921–1960. Barnes highlights the “strong sense of the family nature of their messages” and the “common interests, concerns, and a unique spiritual kinship that overrode long years of separation.” Click here to see the review.
