Dear President Garimella,

We are delighted to share with you a special offering from the Humanities Seminars Program (HSP) that reflects both the spirit of lifelong learning and your own love of great literature: a recorded course titled Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and the Politics of Russian Literary Dissent.

Knowing that Dr. Zhivago has long been one of your favorite works, we thought you might especially enjoy this exploration of the novel’s artistic legacy and political resonance. Offered as a gift to you, this course exemplifies the kind of rich, accessible, and world-class learning experiences that HSP provides to thousands of adult learners each year.

HSP is proud to advance the College of Humanities’ vision to foster empathy, creativity, and connection through the study of human expression across time and culture. By bringing exceptional faculty together with curious minds of all backgrounds—in both in-person and online settings—we help fulfill the University’s land-grant mission to educate and uplift communities across Arizona and beyond.

We hope this course offers you both enjoyment and a window into the meaningful impact HSP has across our state. Thank you for your leadership and for championing the transformative role of the humanities at the University of Arizona.

With warm regards,

Alain-Philippe Durand, Dorrance Dean
College of Humanities

Micah Lunsford, Director
Humanities Seminars Program

Russia has never gotten Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago out of its system. This course will take us deep into the most controversial novel written during the Soviet era. Tolstoyan in its sweep, Dr. Zhivago is a stunning indictment of the system that attempted to engineer human life and an equally stunning meditation on the power of art to survive turbulent times. Pasternak was, above all, a poet. Dr. Zhivago was the only novel he ever wrote, and as such, we will be reading the prose of a poet. We will look at the poetic tradition to which Pasternak belonged, as well as the Zhivago poems that are key to understanding the philosophical core of the novel. Pasternak called it “a novel about us,” yet he could not get Dr. Zhivago published in his own country. The fate of Pasternak’s novel tells us much about how literary dissent functioned in the Soviet Union, but what can Pasternak and his novel speak to the world where Russia finds itself today?

Professor Adele Barker
Department of Russian and Slavic Studies

ADELE BARKER is professor emerita in the Russian Department and has taught Russian and Soviet literature and film for 35 years. She has lived, studied, and traveled widely throughout Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author/editor of five books on Russian literature and popular culture and works in creative nonfiction. She has taught seven courses for the Humanities Seminars Program.