"To me encountering Cordwainer Smith's works was like a door opening. There is one story of his called "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" that was as important to me as reading Pasternak for the first time and realizing that one could write a novel the way he wrote Dr. Zhivago. There are these moments in most writers' careers when you discover that someone else has actually written down some of these things that have been going on in your own head; you realize that this isn't just a private experience."
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Novelists from RussiaShort story writers from RussiaPoets from RussiaJews from RussiaTranslators from Russia
Original Language: English
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Ursula Le Guin, in a 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak
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Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak [Борис Леонидович Пастернак] (10 February 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet and writer famous for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. His first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it i
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