STAGE

A stage version of Boris Pasternak’s novel “Dr. Zhivago” received 12 minutes of curtain calls and applause at a packed theater this weekend in the east Hungarian town of Szolnok, according to a radio broadcast from the country. Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 after the novel was published in the West. It was banned in the Soviet Union for its portrayal of Communist society, and Pasternak was sent into internal exile. However, the novelist recently has been “rehabilitated” in the Soviet Union with small excerpts of the epic novel published in December by the Soviet magazine Ogonyok. The entire novel is due to appear in a Soviet literary journal in installments this year, and already has been published in Bulgaria. A Hungarian translation of the novel is due in May.