- Person
- Boris Pasternak
- Lived
- 1890–1960
- Field
- Poetry and fiction
- From
- Russian
The story
In April 1934 the poet Osip Mandelstam recited to Boris Pasternak a short satirical poem about Stalin, later known as the Stalin Epigram. Pasternak, alarmed, told him to act as if he had never recited it, warning that people were being picked up and that even the benches might be listening. On the night of 14 May 1934 Mandelstam was arrested at his home by the Soviet secret police.
Mandelstam himself expected that insulting Stalin would bring a death sentence, and in the atmosphere of the time many people were afraid even to be associated with the accused. Mandelstam's wife Nadezhda and the poet Anna Akhmatova began a campaign to save him. Pasternak, a friend and fellow poet of Jewish birth who did not like the tone of the poem, nevertheless did not keep silent. He went straight to the offices of the newspaper Izvestia and begged its editor, the senior Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, to intercede. Bukharin, who had often helped the Mandelstams, approached the head of the secret police and wrote a note to Stalin.
Soon afterwards the telephone rang in Pasternak's Moscow apartment, and Stalin himself came on the line to ask what was being said about Mandelstam's arrest and what Pasternak thought of him as a poet. It was Pasternak's only conversation with the dictator.
On 26 May Mandelstam was sentenced not to death or to the Gulag but to three years of internal exile, first in Cherdyn in the northern Urals and then in Voronezh, an outcome his circle regarded as a miracle. In Voronezh he wrote the poems known as the Voronezh Notebooks. He was arrested again in 1938 and died that December in a transit camp near Vladivostok.
Pasternak's intervention, at real risk to himself, bought his friend precious time and some of his finest poetry. It was one of several occasions on which Pasternak used whatever standing he had to plead for people who had been arrested, at a time when silence was the safer choice.
Why it matters
Pasternak's appeal showed rare moral courage in a time of terror and helped spare a great poet, for a while, from the camps.
About Boris Pasternak
Russian poet and author of Doctor Zhivago, smuggled to the West in 1957, who was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature and forced by the Soviet state to decline it.
More about Boris Pasternak
- Pasternak sent Doctor Zhivago into the worldRejected at home, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy in 1957, and its English edition spent 26 weeks at the top of the New York Times list.
- Pasternak's My Sister, Life transformed Russian poetryBoris Pasternak wrote My Sister, Life in the revolutionary summer of 1917; published in 1922, it changed the course of Russian poetry.
- Boris Pasternak translated Goethe's Faust and Georgian poetsBoris Pasternak's translations ranged from Goethe's Faust and Schiller to the poets of Georgia, bringing world literature to Russian readers.
- Boris Pasternak's Shakespeare is still loved in RussiaBarred from publishing much of his own work under Stalin, Boris Pasternak translated Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays into Russian versions still widely performed.
- Doctor Zhivago has been taught in Russian schools since 2003Once banned in the Soviet Union, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003.
- Boris Pasternak refused to endorse Stalin's death sentencesIn 1937, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Boris Pasternak refused to sign a Writers' Union statement supporting death sentences for Red Army commanders.
- Boris Pasternak served as a fire warden and read to soldiersDuring the Second World War, Boris Pasternak served as a fire warden in Moscow and in 1943 travelled to the front to read his poetry to soldiers.
Sources
- Boris Pasternak Wikipedia
- Osip Mandelstam Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.