- Person
- Boris Pasternak
- Lived
- 1890–1960
- Field
- Poetry and fiction
- From
- Russian
The story
In June 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, General Iona Yakir and other senior Red Army commanders were tried in secret on fabricated charges of treason and shot. The Union of Soviet Writers drew up a public statement supporting the death sentences and asked all its members to add their names, so that the whole literary profession would appear to stand behind the executions.
Refusing to sign such a document in 1937 was extremely dangerous. These were the worst years of Stalin's Great Purge. Pasternak's close friend, the Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, was arrested that autumn and shot within two months, and another Georgian friend, Paolo Iashvili, took his own life after Tabidze's arrest. Anyone who appeared disloyal could be next.
Boris Pasternak, born into a Jewish family and raised in the Tolstoyan spirit of his parents' home, refused to add his name, even after leaders of the Writers' Union came to his house to press him. He then wrote directly to Stalin, explaining his family's Tolstoyan convictions, putting his own life at Stalin's disposal and saying that he could not set himself up as a judge of who should live and who should die. Pasternak was certain he would be arrested. Instead, according to accounts of the period, Stalin crossed his name off an execution list, reportedly telling officials not to touch this cloud dweller.
Pasternak was spared while many of his friends perished, and he lived with that knowledge for the rest of his life. He described Tabidze's execution and Iashvili's suicide in an autobiographical essay in the 1950s, and in 1940 he helped Tabidze's widow, Nina, draft a petition on her husband's behalf, not knowing that he was already dead. Throughout the show trials he refused to sign petitions and open letters against the defendants, and he used whatever standing he had to intercede for people who had been arrested.
His refusal to lend his name to judicial murder was a quiet but powerful act of resistance during the Great Terror. After his death his grave at Peredelkino became a shrine for the Soviet dissident movement.
Why it matters
Pasternak's refusal to lend his name to judicial murder was a quiet but powerful act of resistance during the Great Terror.
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 interceded for the arrested Osip MandelstamWhen his fellow poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for a poem mocking Stalin, Boris Pasternak appealed to Nikolai Bukharin to intervene on his behalf.
- 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
- Titsian Tabidze 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.