- Person
- Boris Pasternak
- Lived
- 1890–1960
- Field
- Poetry and fiction
- From
- Russian
The story
When Doctor Zhivago first appeared in Italy in 1957, Soviet officials denounced it and its author. After Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958 he was hounded by the press, forced to renounce the award and expelled from the Writers' Union. The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, and for decades readers could see it only in typed samizdat copies or editions smuggled from abroad. A Russian saying of the time mocked the official campaign: people condemned Pasternak without having read him.
Pasternak died at his house in Peredelkino in May 1960, never having seen the novel published in his own country. After his death the woman he loved, Olga Ivinskaya, was arrested with her daughter and sent to the camps for their role in the book's publication abroad.
Change came only under Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1988 the novel was finally serialised in Novy Mir, the journal that had rejected it in 1956, and in 1989 Pasternak's son Yevgeny received his father's Nobel medal in Stockholm. In 1990, the centenary of his birth, museums opened in Peredelkino and in Chistopol, where he had lived during the war.
Today the novel has a very different status. Since 2003 it has been part of the Russian school curriculum, read in the eleventh grade as one of the classics of twentieth-century Russian literature. The book closes with a cycle of poems attributed to Zhivago, some of Pasternak's finest verse, so students meet the poet as well as the novelist.
The change reflects how completely Pasternak's reputation has been restored. He is remembered in Russia as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His house at Peredelkino, taken over by the state in 1984, became the House-Museum of Boris Pasternak in 1986, the first such writer's house-museum in the Soviet Union. It preserves the rooms where he wrote much of Doctor Zhivago and spent his final years in official disgrace, and it welcomes readers from around the world.
Why it matters
Generations of Russian students now encounter Pasternak's vision of love, conscience and personal freedom as part of their education.
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.
- 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 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
- Doctor Zhivago (novel) 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.