A house full of art
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890, into a prosperous, cultured and assimilated Jewish family. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a celebrated painter and a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture; his mother, Rosa Kaufman, the daughter of an Odessa industrialist was a gifted concert pianist. Boris was the eldest of four children, followed by his brother Alexander and his sisters Josephine and Lydia.
The household was a meeting place for Russia’s artistic elite. Leo Tolstoy was a family friend, and Leonid illustrated his novel Resurrection; Boris remembered railway conductors waiting in the kitchen to rush his father’s fresh drawings to the publisher in St Petersburg. In November 1910 his father took him to the station at Astapovo, where Tolstoy had died, to draw the writer on his deathbed. The composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were among the visitors to the family home.
Music, philosophy, then poetry
Inspired by Scriabin, the young Pasternak first wanted to be a composer and studied music intensively, briefly attending the Moscow Conservatory, but by 1912 he had renounced music as his calling. He turned to philosophy at Moscow University and in the summer of 1912 studied at the University of Marburg in Germany under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. Cohen encouraged him to stay and take a doctorate, but Pasternak, newly heartbroken after a marriage proposal to a young woman from the wealthy Vysotsky tea family was turned down, decided instead to devote himself to poetry.
Back in Moscow he joined the Futurist circle Centrifuge and published his first collection, Twin in the Clouds, in 1914. A childhood fall from a horse had left one leg shorter than the other, and the injury exempted him from military service in the First World War; he worked instead as a tutor and in the offices of chemical factories in the Urals, experiences that would later feed into Doctor Zhivago.
My Sister, Life
In the revolutionary summer of 1917, during an unhappy love affair, Pasternak wrote the poems of My Sister, Life. Publishing was nearly impossible in the chaos that followed, and the poems first circulated in manuscript and in readings before the book appeared in 1922. It transformed Russian poetry. With its rush of images, startling rhythms and everyday words, it made Pasternak a model for younger poets and changed the work of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom, and with Rilke, he later carried on a famous three-way correspondence.
Unlike his parents and sisters, who left for Germany in 1921 and later settled in England after the Nazis came to power, Pasternak chose to stay in Russia. In 1922 he married the painter Evgeniya Lurye, and their son Yevgeny was born the following year. In the 1930s he left her for Zinaida Neuhaus, wife of the pianist Heinrich Neuhaus; they married in 1934 and had a son, Leonid.
Surviving Stalin
As the Stalinist terror deepened, Pasternak’s position grew precarious. In 1934, after his friend Osip Mandelstam was arrested for a poem mocking Stalin, Pasternak appealed on his behalf to Nikolai Bukharin, and soon afterwards received a telephone call from Stalin himself asking for his view of Mandelstam. During the Great Purge he refused to sign a writers’ letter supporting death sentences for Red Army commanders. Many of his friends perished; Pasternak, for reasons never fully explained, was spared.
Increasingly unable to publish his own work, he turned to translation, producing versions of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Goethe’s Faust, Schiller and the Georgian poets that are still loved by Russian readers today. During the Second World War he served as a fire warden on the roof of his Moscow apartment building during air raids and in 1943 travelled to the front to read to soldiers.
In 1946 he met Olga Ivinskaya, an editor at the journal Novy Mir, who became his companion for the rest of his life and an inspiration for the heroine Lara. In 1949 she was arrested and sent to the Gulag; Pasternak believed she had been imprisoned to put pressure on him, and wrote that he owed his life to her endurance.
Doctor Zhivago
After the war Pasternak devoted himself to the novel he had been circling for decades. Doctor Zhivago follows a physician and poet, Yuri Zhivago, through the revolution of 1905, the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution and the civil war, caught between his love for his wife Tonya and for Lara. It is a book that values private life, love, nature and spiritual freedom over the historical “progress” the Soviet state demanded, and it includes some of his finest poems, attributed to Zhivago himself.
In 1956 Novy Mir rejected the novel. That year an Italian Communist journalist, Sergio D’Angelo, came to Pasternak’s home at Peredelkino on behalf of the Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Pasternak handed him the manuscript, remarking that he was inviting him to watch him face the firing squad. Despite Soviet pressure, Feltrinelli published the novel in Italian in November 1957; an English translation followed in 1958 and spent weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Documents declassified in 2014 confirmed that the CIA, seeing the book as a weapon in the Cold War, secretly arranged a Russian-language edition for circulation to Soviet readers.
The Nobel Prize and its price
On October 23, 1958, the Swedish Academy awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature for his achievement in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the great Russian epic tradition. He cabled back that he was “infinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed.” The Soviet response was ferocious. Newspapers denounced him; the head of the Communist youth league, in words later revealed to have been dictated by Khrushchev, compared him unfavourably to a pig before an audience of thousands. The Union of Soviet Writers expelled him, and he was told that if he went to Stockholm he would not be allowed back.
On October 29 he sent a second telegram renouncing the prize. He then wrote to Khrushchev pleading not to be exiled, saying that leaving Russia would be for him like death. Ivinskaya later blamed herself for urging him to give in; the Swedish Academy declared that his refusal did not alter the validity of the award, and only regretted that it could not be presented. According to his son Yevgeny, formal exile was averted partly because India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, intervened with Khrushchev. In America, Bill Mauldin won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon showing Pasternak as a Gulag prisoner asking a fellow inmate, “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?”
A Jewish-born poet and Christian faith
Pasternak’s relationship with his Jewish origins was complex. His parents were secular, assimilated Jews of the Moscow intelligentsia whose privileged position exempted them from many of the tsarist restrictions on Jews. In a 1959 letter he recalled that his nanny had baptized him as a child, something felt to be “half-secret and intimate” in the family, and he wrote that Christianity had occupied his mind most intensely between 1910 and 1912. In later life he attended Russian Orthodox services, and his late poems are steeped in Gospel themes.
Doctor Zhivago includes passages, voiced by the Jewish character Misha Gordon, urging Jews to give up their separate identity, and the novel was sharply criticised in Israel and by many Jewish readers for its assimilationist outlook. Pasternak’s defenders noted that he had written those passages before the founding of the State of Israel, at a time when he saw conversion as preferable to Jews dissolving into Stalinist atheism.
Last years at Peredelkino
Pasternak spent his final years at his dacha in the writers’ village of Peredelkino near Moscow, keeping to his daily routine of writing and translating. His last complete collection of poems, When the Weather Clears, dates from 1959, and he began a cycle of plays, The Blind Beauty, about Russia after the abolition of serfdom. He fell ill with lung cancer and died at Peredelkino on May 30, 1960.
Although the press carried only a tiny notice, handwritten announcements were posted in the Moscow metro, and thousands of people came to his funeral despite police surveillance. Someone recited his banned poem “Hamlet” at the graveside. After his death the authorities arrested Ivinskaya and her daughter for their links with foreign publishers. His grave became a place of pilgrimage for the Soviet dissident movement.
Legacy
Pasternak was officially rehabilitated under Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1988 Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the Soviet Union, serialized in Novy Mir, the journal that had rejected it more than three decades earlier, and in December 1989 his son Yevgeny travelled to Stockholm to receive his father’s Nobel medal. Since 2003 the novel has been part of the Russian school curriculum.
He is remembered as one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, and David Lean’s 1965 film of Doctor Zhivago carried his story to millions more around the world. His refusal to bend his art to the demands of the state, and the price he paid for publishing the truth as he saw it, made him a symbol of the writer’s freedom of conscience in an age of dictatorship.
Sources & further reading
Boris Pasternak, Wikipedia · Boris Pasternak, Jewish Virtual Library · The Nobel Prize in Literature 1958, Boris Pasternak, NobelPrize.org · Boris Pasternak, Poets.org (Academy of American Poets) · Biography: Boris Pasternak, Boston University Russian Poetry · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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