Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890, into one of Russia's most prominent Jewish artistic families. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a celebrated painter who illustrated Tolstoy's works and taught at the Moscow School of Painting. His mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist who had studied with Anton Rubinstein. The Pasternak home was a salon where Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Rilke gathered — the very heart of Russian cultural life.

The Poet

Pasternak studied philosophy in Moscow and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he was deeply influenced by the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. He had seemed destined for an academic career — but poetry called. His early collection, My Sister, Life(1922), was one of the most influential books of Russian poetry of the twentieth century. It made him famous among the literary intelligentsia: a poet of dazzling imagery, musical density, and emotional immediacy. Marina Tsvetaeva called it “a downpour of light.”

Under Stalin

When other poets — Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva — were destroyed by Stalin's terror, Pasternak survived. In an extraordinary episode, Stalin himself supposedly crossed out Pasternak's name on an execution list, saying, “Leave this holy fool alone.” Pasternak was publicly praised by the dictator. But survival came at an enormous cost: for two decades, he produced almost no original poetry, retreating instead into translation. He translated Shakespeare's tragedies, Goethe's Faust, and the Georgian poets — becoming one of the great literary translators of European literature into Russian. It was a form of internal exile, a silence enforced from without and maintained from within.

Writing Doctor Zhivago

Pasternak began work on Doctor Zhivago in the late 1930s. He worked on it for nearly twenty years, through the Great Terror, World War II, and the deepening cultural repression of the late Stalin era. He completed it in 1955. It was his testament — his attempt to tell the truth about the Revolution, about the fate of the individual in the age of ideology, about love and art and the sacredness of being alive. In 1956, the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir rejected the manuscript. The editors wrote a scathing letter explaining its ideological unacceptability. Pasternak then entrusted the manuscript to an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who smuggled it to the West.

Nobel Prize and Persecution

Doctor Zhivagowas published in Italian in 1957. English and Russian editions followed in 1958. On October 23, 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.” The Soviet government erupted. Pasternak was denounced as a traitor, a “literary weed,” and anti-Soviet. He was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union. There were threats of expulsion from the country. Under intense pressure, Pasternak was forced to renounce the Nobel Prize. “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong,” he wrote in a telegram to the Nobel committee, “I must refuse this undeserved prize which has been presented to me.”

Death

Boris Pasternak died of lung cancer on May 30, 1960, at his dacha in Peredelkino, the writers' colony outside Moscow. He was 70 years old. At his funeral — which the Soviet authorities attempted to prevent — thousands gathered. Young people recited his poems by heart. The KGB filmed it all. Pasternak was buried beneath three pine trees in the Peredelkino cemetery. He never received the Nobel Prize in person, and Doctor Zhivago was not published in the USSR until 1988. In 1989, his son Yevgeny accepted the Nobel Prize on his behalf.