Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak: The Poet Who Outlived His Executioner

In 1956 a Russian writer handed the manuscript of his only novel to an Italian communist's emissary and said, with complete accuracy, "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad." Two years later Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and cabled Stockholm: "Infinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed." Six days after that he cabled again, renouncing it. His son Yevgeny found him that evening with a pale, lifeless face, saying only one thing over and over: "Now it all doesn't matter, I declined the Prize."

A Household of Working Artists

He was born in Moscow on 10 February 1890, into one of the most artistically saturated households in the city. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a post-Impressionist painter and professor; his mother, Rosalia Kofmann, a concert pianist trained by Anton Rubinstein. The family claimed descent from the fifteenth-century Sephardic philosopher Isaac Abarbanel. Tolstoy, Rilke and Scriabin passed through the house as guests rather than as names in books.

Scriabin's influence took first. Pasternak intended to be a composer, and in 1909 produced a Piano Sonata in B minor that wears the older man's harmonic language openly. Then, in 1910, he abruptly quit the Moscow Conservatory — a decision he never fully explained — and went to Germany.

Marburg, and the Abandonment of Philosophy

At the University of Marburg he read neo-Kantian philosophy under Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp, three of the most formidable teachers then alive in the field. He abandoned that too, returning to Russia around the outbreak of the First World War and settling, at last, on poetry. Two rigorous disciplines mastered and then discarded, each leaving a residue: his verse has a composer's ear for interval and a philosopher's suspicion of easy statement.

The Book That Changed Russian Poetry

*My Sister, Life* was composed in the revolutionary summer of 1917 and published in Berlin in 1922. It is generally credited with revolutionising Russian poetry — a book of erotic and meteorological intensity written while the state was collapsing, in which rainstorms and railway platforms carry more political charge than any slogan. *Themes and Variations* followed, then *Second Birth* in 1932, in which he deliberately simplified his manner to reach a wider readership; *Early Trains* came in 1943 and *When the Weather Clears* in 1959. Between them lay years in which he was, functionally, silenced. Unable to publish his own verse, he turned to translation and made a second career of it: Goethe, Schiller, Rilke, Verlaine, Calderón, Petőfi, Tagore, Shevchenko. His Shakespeare — *Hamlet*, *Romeo and Juliet*, *Macbeth*, *King Lear*, *Othello*, both parts of *Henry IV* — remains deeply popular with Russian audiences, though critics complained he had "pasternakized" the plays. He was unrepentant, dismissing contemporary translation theory in 1942 as "soulless." The bitterness surfaced anyway: he told a British newspaper he was "silent because I am not printed."

The Silent Duel

In 1934 Osip Mandelstam recited his suicidal epigram against Stalin to Pasternak, who replied: "I didn't hear this, you didn't recite it to me, because... very strange and terrible things are happening now: they've begun to pick people up." After Mandelstam's arrest, Stalin personally telephoned Pasternak to ask how literary Moscow was reacting. Pasternak fumbled; Stalin mocked him for failing to defend a comrade.

Three years later, during the show trials of Tukhachevsky and Yakir, the Union of Soviet Writers required members to sign petitions demanding the death penalty. Pasternak refused, even after delegations came to his house, and wrote to Stalin directly, invoking Tolstoyan conviction and placing his life at the leader's disposal. Stalin reportedly struck his name from an execution list with the words "Do not touch this cloud dweller." His friend Titsian Tabidze was killed in the purges; Paolo Iashvili and Marina Tsvetaeva killed themselves. Olga Ivinskaya, the woman he loved from 1946 until his death and the model for Lara, called it "an incredible, silent duel."

The state took its revenge on her instead. The KGB arrested Ivinskaya in October 1949; she miscarried Pasternak's child in custody and served years in the Gulag. "It's like death, even worse," he told a friend. She was arrested again in 1960, weeks after he died, and released in 1964.

Zhivago Goes West

*Doctor Zhivago* was begun in fragments decades earlier and finished in 1955. *Novy Mir* rejected it in 1956 as incompatible with socialist realism and anti-Soviet in its treatment of Stalinism, collectivisation, the purges and the camps. That same year the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli sent the journalist Sergio D'Angelo to acquire new Soviet writing, and Pasternak gave him the manuscript. When Moscow forced him to cable demanding its return, he sent secret letters telling Feltrinelli to ignore the cables.

It appeared in Italy in November 1957 and became an instant sensation; the CIA quietly bought hundreds of copies to circulate. The 1958 English translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari spent twenty-six weeks atop the *New York Times* bestseller list. At home it was banned and denounced by people who had not read it, producing the sardonic Soviet formula: "I haven't read Pasternak, but I condemn him."

The Prize and the Punishment

The Nobel citation of 23 October 1958 honoured "his important achievement in contemporary lyrical poetry and the great Russian epic tradition" — wording that conspicuously did not mention the novel. The regime understood anyway. On 29 October, Vladimir Semichastny, soon to head the KGB, denounced Pasternak before an audience of 14,000 and Khrushchev himself as a mangy sheep who had spat in the face of the people — language Khrushchev had dictated the night before. Threatened with permanent exile, Pasternak renounced the prize the same day. The Writers' Union expelled him on 31 October and demanded his citizenship; Nehru's threat to convene an international committee in his defence appears to be what kept him in Russia. His son accepted the medal in 1989.

Why Boris Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is compression — the ability to load an image with more meaning than it should structurally bear. Ivinskaya described "the all-powerful god of detail" as the governing principle of his aesthetic, and characterised the standard he set as poetry "so tightly packed" that it "crunched like ice," admitting nothing for which indulgence was required. That is an exact account of what he does: a rainstorm, a candle in a window, a lit train carriage, each carrying historical weight without being made to announce it. The Swedish Academy credited him with two distinct achievements, the lyric and the epic — a rare double from a man who had already reached professional level in music and in academic philosophy before choosing verse at all.

The counter-case deserves stating plainly. Outside Russia his fame rests almost entirely on *Doctor Zhivago*, a novel many serious critics find structurally loose and dependent on improbable coincidence, and whose Western sales were inflated by Cold War politics and covert CIA distribution. The poetry that Russians consider his real claim is close to untranslatable, so most of his international readership has never encountered the basis of the argument. He was also protected by Stalin's whim rather than by dissidence, and survived years in which braver contemporaries died. What is not in dispute is the internal evidence of the verse itself — and that Russian readers, who can actually read it, have never wavered.

Peredelkino

He died of lung cancer at his Peredelkino dacha on 30 May 1960. The official notice was minimal, but handwritten announcements circulated through the Moscow subway and thousands came under open KGB surveillance. At the graveside someone recited the banned poem "Hamlet" in a young, anguished voice, and a mourner who noted that Russia had already excommunicated Tolstoy ended with "Glory to Pasternak!" The grave became a shrine for dissidents. In 1988 *Doctor Zhivago* was serialised in the same journal that had rejected it; since 2003 it has been required reading in Russian schools.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1958
• Medal "For the Defence of Moscow"
• Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
• Bancarella Literary Prize — 1958
• Notable work: Doctor Zhivago