Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Борис Леонидович Пастернак) (February 10, 1890 – May 30, 1960) was a Russian poet, writer best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, a tragedy whose events span the last period of Czarist Russia and the early days of the Soviet Union, and first published in Italy (in translation) in 1957. It is as a poet, however, that he is most celebrated in Russia. My Sister Life, written by Pasternak in 1917, is arguably the most influential collection of poetry published in Russian in the 20th century.

Early life

Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10 (Gregorian), 1890 (Julian January 29). His parents were a prominent Jewish painter Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, who converted to Orthodox Christianity, and Rosa Kaufman, a popular concert pianist. Pasternak was brought up in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, his father's home being visited by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Leo Tolstoy. His father's conversion naturally affected Pasternak deeply, and many of his later poems hold overtly Christian themes.

Inspired by his neighbour Alexander Scriabin, Pasternak resolved to become a composer and entered the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910, he abruptly left the conservatory for the University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Nicolai Hartmann. Although invited to become a scholar, he decided against philosophy as a profession and returned to Moscow in 1914. His first collection of poetry, influenced by Alexander Blok and the Russian Futurists, was published later that year.

Pasternak's early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Kant's ideas. Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favourite poets - Lermontov and German Romantics.

During World War I he taught and worked at a chemical factory in the Urals; this undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later. Unlike his relatives and many of his friends, Pasternak didn't leave Russia after the revolution. He was fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities the revolution had brought to life.

My Sister Life

Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe near Saratov, where he fell in love with a Jewish girl. These passions resulted in the collection My Sister Life, which he wrote for three months and was embarrassed to publish for four years. When it finally appeared in 1921, the book had revolutionary impact upon Russian poetry. It made Pasternak the model of imitation for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetic manners of Osip Mandelshtam and Marina Tsvetayeva, to name only a few.

Following My Sister Life, Pasternak produced some hermetic pieces of uneven quality, including his masterpiece, a lyric cycle entitled Rupture (1921). Such various authors as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrey Bely, and Vladimir Nabokov applauded Pasternak's poems as the works of pure, unbridled inspiration. In the later 1920s, he also participated in the celebrated tripartite correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva.

By the end of the 1920s, Pasternak increasingly felt that his colourful modernist style was at variance with the doctrine of Socialist Realism approved by the Communist party. He attempted to make his poetry much more comprehensible to mass reader by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the Russian Revolution. He also turned to prose and wrote several autobiographic stories, notably "The Childhood of Luvers" and "Safe Conduct".

Second Birth

By 1932, Pasternak strikingly reshaped his style to make it acceptable to the Soviet public and printed the new collection of poems aptly entitled The Second Birth. Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book alienated the core of Pasternak's refined audience abroad. He simplified his style even further for the next collection of patriotic verse, Early Trains (1943), which prompted Nabokov to describe Pasternak as a "weeping Bolshevik" and "Emily Dickinson in trousers".

During the great purges of the later 1930s, Pasternak became progressively disillusioned with the Communist ideals. Reluctant to publish his own poetry, he turned to translating Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear), Goethe (Faust), Rilke (Requiem fur eine Freundin), Paul Verlaine, and Georgian poets favoured by Stalin. Pasternak's translations of Shakespeare have proved popular with the Russian public on account of their colloquial, modernised dialogues, but the critics accused him of "pasternakizing" the English playwright. Although he was widely panned for excessive subjectivism, Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off an arrest list during the purges, saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller."

Doctor Zhivago

Several years before WWII, Pasternak and his wife settled in Peredelkino, a village for writers several miles from Moscow. He was filled with a love of life that gave his poetry a hopeful tone. Pasternak’s love of life is reflected in the name of his autobiographic hero Zhivago, derived from the Russian word for "live". Another famous character, Lara, is said to have been modeled on his mistress Olga Ivinskaya.

As the book was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled abroad and released in Italy in 1957. Becoming an instant sensation, the novel was subsequently translated and published in many non-Soviet bloc countries. In 1958 and '59, the American edition spent twenty six weeks at the top of The New York Times' Best Seller List The #1 New York Times Best Sellers, John Bear, Ten Speed Press, 1992.. Although none of his critics had the chance to read the proscribed novel, some of them publicly demanded, "kick the pig out of our kitchen-garden", i.e., expel Pasternak from the USSR. Doctor Zhivago was eventually published in the USSR in 1987.

The screen adaptation received Gone With The Wind type treatment, and starredOmar Sharif and Julie Christie. Concentrating on the romantic aspects of the tale, it quickly became a blockbuster around the world, but wasn't released in Russia until near the time of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Pasternak's post-Zhivago poetry probes the universal questions of love, immortality, and reconciliation with God. The poems from his last collection, which he wrote until his death, are probably his best loved and best known.

Nobel Prize

Pasternak was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. On October 25, two days after hearing that he had won, Pasternak sent the following telegram to the Swedish Academy:

"Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed."

However, four days later came another telegram:

"Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure."

The Swedish Academy announced:

"This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place."

Reading between the lines of Pasternak's second telegram, it is clear he declined the award out of fear that he would be stripped of his Soviet citizenship and not allowed to return to his homeland if he were to travel to Stockholm to accept it. He was an old and sick man, and this was not a prospect he welcomed.

Although he wasn't in fact imprisoned, a famous cartoon in the West at the time showed Pasternak and another prisoner in Siberia, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak is saying, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"

Pasternak died on May 30, 1960 and was buried in Peredelkino in the presence of several devoted admirers, including the poet Andrey Voznesensky.

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