Lyric poet, novelist, and translator, born in Moscow, Russia. He studied law and musical composition, then switched to philosophy. He wrote autobiographical and political poetry, and some outstanding short stories, some of which were collected in The Childhood of Lyuvers (1924). Unable to publish his own poetry during the years under Stalin, he became the official translator into Russian of Shakespeare, Verlaine, and Goethe. He caused a political earthquake with his first novel, Dr Zhivago, which was banned in the Soviet Union, but became an international success after its publication in Italy in 1957. A fragmentary, poet's novel, it describes with intense feeling the Russian Revolution as it impinged upon one individual. Expelled by the Soviet Writers' Union, he had to take the unprecedented step of refusing the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. The ban was lifted in 1988 and his entire works began publication in his home country in 2004.
January 29]Moscow, Russian Empire
| Died: |
May 30, 1960 Peredelkino, USSR |
|---|---|
| Occupation(s): | poet, writer |
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Russian: Борис Леонидович Пастернак) (February 10, 1890 [O.S. 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 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.
Pasternak's early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Kant's ideas.
During World War I he taught and worked at a chemical factory in the Urals; Unlike his relatives and many of his friends, Pasternak didn't leave Russia after the revolution.
My Sister Life
Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near Saratov, where he fell in love with a Jewish girl. 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.
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.
Second Birth
By 1932, Pasternak had 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. 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.
As the book was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled abroad and released in Italy in 1957. 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.
The screen adaptation, directed by David Lean, was of epic proportions, being toured in the roadshow tradition, and starred Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.
Doctor Zhivago was produced as an extended-length film starring Omar Sharif which quickly became renowned and well-loved the world around outside the Communist bloc.
Nobel Prize
Pasternak was named 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.
The Swedish Academy announced:
This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award.
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 citizenship were he to travel to Stockholm to accept it.
Despite turning down the Nobel Prize, an official witchhunt immediately started against Pasternak, and he was threatened at the very least with expulsion.
Although he wasn't exiled or imprisoned, a famous Bill Mauldin cartoon at the time showed Pasternak and another prisoner in Siberia, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Death
Pasternak's post-Zhivago poetry probes the universal questions of love, immortality, and reconciliation with God.
Pasternak died of lung cancer on May 30, 1960.
It was not until 1987 that Doctor Zhivago was published in the USSR.
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