Boris Pasternak (1890 - 1960) was a Russian poet, novelist and literary translator whose lyric verse is regarded as among the most important written in Russian in the twentieth century. [1] Abroad he is best known for Doctor Zhivago, a novel banned in the Soviet Union and published in Italy in 1957. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 but was forced by Soviet authorities to decline it. [2]
Early life and education
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born on 10 February 1890 in Moscow into a cultivated Jewish family: his father Leonid was a painter and academician, his mother Rosalia Kaufman a concert pianist. [1] Visitors to the household included Leo Tolstoy, Rainer Maria Rilke and Alexander Scriabin, and the young Pasternak trained seriously as a composer under Scriabin's influence before concluding that he lacked the technical gift he demanded of himself.
He turned instead to philosophy, studying at Moscow University and then at the University of Marburg under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. He abandoned philosophy in turn and committed himself to poetry, returning to Russia shortly before the First World War. [3]
Poetry
Pasternak's early collections appeared amid the ferment of Russian Futurism, but his reputation was established by My Sister, Life, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917 and published in 1922. Its fusion of natural imagery, erotic feeling and historical upheaval was received as a renewal of Russian lyric poetry. Further collections followed, along with the long narrative poems on revolutionary subjects that he wrote in the later 1920s. [3]
As official pressure on literature grew during the 1930s, Pasternak wrote less original verse and turned increasingly to translation. His Russian versions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, of Goethe's Faust, and of Georgian poetry became standard texts and provided his livelihood. [1] He survived the purges that killed or silenced many of his contemporaries, and he supported the families of persecuted writers, among them Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva.
Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak worked for years on a large novel tracing the fate of a physician and poet through the last decades of imperial Russia, the revolution and the civil war. Completed in the mid-1950s, Doctor Zhivago was rejected by Soviet publishers as hostile to the October Revolution. A manuscript reached the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who issued it in Italian in 1957; translations into other languages followed and the book became an international success. [3]
The Swedish Academy awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. [2] A campaign of denunciation in the Soviet press followed, he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, and under threat of exile from his country he sent a telegram declining the award. He spent his final period at the writers' colony of Peredelkino outside Moscow, where he died on 30 May 1960.
Legacy
Despite the official silence surrounding his death, a large crowd attended Pasternak's funeral at Peredelkino. His membership of the writers' union was restored posthumously in 1987, and Doctor Zhivago was published in the Soviet Union in 1988. In 1989 his son accepted the Nobel medal on his behalf. [2] In Russia his standing rests above all on the poetry; elsewhere the novel and its 1965 film adaptation have carried his name furthest. [1]
