Why did Boris Pasternak decline the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Pasternak declined the 1958 Nobel Prize under pressure from the Soviet government, which threatened to refuse him re-entry to the USSR if he travelled to Stockholm to collect it. On the 29th of October 1958, he sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy stating: "In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this undeserved distinction." His son Yevgeny finally accepted the medal in Stockholm in December 1989.
How was Doctor Zhivago first published if the USSR banned it?
The manuscript was smuggled to Italy and published by the Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in November 1957. Italian Communist Party journalist Sergio D'Angelo had carried it out of the Soviet Union after visiting Pasternak in Peredelkino in March 1956. The CIA also secretly purchased hundreds of copies of the book as it came off presses around the world as part of an operation to undermine Soviet authority.
Who was Olga Ivinskaya and what was her connection to Boris Pasternak?
Olga Ivinskaya was a 34-year-old single mother employed by the literary journal Novy Mir when Pasternak met her in October 1946. She became his companion for the rest of his life and is considered the inspiration for the character Lara in Doctor Zhivago. She was arrested by the KGB in 1949 and served time in the GULAG, and was arrested again after Pasternak's death in 1960, serving four years of an eight-year sentence.
What was Boris Pasternak's family background?
Pasternak was born in Moscow into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a post-Impressionist painter and professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist who had studied under Anton Rubinstein. The family claimed descent on the paternal line from Isaac Abarbanel, the 15th-century Sephardic Jewish philosopher and treasurer of Portugal.
When did Doctor Zhivago become part of the Russian school curriculum?
Doctor Zhivago entered the Russian school curriculum in 2003, during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin. It is read in the 11th grade of secondary school. The novel had previously circulated in samizdat for decades before being serialised in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1988.
What role did Stalin play in Boris Pasternak's survival during the Great Purge?
When the Union of Soviet Writers demanded Pasternak sign a statement supporting the death penalty for defendants in the 1937 trial of General Iona Yakir and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Pasternak refused. He then wrote directly to Stalin placing his own life at Stalin's disposal. Stalin reportedly crossed Pasternak's name off an execution list with the remark "Do not touch this cloud dweller," sparing him while his close friend Titsian Tabidze was executed.