Boris Pasternak

• 1. Introduction

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  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the kitchen door waiting to rush illustrations to a literary journal in St. Petersburg. His father, the post-Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, was illustrating Tolstoy's novel Resurrection for the journal Niva, and Boris watched as finished sketches were hastily dried, glued to cardboard, rolled up, sealed with wax, and handed off so they would reach the publisher in time. That childhood scene of urgency, art under deadline, and official pressure could have been drawn from the novel that would define Boris Pasternak's life: Doctor Zhivago. The book was smuggled out of the USSR, published in Italy in 1957 as part of a CIA operation, and eventually earned Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Soviet state then forced him to decline it. What drove a man who could have had a career as a composer, a philosopher, or a translator to stake everything on a novel his own government would never allow its citizens to read?

• 2. A House Full of Art

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  Leonid Pasternak taught as a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and the family traced its lineage on the paternal side all the way to Isaac Abarbanel, the 15th-century Sephardic Jewish philosopher and treasurer of Portugal. Rosa Kaufman, Boris's mother, was a concert pianist who had studied under Anton Rubinstein and Theodor Leschetizky. Boris's earliest impressions were of piano trios played at home. Regular visitors included not only Rachmaninoff and Tolstoy but also Alexander Scriabin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the philosopher Lev Shestov. In November 1910, when Tolstoy fled his home and died at the stationmaster's house in Astapovo, Leonid Pasternak rushed there by telegram and brought his son Boris with him, drawing Tolstoy on his deathbed. The family had also, shortly after Boris's birth, joined the Tolstoyan Movement. Boris wrote years later that "the whole house was imbued with his spirit." He began composing music at the age of 13, inspired by Scriabin; his Piano Sonata of 1909, nominally in B minor, already moved freely between keys in a chromatic dissonant style that resisted easy analysis. It was composed at Rayki, some 40 kilometres north-east of Moscow, where his father had a painting studio.

• 3. The Road Away From Music

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  In 1910, Pasternak abruptly left the Moscow Conservatory and enrolled at the University of Marburg in Germany to study philosophy under neo-Kantian thinkers Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp. Professor Cohen encouraged him to stay and pursue a doctorate. What changed his mind was a rejection of a different kind. Ida Wissotzkaya was from a prominent Moscow Jewish family whose company, Wissotzky Tea, was the largest tea company in the world. Pasternak had tutored her in her final year of high school, and they met again in Marburg during the summer of 1912 when his father painted her portrait. Pasternak proposed marriage, but the Wissotzky family found his prospects too uncertain and persuaded Ida to refuse him. Pasternak recorded the experience in the 1917 poem "Marburg," quoting his own shaken state: "I quivered. I flared up, and then was extinguished. / I shook. I had made a proposal -- but late, / Too late. I was scared, and she had refused me." He returned to Moscow, joined the Russian Futurist group Centrifuge as a pianist, and published some of his earliest poems in the group's journal Lirika. Poetry had been a hobby; now it was becoming a vocation. He published a satirical attack in 1914 on Vadim Shershenevich, leader of the "Mezzanine of Poetry," touching off a verbal war among Futurist factions. His first and second books of poetry appeared in the immediate aftermath of that dispute.

• 4. My Sister, Life

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  A failed love affair in 1917 supplied the emotional fuel for My Sister, Life, the collection that would reshape Russian poetry. Composed that year, it circulated in manuscript before it could even be printed; during the Civil War of 1918-1920, publishing had become nearly impossible, and the only way to reach readers was to recite verse in the literary cafes springing up across Moscow or to pass hand-written copies among friends, anticipating the samizdat underground that would later carry Doctor Zhivago. When the collection was finally published in Berlin in 1922, its effect was immediate. It decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam and Marina Tsvetayeva and made Pasternak the model that younger poets measured themselves against. Critics on both sides of the political divide -- pro-Soviet writers and White emigre equivalents -- praised it as pure, unbridled inspiration. The book's fabric, as Pasternak himself conceived it, included striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, everyday vocabulary, and hidden allusions to Rilke, Lermontov, Pushkin, and the German Romantics. That same year, 1922, Pasternak married Evgeniya Lurye, a student at the Art Institute; their son Yevgeny was born the following year. In 1921, Pasternak had also published what he considered his masterpiece from this period: the lyric cycle Rupture. By the late 1920s he was part of a celebrated three-way correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva, two of the poets whose work he admired most.

• 5. Stalin, Mandelshtam, and the Purge

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  In April 1934, Osip Mandelshtam recited his secretly composed "Stalin Epigram" to Pasternak. Pasternak's response was immediate and frightened: "I didn't hear this, you didn't recite it to me, because, you know, very strange and terrible things are happening now: they've begun to pick people up. I'm afraid the walls have ears." On the night of the 14th of May 1934, Mandelshtam was arrested on a warrant signed by NKVD boss Genrikh Yagoda. Pasternak rushed to the offices of Izvestia and begged Nikolai Bukharin to intercede. Then Stalin phoned. According to Olga Ivinskaya's account, Pasternak was struck dumb by the call. Stalin asked what was being said in literary circles about the arrest. Flustered, Pasternak denied that any literary circles existed. Stalin finally said, in a mocking tone: "I see, you just aren't able to stick up for a comrade," and put down the receiver. Three years later, the Union of Soviet Writers demanded that all members sign a statement supporting the death penalty for General Iona Yakir and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky at their 1937 trial. Pasternak refused, even after Union leadership visited him personally. He then wrote directly to Stalin, explaining his family's Tolstoyan convictions and placing his own life at Stalin's disposal. He was certain he would be arrested. Instead, Stalin reportedly crossed Pasternak's name off an execution list with the declaration: "Do not touch this cloud dweller." His close friend Titsian Tabidze was not so fortunate and was executed during the Purge.

• 6. Olga Ivinskaya

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  In October 1946, Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya at the offices of the literary journal Novy Mir. She was 34 years old and a single mother. Pasternak was struck by her resemblance to his first love, Ida Vysotskaya, and gave her volumes of his poetry. He never left his wife Zinaida, but the relationship with Ivinskaya lasted until his death. He was translating the Hungarian national poet Sandor Petofi when they first met, and he later inscribed a copy of Petofi's work: "Petofi served as a code in May and June 1947, and my close translations of his lyrics are an expression, adapted to the requirements of the text, of my feelings and thoughts for you and about you. In memory of it all, B.P., the 13th of May 1948." Ivinskaya described those translations as a "first declaration of love." On the evening of the 6th of October 1949, KGB agents burst into Ivinskaya's apartment and found her at her typewriter working on translations of the Korean poet Won Tu-Son. She was taken to Lubyanka Prison. At the time, she was pregnant with Pasternak's child and suffered a miscarriage early in what would become a ten-year GULAG sentence. She refused to say anything incriminating about Pasternak throughout her interrogation. In a 1958 letter to a friend in West Germany, Pasternak wrote plainly: "She was put in jail on my account... I owe my life, and the fact that they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance."

• 7. Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel

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  Doctor Zhivago was not completed until 1955, though it contained passages written as early as the 1910s and 1920s. Pasternak submitted it to Novy Mir in 1956; the journal refused publication on grounds that the novel rejected socialist realism and that certain passages criticising Stalinism, Collectivisation, the Great Purge, and the Gulag were anti-Soviet. In March 1956, the Italian Communist Party sent a journalist named Sergio D'Angelo to Moscow. A Milan publisher, the communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, had commissioned him to find new Soviet literature for Western audiences. D'Angelo travelled to Peredelkino and offered to submit the manuscript. Pasternak brought it from his study, laughed, and told D'Angelo: "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad." Both Ivinskaya and Zinaida Pasternak were horrified by the decision. Pasternak refused to change his mind. When the Soviet government forced him to cable Feltrinelli to withdraw the manuscript, Pasternak secretly wrote separate letters instructing Feltrinelli to ignore the telegrams. The novel appeared in November 1957. The English translation, produced by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, was released in August 1958 and spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller list between 1958 and 1959. The CIA secretly purchased hundreds of copies as they came off presses around the world. On the 23rd of October 1958, Boris Pasternak was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for his contribution to Russian lyric poetry and for his role in "continuing the great Russian epic tradition." On the 25th of October, he sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy: "Infinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed." That same day, the Literary Institute in Moscow demanded its students sign a petition denouncing him and ordered them to join a demonstration calling for his exile. On the 29th of October, at the Komsomol's fortieth anniversary plenum before an audience of 14,000 people including Khrushchev, Komsomol head Vladimir Semichastny called Pasternak "a mangy sheep" and said that, if compared to a pig, a pig "would not do what he did." Khrushchev applauded. The speech drove Pasternak to the brink of suicide. It later came to light that Khrushchev had dictated Semichastny's insults over the phone the night before. Pasternak was told he would not be allowed back into the Soviet Union if he travelled to Stockholm. On the 29th of October, he sent a second telegram to the Nobel Committee declining the prize. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru telephoned Khrushchev and threatened to organise an international committee for Pasternak's protection, which appears to have been a decisive factor in preventing his exile. In December 1989, Pasternak's son Yevgeny was finally permitted to travel to Stockholm to collect the medal. Acclaimed cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performed a Bach serenade in honor of his deceased countryman at the ceremony.

• 8. Death and What Followed

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  Boris Pasternak died of lung cancer at his dacha in Peredelkino on the evening of the 30th of May 1960. Before he died, he summoned his sons and told them his greatest worry was for Ivinskaya: "Who will suffer most because of my death? Only Oliusha will, and I haven't had time to do anything for her." His last recorded words were: "I can't hear very well. And there's a mist in front of my eyes. But it will go away, won't it? Don't forget to open the window tomorrow." Only a small notice appeared in the Literary Gazette, but handwritten notes with the funeral date and time were posted throughout the Moscow subway system. Thousands of admirers braved Militia and KGB surveillance to travel to Peredelkino. At the graveside, someone with what Ivinskaya described as "a young and deeply anguished voice" began reciting Pasternak's banned poem Hamlet. Party officials tried to shut the service down. A man who "looked like a worker" told the crowd: "Sleep peacefully, dear Boris Leonidovich! We do not know all your works, but we swear to you at this hour: the day will come when we shall know them all." After the funeral, Ivinskaya was arrested for the second time, along with her daughter Irina. Both were accused of being Pasternak's link with Western publishers. Irina was released after one year, in 1962; Ivinskaya served four years of an eight-year sentence before her release in 1964. Doctor Zhivago circulated in Samizdat until 1988, when it was serialised in Novy Mir -- the same journal that had refused it in 1956. Since 2003, during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin, the novel has been part of the standard Russian school curriculum, read in the 11th grade.