PASTERNAK, BORIS (1890–1960)

Russian poet and writer.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow to a highly educated family, a son of the famous Jewish painter and professor Leonid Pasternak. He studied music and law, but graduated from Moscow University with a degree in philosophy (1913). In 1912 he studied at Marburg University in Germany, and his exposure to Europe during this time significantly influenced him. Pasternak wrote his first poems in 1909–1913, participated in the literary avant-garde, and began publishing in 1913. In 1914 his first volume of poetry, Twin in the Stormclouds, came out. He also met with Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), whose urban and futuristic poetry had a great impact on him. In late 1916 Pasternak published his second book of poems, Over the Barriers.

Initially sympathetic to the revolution, Pasternak welcomed the fall of the tsarist regime in 1917, and perhaps not accidentally, one of his most famous books of poetry, My Sister Life (published in 1922), bore the subtitle "Summer of the Year 1917," indicating when most of its poems were written. But the civil war with its hardships and atrocities drove Pasternak to an increasingly critical assessment of the revolution, as did the continuing reprisals and the growing Bolshevik pressure on writers and poets to glorify the new order. Despite his disenchantment, Pasternak stayed in Soviet Russia, even as his parents emigrated.

During the 1920s, he wrote several epic poems on revolutionary themes, such as Lieutenant Schmidt (1926) and The Year Nineteen Five (1927). In the Soviet press, he was often criticized for his intellectualism, "decadence," and pessimism, and was habitually regarded with suspicion. Yet, unlike many other turn-of-the-twentieth-century poets, Pasternak was allowed a certain autonomy in his work, retaining his predilection for lyric poetry and generally staying away from socialist realism. In 1928 he published High Malady; in 1931 his novel in verse, Spektorsky, appeared; and in the same year his autobiography, Safe Conduct, came out (it was banned shortly thereafter).

Pasternak was involved in the formation of the Union of Soviet Writers and spoke at its first congress in 1934. Appalled by the Great Terror of 1937–1938, he nonetheless showed courage, refusing to sign a writers' petition for the execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937). Still, from 1936 on he spent ever more time in his country house near Moscow. After the Terror, he increasingly retreated from writing poetry and concentrated on translations, notably of Shakespeare, a work he performed brilliantly.

During World War II, Pasternak published two books of poetry, On Early Trains (1943) and Earth's Vastness (1945), which came closer to socialist realism than his other work. But it was after the war that he set upon what he regarded as his life's work—Doctor Zhivago. Written between 1945 and 1955, the novel represented a major reassessment of Russia's historical experience of the revolution and civil war. Having tried and failed to publish the novel in the Soviet Union, in 1956 Pasternak handed the manuscript over to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who published the book in Italy in 1957. Doctor Zhivago immediately became a tremendous success in the West; numerous editions were published in the late 1950s alone.

In 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, not just for the novel but for his cumulative literary achievement. The prize provoked a fury among the Soviet leadership, both because Pasternak did not have official permission to publish in the West and because many viewed his novel as an attack on the revolution. Remarkably, when excerpts from Doctor Zhivago were published in the Soviet press in 1958, many readers, especially the elderly, reacted in the same negative way, apparently without orchestration. With its unprecedented freedom of humanistic and historical thought, Doctor Zhivago was duly appreciated in Russia only decades later (it was published there in 1988).

The target of a furious media campaign and pressure, Pasternak had to renounce the Nobel Prize. His health declined, and on 30 May 1960 he died at his home. Pasternak's funeral was attended by several thousand people, and students read his poems at his gravestone till sunset.

One of the most prominent literary figures in twentieth-century Russia, Boris Pasternak was also one of the few surviving poets of his generation who not only went together with the country through the cataclysms of revolution, war, and terror but also managed to retain an independence of mind, a certain dignity and aloofness from officialdom, and considerable freedom in writing and in life. For many young poets of the post-Stalin decades, he and his verses represented a living link between the present and Russia's prerevolutionary literary culture, which increasingly many came to honor during the late Soviet years. In the twenty-first century Pasternak is admired and read in his own country, where he has long become a cultural legend.

See alsoRussia; Samizdat; Solzhenitsyn, Alexander; Soviet Union.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Afiani, V. Iu., and N. G. Tomilina, eds. A za mnoiu shum pogoni: Boris Pasternak i vlast': Dokumenty 1956–1972. Moscow, 2001.

Secondary Sources

Barnes, Christopher. Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1989–1998.

Fleishman, Lazar. Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

Mallac, Guy de. Boris Pasternak, His Life and Art. Norman, Okla., 1981.

Pasternak, Evgeny. Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930–60. Translated by Michael Duncan. Poetry of Boris Pasternak translated by Ann Pasternak Slater and Craig Raine. London, 1990.

Denis Kozlov