Boris (Leonidovich)
Pasternak (1890-1960)
Russian poet, whose novel DOKTOR ZHIVAGO brought him the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1958. Pasternak had to decline the honour because the protests
in his home country. The novel was banned in the Soviet Union and Pasternak
was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. After Doctor Zhivago had
reached the West, it was soon translated into 18 languages. Pasternak was
rehabilitated posthumously in 1987, which made possible the publication of his
major work.
"Yura enjoyed being with his uncle. He reminded him of his mother. Like hers,
his mind moved with freedom and welcomed the unfamiliar. He had the same
aristocratic sense of equality with all living creatures and the same gift of
taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first
came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality." (from Doctor
Zhivago)
Boris Pasternak was born into a prominent Jewish family in Moscow, where his
father, Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, was a professor at the Moscow School of
Painting. His mother, Rosa Kaufman, was an acclaimed concert pianist. Their
home was open to such guests as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aleksandr Scriabin,
Rainer Maria Rilke, and Tolstoy. Inspired by Scriabin, Palsternak entered the
Moscow Conservatory, but gave up suddenly his musical ambitions in 1910. He
then studied philosophy under Prof. Herman Cohen at the Marburg University in
Germany, and returned to Moscow in the winter of 1913-14.
As a poet Pasternak made his debut with the collection BLIZNETS V TUCHAKN
(1914). During World War I Pasternak worked as a private tutor and at a
chemical factory in the Ural Mountains. Due to a leg injury he did not serve
in the army. The journey to the Ural gave him material for Doctor Zhivago.
Although Pasternak was horrified by the brutality of the new government, he
supported the Revolution. His parents and sisters migrated to Germany in 1921,
when travel abroad was legalized. Leonid Pasternak died in Oxford in 1945.
After the Revolution of 1917 Pasternak worked as a librarian. With the books
Over the Barriers (1917) and My Sister - Life (1922) he gained fame as a
prominent new poet. Pasternak's father proudly mentioned this in a letter he
wrote in German to Rilke: "If only you knew how my children cherish your every
line - especially my elder son, Boris, who is a young poet already acclaimed
in Russia. He is your most ardent admirer, one who thoroughly appreciates you,
who, I may even say, calls himself your pupil; he was one of the first to
spread your fame in our country, where you were as yet unknown." In the early
1920s Pasternak wrote autobiographical and political poetry, and some short
stories, which were collected in The Childhood of Luvers (1922). His memoir
'Safe Conduct' (1930) was continued in 'I Remember' (1959). Pasternak married
in 1922 Evgeniia Vladimirovna Lourie. They hand one son, but the marriage
dissolved in 1931. In 1934 he married Zinaida Nikolaevna Neigauz.
From the mid-1920s Pasternak moved away from personal themes and focused his
attention to the meaning the Revolution. He began to study historical and
moral problems in such works as VOZHUSHNYE PUTI, a prose piece, and in the
poem The Year Nineteen Five. When the Writer's Union increasingly imposed on
the doctrine of socialist realism, he gradually ceased to produce original
work. Socialist themes did not attract Pasternak who was interested in ethical-philosophical
issues. His concept of realism was not the same as the official doctrine. "We
cease to recognize reality," Pasternak wrote in 'Safe Conduct'. "It manifests
itself in some new category. And this category appears to be its own inherent
condition and not our own. Apart from this condition everything in the world
has a name. Only it is new and is not yet named. We try to name it - and the
result is art."
In the 1930s and 1940s Pasternak's works didn't gain authorities favour and
they were not printed. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, RAPP,
campaigned against the older literary types and criticized Osip Mandel'shtam,
Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Pasternak was accused of subjectivism and
aestheticism, but Stalin's respect of Pasternak, who did not die in the Gulag
Archipelago, remains one of the mysteries of the Soviet dictator's behavior,
who even took time to correct L.M. Leonov's Russian Forest with a red pencil.
According to a famous story, he had once a telephone conversation with Stalin,
who asked whether he was present when a lampoon about himself, Stalin, was
recited by Mandel'shtam. Unable to publish his own poetry Pasternak became a
translator, selecting works from such authors as William Shakespeare (Hamlet),
J.W. von Goethe (Faust), Heinrich Kleist (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg), Paul
Verlaine and Rainer Maria Rilke - in the late 1920s he translated Rilke's 'Requiem
für eine Freundin'. In his translation of Hamlet Pasternak intepreted the play
as a tragedy of duty and self denial. With Rilke he had a brief correspondence,
which was cut short by the poet's death. In 1935 he travelled to Paris to
participate in the Anti-Fascist Congress. André Malraux, the organizer of the
congress, had made the journey possible with his persistence.
During World War II Pasternak wrote patriotic verses, and published a
collection of poems, NA RANNIKH POYEZDAKH in 1943. From the elliptical
expression of his earlier work he moved toward disciplined simplicity. At the
same time he had lost a number of his old readers, intellectuals, who had been
sent to prison camps, the gulag archipelago. Like Anna Akhmatova, he received
letters from soldiers quoting from both published and unpublished poems.
Another collection appeared in 1945, followed by a selection of earlier poetry
in 1947. In 1954, the Soviet literary journal Znamya published his lyrics
under the title 'Poems from a Novel', where the novel referred to Doktor
Zhivago. His last book of poetry was When the Weather Clears (1960), written
through the 1950s. As in his earlier verse, he used religious motifs and drew
parallels with art and death. "With secret trembling, to the end, / I will thy
long and moving service / In tears of happiness attend". Pasternak did not
write political poems, his view was personal, which was considered a political
statement by the authorities.
Doktor Zhivago was rejected by the Soviet journal Novye Mir. It was published
first in Russian and in Italian translation by the publisher Feltrinelli in
Milan in 1957, after the Italian journalist Sergio D'Angelo had smuggled the
manuscript out of Russia. The English translation appeared in 1958. Pasternak
probably completed the work in 1954, it had started in 1945, after the death
of his father. During the writing process, only some poetical excerpts were
published in Moscow.
The title of the novel refers to the Russian word "zizn", which means "life".
In the Soviet Union the book was banned for three decades - Novye Mir
considered its spirit that of "nonacceptance of the socialist revolution" -
and did not appear until 1988 in Novye Mir, a sign of changing times.
Doctor Zhivago has been recognized by many as the greatest Russian novel of
the 20th century. It is partly autobiography and partly epic novel, a many-layered
story starting from the year 1903, when Iurii Zhivago's mother died. His
father, a rich industrialist, commits suicide through the malign influence of
his lawyer, Komarovskii. The boy is brought up in the Gromenko family. Durig
this time Zhivago finds his call to poetry and decides to become a doctor.
Simultaneously Lara Guishar is seduced in her teens by Komarovskii, and she
marries Pasha Antipov. Zhivago qualifies as a doctor, marries, and has a child.
He meets Lara during World War I, they fall in love. Throughout the story
Zhivago and Lara are repeatedly separated. He moves with his family to Urals
after the 1917 Revolution to escape the famine, and the Communists. There he
meets Lara. Zhivago chooses a life with her, but is captured by local
Boslhevik partisans. Zhivago spends a long time in their forest camps.
Eventually he escapes and makes his way back to Lara. Meanwhile his family has
returned to Moscow. Komorovskii discovers Lara and Zhivago. They are promised
a safe conduct to the east. Lara follows with Komorowskii expecting that
Zhivago will follow shortly. He meets Lara's husband Pasha, who commits
suicide disillusioned with the Revolution. Zhivago, a broken man, returns to
Moscow in 1922, on foot, and attempts to start a new life. He dies in the
street years later of a weak heart, in 1929. Lara reappears before his burial.
Zhivago's friends collect his poetry. The story ends with a short episode,
occurring "five or ten years" after WW II, in which Zhivago's old friends
contemplate the fate of their country. - Zhivago was partly modelled on
Pasternak and Lara on his companion, Olga Ivanskaya, who was arrested with her
daughter after the death of the author.
Pasternak's disagreement with Soviet Communism was not political but rather
based on his aesthetic views - he couldn't fully accept official literary
doctrines developed from a theory of class struggle but followed his own
principles. Already in 1923 he wrote in a poem: "I was not born to look three
times / Into the eyes of men. / Even more senseless than song / Is the dull
word ''foe." He thought little of Hemingway, found Sartre's La Nausée
unreadable, and did not consider Mayakovsky a major poet. In a personal letter
to the premier Nikita Khrushchev he expressed the hope that he would be
allowed to remain in his home country after continuing attacks against his
work. "Leaving the motherland will equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by
birth, by life and work." It is possible that Premier Khrushchev used his
influence to calm down attack on Pasternak.
Pasternak remained at Peredelkino, a writers's colony about twenty miles
outside of Moscow. His last projects included a play about Aleksander II and
the emancipation of the serfs. He also planned to write another novel.
Pasternak died from lung cancer on May 30, 1960. In one poem he had written:
"And keep on grinding / Everything that happened to me / For almost forty
years, / Into a churchyard compost". Pasternak's son accepted his father's
Nobel Prize medal at a ceremony in Stockholm in 1989. "Pasternak loved Russia,"
said Isaiah Berlin in The Proper Study of Mankind (1998). "He was prepared to
forgive his country all its shortcomings, all, save the barbarism of Stalin's
reign; but even that, in 1945, he regarded as the darkness before the dawn
which he was straining his eyes to detect - the hope expressed in the last
chapters of Doctor Zhivago."
Doctor Zhivago was made into a film by David Lean in 1965, together with the
screenwriter Robert Bolt. Omar Sharif played the title role as Yuri, and Julie
Christie was Lara. The film, shot in Spain and Finland, focused on the love
story and used Yuri's stepbrother Yevgraf as a narrator. A number of scenes
and characters, important for Pasternak's philosophical vision of the fate of
his generation, were omitted. "... the biggest disappointment of 1965... There
is nothing holding the effects together, not an idea, or a feeling, or a mood,
or even much of a plot, and a relatively capable cast struggles helplessly
with Robert Bolt's disconnected, uninspired dialogue as the film bumbles along
to boredom." (Andrew Sarris in Village Voice, December 30, 1965)
For further reading: Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago by A.g. Gaev (1959); The
Pastenak Affair: Courage of Genius by R. Conquest (1962); Boris Pasternak by J.W.
Dyck (1972); Pasternak: A Critical Study by H. Gifford (1977); by Olga
Ivinskaya (1978); Boris Pasternak's Translations of Shakespeare by Anna Kay
France (1978); Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art by Guy de Mallac (1981);
Pasternak: A Biography by R. Hingley (1982); Boris Pasternak: A Literary
Biography, Vol. I: 1890-1928 by Katherine Tiernan O'Connor (1989); Boris
Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago by Angela Livingstone (1989); The Poet and His
Politics by L. Fleishman (1990); Boris Pasternak: A Biography by Peter Levi
(1990); Boris Pasternak: the Tragic Years, 1930-1960 by Evgeny Pasternak
(1990): A Literary Biography, Vol. 1, 1890-1928 by Christopher Barnes (1990)
Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. by Edith W. Clowes (1995);
Understanding Boris Pasternak by Larissa Rudova (1997) - Suom.: Pasternakilta
on myös suomennettu muistelmateos Turvakirja, runosuomennoksia antologioihin
Venäjän runotar, Neuvotolyriikkaa 3, muita teoksia valikoimaan Viimeinen kesä
sekä antologiaan Neuvostoproosaa I. Marja-Leena Mikkolan suomentama valikoima
runoutta, Sisareni, elämä, ilmestyi 2003. - SEE ALSO: Isaiah Berlin
Selected works:
* BLIZNETS V TUCHAKH, 1914
* POVERH BAR'EROV, 1917 - Over the Barriers
* DEVJATSOT PJATYI GOD, 1922
* SESTRA MOYA ZHIZN, 1922 - My Sister-Life
* TEMY I VARIATSII, 1923
* RAZZKAZY, 1925
* DESTVO LIUVERS, 1925 - The Childhood of Luves - Ljuvrsin lapsuus
* LEITENANT SHMIDT, 1926-27
* DEVIAT'SOT PIATYI GOD, 1927 - title poem The Year Nineteen Five translated
* VYSOKAIA BOLEZN, 1928 - Sublime Malady
* OKHRANNAYA GRAMOTA, 1931 - Safe Conduct
* SPEKTORSKII, 1931
* VTOROE ROZHDENIE, 1932
* STIKHOTVORENIIA V ODOM TOME, 1933
* POVEST, 1934 - The Last Summer
* Bystander, 1936
* IZBRANNIE PEREVODY, 1940 (translations)
* GAMLET PRINTS DATSKII, 1940 (translation of William Shakespeare's play)
* Childhood, 1941
* NA RANNIKH POYEZDAKH, 1943 - On Early Trains
* ROMEO I DZHUL'ETTA, 1943 (translation of Williams Shakespeare's play)
* ANTONII I KLEOPATRA, 1944 (translation of William Shakespeare's play)
* The Collected Prose Works, 1945
* ZEMNOI PROSTOR, 1945
* OTELLO, VENETSIIANSKII MAVR, 1945 (translation of William Shakespeare's play)
* Selected Poems, 1946
* GRUZINSKIE POETRY, 1946 (translation)
* GENRIKH CHETVERTYI, 1948 (translation of William Shakespeare's play)
* STIKHOTVERENIIA, 1948 (translation of N.M. Baratashvili's works)
* Selected Writings, 1949
* KOROL' LIR, 1949 (translation of William Shakespeare's play)
* VIL'IAM SHEKPIR V PEREVODE BORISA PASTERNAKA. 1949 (translation)
* FAUST I, 1950 (translation of Goethe's work)
* VITIAZ IANOSHCH, 1950 (translation of Sándor Petöfi's works)
* MAKBET, 1951 (translation of William Shakespeare's play)
* DOKTOR ZIVAGO, 1957 (published in Milano) - Doctor Zhivago - Tohtori Zivago
- suom. Juhani Konkka - film 1965, directed by David Lean, starring Omar
Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, screenplay by Robert
Bolt ; TV Series, dir. by Giacomo Campiotti (2002), screenplay by Andrew Davis,
starring Sam Neill, Hans Matheson and Keira Knightley ; TV Series (2005), dir.
by Aleksandr Proshkin, starring Oleg Menshikov, Chulpan Khamatova, Sergej
Garmash, Vladimir Iljin, Andrej Panin Panin
* Safe Conduct, An Early Autobiograph, and Other Works, 1958
* MARIIA STIUART, 1958 (translation of Schiller's play)
* STIKHI O GRUZII, 1958 (translation)
* KOGDA RAZGULJAJETSJA, 1959 (published in Paris)
* The Poetry of Boris Pasternak, 1917-1959, 1959
* Poems, 1959
* An Essay in Autobiography, 1959
* When the Sky Clears, 1960
* KOGDA RAZGULIAETSIA: POEMS 1955-1959, 1960
* Poems 1955-59, 1961
* SOCHINENIIA, 1961 (3 vols.)
* AUTOBIOGRAFICHESKIY OCHERK, 1961 - I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography
* In the Interlude: Poems 1945-1960, 1962
* Fifty Poems, 1963
* Poems 1916-1959, 1964
* STICHOTVORENIJA I POÉMY, 1965
* ZVEZDNOE NEBO, 1966 (translation)
* Letters to Georgian Friends, 1967
* SLEPAIA KRASAVITSA - The Blind Beauty, 1969
* Seven Poems, 1969
* The Poems of Doctor Zhivago, 1971
* Letters to Georgian Friends, 1971
* TEMY I VARIATSII, 1972
* Collected Short Prose, 1977
* PREPISKA S OL'GOI FREIDENBERG, 1981 - Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and
Olga Freidenberg
* Zhenia's Childhood and Other Stories, 1982
* VOZDUSHNYE PUTI, 1982
* The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910-54, 1982
* Selected Poems, 1983
* JUVENILIA B. PASTERNAKA, 1984
* IBRANNOE, 1985 (2 vols.)
* Pasternak on Art and Creativity, 1985
* The Voice of Prose, 1986-90
* OB ISKUSSTVE, 1990 - Taiteesta: Kirjeitä vuosilta 1907-1960
* SOBRANIE SOCHINENII, 1989-92 (5 vols.)
* Selected Writings and Letters, 1990
* ZARUBEZHNAIA POEZIIA V PEREVODAKH B.L. PASTERNAKA, 1990 (translation)
* Poems/Stikhotvereniia, 1990
* Second Nature, 1990
* PREPISKA BORISA PASTERNAKA, 1990
* BORIS PASTERNAK OB ISKUSSTVE, 1990
* IZBRANNYE PROIZVEDENIIA, 1991
* BORIS PASTERNAK: SOCHINENII V DVUH TOMAH, TOM 1, 1003 - Boris Pasternak:
Sisareni elämä (valikoinut ja suomentanut Marja-Leena Mikkola)
* PIS'MA B.L. PASTERNAKA K ZHENE Z.N. NEIGAUZ-PASTERNAK, 1993
* BORIS PASTERNAK I SERGEI BOBROV, 1996