Boris Pasternak
1 book analyzed
Biography
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) was already one of Russia's most celebrated poets when he began writing Doctor Zhivago in 1945. Son of a painter father and pianist mother, raised among Tolstoy, Scriabin, and the Moscow intelligentsia, he was the embodiment of the cultivated Russian artistic tradition the Bolsheviks sought to control. He survived the purges of the 1930s — when many of his friends were arrested or killed — partly through luck, partly through his fame as a poet, and partly through Stalin's enigmatic decision to spare him. He spent a decade writing Doctor Zhivago, knowing it could never be published in the Soviet Union. In 1956, he smuggled the manuscript to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The CIA — recognizing the novel's propaganda value — secretly helped distribute it worldwide. The novel was published in Italian in 1957, and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. The Soviet government forced him to decline the prize under threat of exile. He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and subjected to a campaign of public denunciation. He died in 1960, broken but unrepentant.