Pasternak, Boris (1890-1960)

Soviet poet and author, who was one of the foremost literary figures in the USSR. Pasternak was born February 10, 1890, into a cultivated Jewish family in Moscow and was educated at the universities of Moscow and of Marburg, Germany. He studied music during his youth but later turned to writing poetry. His first collection of poems was The Twin in the Clouds (1914). It was followed by other collections, including Over the Barriers (1917; trans. 1923), My Sister, Life (1922), and Second Birth (1932). Although the influence of the late 19th-century symbolist tradition, with its emphasis on mysticism, aesthetics, and impressionism, is evident in his work, the poems reveal strong modernistic tendencies, particularly in unusual associations of images and in a philosophical approach to nature and history. These works established Pasternak as the outstanding Soviet poet. Communist critics, however, reproached him because his poetry did not follow the preferred patterns of socialist realism, and after 1932 only two collections, On Early Trains (1943) and The Terrestrial Expanse (1945), were published. He earned his living from his notable translations of the works of Shakespeare, Goethe and other English and German writers. Pasternak's only novel, Doctor Zhivago (completed in 1956; trans. 1958), was rejected by Soviet publishers because of its critical approach to Soviet communism, but it won international acclaim when it first appeared in the West in 1957. It was translated into 18 languages. The novel presents a panoramic view of Russian society at the time of the 1917 Revolution. The protagonist, Dr. Zhivago, is an intellectual whose sincerity, religious convictions, and independence of spirit enter into conflict with the theory and practice of the Soviet regime. Pasternak won and accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature but was denounced by various Soviet Communist groups as a traitor. Announcing publicly his unwillingness to enter exile, he rejected the prize. He died May 30, 1960, near Moscow. Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the USSR in 1987 when, due to a newly initiated "openness" (in Russian, glasnost') policy by the party leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Pasternak was officially rehabilitated. Among his other works are the collection of short stories Airy Paths (1925), the autobiographies Safe Conduct (1931; trans. 1958) and I Remember (1957; trans. 1959), and the unfinished play The Blind Beauty (1969; trans. 1969).