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Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak loved his country. He was a poet sensitive enough to understand at once its need for change and the suffering much of that change inflicted. From World War One onwards, he was in trouble with the authorities and unable to publish anything for 10 years. When the Stalin era ended, the “thaw” under Khrushchev, which benefited so many other writers, did nothing for Pasternak. It was then that he wrote his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago. He had worked on it since 1946 and it appeared in print 11 years later in Italy. The book was banned in the Soviet Union and the author’s rulers forbade him to accept the Nobel Prize it awarded. He had not meant to criticize the regime. He had welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution with modernist poems written in the same vein as his friend Mayakovsky, but his sensitivity to the more perennial truths he divined in nature dominated subsequent work. His apparent disregard for historical movements attracted the authorities’ attention, particularly with the line, “What century is out there?” in About These Poems. The poet-hero Doctor Zhivago cannot remain so indifferent. By then Pasternak had suffered his won grief’s in the Soviet Union and no longer felt able to address human concerns: his mistress had been sent to a labour camp. His prose shows a lyric poet’s leaning toward short episodes, contrasting voices and word music. The hero’s own poems are appended to the text, showing the author’s continued faith in Christian imagery and complete identification his central character.
Pasternak and Hamlet: Pasternak spent most of 1940 on his translation of Hamlet and published it the following year. His statements about the tragedy shed light not only on his translation but also an essential theme in Doctor Zhivago. Hamlet, he fins, evinces great self-sacrifice in giving up his brilliant prospects for a higher aim. He even describes the hero in words evoking Christ: “From the moment of the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet gives up his will in order to ‘do the will of him that sent him.’ Hamlet is not a dram of weakness, but of duty and denial.’” Hamlet has been allotted the role of “judge of his own time and servant of the future.” The play is for Pasternak “a drama of high calling, of preordained heroic deed, of entrusted destiny.” PASTERNAK LETTERS TELL OF WORK ON 'ZHIVAGO'Author: Associated Press MOSCOW -- A Soviet weekly has printed several letters written by Boris Pasternak describing his work on the epic novel "Doctor Zhivago" and the problems he faced when authorities refused to publish it. The letters, in the current edition of Ogonyok, speak of Pasternak's efforts to present Russian history in the novel and his dislike of the way the finished work was treated by censors. Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature but fell from favor for political reasons. He died in disgrace in 1960. Soviet officials say "Doctor Zhivago" will be published for the first time in the Soviet Union next year. The book recounts how the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war disrupted the lives of the main characters and the traditional way of life. "This novel will be my expression of my views over the arts, over the Gospels, the life of a person in history, and many other things," Pasternak wrote in an October 1946 letter, Ognoyok said. In July 1946, Pasternak wrote to a cousin, Olga Freydenberg, that he had started a novel that would cover the past 40 years of Russian history. "This is a very serious work. I am already old. I may die quite soon and I cannot postpone the free expression of my real thoughts until God knows when," he wrote. In an apparent reference to an ideological campaign against some writers in the postwar years under Josef Stalin, Pasternak wrote of the unhappiness it caused him and his wife. "At the beginning, all this which happens now did not affect me at all," he said. "But more often and often, Zina started coming back from the city, all unhappy, suffering and even old, because of the feeling of damaged pride for myself," he said. "And only in this way, unpleasantness, in the shape of my pain for her, found a way to me," he wrote. "How old this all is, how stupid and how tiresome," he added. Ognoyok said the novel was completed in the winter of 1955-56. It said the manuscript was sent to Novy Mir (New World) magazine and to the state publishing house for literature. "But those plans got postponed and then were frustrated because a number of very influential writers spoke out against publication," Ogonyok said. A savage campaign of political denunciation started. Pasternak was expelled from the national Soviet Writers Union, and the Moscow writers union called for him to be stripped of his citizenship. "Doctor Zhivago" was published in the West. Under pressure, Pasternak renounced his Nobel Prize in 1958. In December 1957, Ogonyok said, Pasternak wrote to Elena Blaginina, a poet who had sent him a letter of support. "I had some troubles; I was under certain moral pressure. Which was repulsive in its duplicity and I had to submit partially," he wrote. "I had to take part in an attempt to stop publication of my novel somewhere very far from here, and in a way so unreal, that this attempt was destined to fail," he wrote. Pasternak wrote that he thought that if the book had actually been published, even in a censored or reduced form, the public stir about it would have quieted. Other: Boris
Pasternak's essay on Hamlet c. 1999 |
