Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (born January 29 [February 10, New Style], 1890, Moscow, Russia—died May 30, 1960, Peredelkino, near Moscow) was a Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international best seller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land.
Pasternak grew up in a refined, artistic, Russian Jewish household. His father, Leonid, was an art professor and a well-known artist, portraitist of novelist Leo Tolstoy, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, all frequent guests at his home, and of Lenin. His mother was the pianist Rosa Kaufman.
Young Pasternak himself planned a musical career, though he was a precocious poet. He studied musical theory and composition for six years, then abruptly switched to philosophy courses at Moscow University and the University of Marburg (Germany). Physically disqualified for military service, he worked in a chemical factory in the Urals during World War I. After the Revolution he worked in the library of the Soviet commissariat of education.
A poet of the post-Symbolist generation, he was closely associated with a Moscow Futurist group, Tsentrifuga (Centrifuge), and he contributed verse and essays to a variety of Futurist publications throughout World War I. His first volume of poetry was published in 1914, the year that he met and befriended the Cubo-Futurist poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1917 Pasternak brought out a striking second volume, Poverkh baryerov (“Over the Barriers”). With the publication of Sestra moya—zhizn (1922; “My Sister—Life”), composed for the most part in the revolutionary months of 1917, he was recognized as a major new voice in Russian lyric poetry, one who best conveyed the colossal natural energy and spirit of the revolutionary age. Marked by Symbolist and Futurist influence, his poems of that period were stylistically unique, both in the breathless pulsing of the rhythmic pattern and in a successful displacement of the poet’s lyric “I” onto the outside world, be it nature, literature, myth, history, or objects of quotidian existence.
Though avant-garde and esoteric by the standards of classical Russian poetry, Pasternak’s verse imprinted itself on the mind of his contemporaries as a condensed expression of the power and character of the times. It has been recited by heart by generations of Russian readers since. Like many of his contemporaries, Pasternak welcomed the Revolution and accepted the Bolshevik regime, established in its wake, as one of its aspects. Although he refused to follow his family into emigration (they settled in England), his acceptance of the new order was neither complete nor unambiguous, Pasternak appearing throughout the 1920s at times to the right, at times (as in the case of his association with the journal Lef, the organ of the Left Front of the Arts) to the left of the reigning orthodoxy. After the publication of his fourth volume of poetry, Temy i variatsii (1923; “Themes and Variations”), he turned to the genre of the long narrative poem (poema), still very much in vogue in Russia, deeming it better suited to historical and epic themes associated with the age of revolution than was lyric poetry. Not unlike the writings of other “fellow travelers,” these works (Vysokaya bolezn [1924; substantially revised, 1928; The Lofty Malady], Devyatsot pyaty god [1926; The Year Nineteen-five], and Leytenant Shmidt [1927; Lieutenant Schmidt) assign a diminished, passive role to the Russian intelligentsia and tend to present the Bolsheviks, Lenin in particular, as paragons of iron will and an expression of the ineluctable logic of history. A new, more mature and tragic understanding of the role of the intelligentsia, especially the artist, marks his experimental autobiography, Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct), which concludes with a chapter on Mayakovsky, a recent suicide. Heavily censored, Safe Conduct came out in 1931.
The excitement and turmoil of the crash industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), along with a big change in Pasternak’s personal life, renewed his commitment to the regime, and he responded to the Stalin revolution by fusing political and lyrical themes and stripping his avant-garde style to the point of “unprecedented simplicity” (Vtoroe rozhdenie [1932; “Second Birth”]). In 1934, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Pasternak was proclaimed the premier Soviet poet and, after some hesitation on the part of the establishment, was sent to Paris to the antifascist First International Congress for the Defense of Culture in 1935 to represent the Soviet Union. At the end of 1936, the year of adoption of the Stalin Constitution, seen by many as signifying the end of wholesale repression, Pasternak published in the government newspaper Izvestiya his poems glorifying Stalin and presenting the Soviet experiment as part of the 2,000-year-old project of Christianity (the Soviet government had recently removed its ban on Christmas trees). But already in 1937, as the Great Terror gained momentum, Pasternak embarked on a collision course with the Soviet establishment (in an act of dangerous defiance, he refused to sign the writers’ petition demanding the execution of the accused at the show trials). Little original poetry or prose was produced by Pasternak in the late ’30s, as he turned his attention to poetic translation (first translating contemporary Georgian poets and later producing the now classic translations of Shakespeare’s tragedies and Goethe’s Faust). In the press, Pasternak became an object of increasingly harsh criticism.
World War II provided some respite from the ideological and physical repression and planted the seeds of hope, ultimately unjustified, in the liberalization of Stalin’s regime. Pasternak’s earlier poetry was reprinted, and he was allowed to publish his new collections of patriotic verse: Na rannikh poezdakh (1943; “On Early Trains”) and Zemnoy prostor (1945; “Expanse of the Earth”). The post-World War II campaign of renewed repression in the cultural sphere, known as Zhdanovshchina, effectively removed Pasternak from the foreground of Soviet literary life. He earned his living by translating European classics and worked feverishly on his novel, Doctor Zhivago, a project about the life of his generation that he had begun and abandoned several times in the previous decades.
Reminiscent of the famous Russian 19th-century classics, Doctor Zhivago is nevertheless a quintessential, self-reflective 20th-century novel, whose central subject is the artist and art itself, as they are shaped by the spirit and the events of their time. After their deaths those artists and their art come to represent the experience of their culture and country. The novel’s protagonist, Yury Zhivago is a physician and a poet, a man endowed with a brilliant mind and uncanny diagnostic intuition but one who is weak-willed and fatalistic. The novel recounts Zhivago’s life from his early years, circa 1900, through the Revolution of 1905, World War I, the 1917 Revolution, and the Civil War (1918–20), to his death in Moscow in 1928 from a heart attack. An epilogue deals with the fate of his lost daughter and friends at the end of World War II who are anticipating the posthumous publications of Zhivago’s poetry. The last book of the novel is a cycle of poems under the title “Poems of Yury Zhivago.” In them the events and themes of the preceding chapters acquire the universal, mythic resonance of great poetry.
The novel was completed in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death and in the first blush of the post-Stalin liberalization. Although Pasternak hoped for the best when he submitted Doctor Zhivago to a leading Moscow monthly in 1956, it was rejected with the accusation that “it represented in a libelous manner the October Revolution, the people who made it, and social construction in the Soviet Union.” The manuscript of the novel, however, soon reached the West, and it was published in Italian translation in 1957 by an Italian publishing house that had bought rights to it from Pasternak and refused to return it to him “for revisions.” By 1958, the year of its English edition, the book had been translated into 18 languages and, together with his achievement in lyric poetry, earned its author the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In the Soviet Union the Nobel Prize brought a campaign of abuse. Pasternak was ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers and thus deprived of his livelihood. Public meetings called for his deportation; he wrote Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, “Leaving the motherland will equal death for me.” Suffering from cancer and heart trouble, he spent his last years in his home at Peredelkino. In 1990, 30 years after his death, the house in which he had lived was designated a museum.
Pasternak’s works in English translation include short stories, the autobiographical Safe Conduct, and the full range of his poetic output, which ended on a note of gravity and quiet inwardness.
In 1987 the Union of Soviet Writers posthumously reinstated Pasternak, a move that gave his works a legitimacy they had lacked in the Soviet Union since his expulsion from the writers’ union in 1958 and that finally made possible the publication (in 1988) of Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union.