Pasternak was born in Moscow into a highly cultured Jewish family. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a well- known impressionist painter and professor at the Moscow School of Painting; his mother was an accomplished pianist. During his formative years, Pasternak studied music and philosophy but abandoned them for literature. At the
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beginning of his literary career, he was associated with the artistic avant-garde, and his modern sensibility was strongly expressed in his first two volumes of poetry, Twin in the Clouds (1914) and Above the Barriers (1916), and in his early experiments in fiction (1911-1913). Most of Pasternak’s works written between 1911 and 1931 explore possibilities far beyond realism and are characterized by dazzling metaphorical imagery and complex syntax reminiscent of Cubo-Futurist poetry, associated especially with Vladimir Mayakovsky. Pasternak’s cycle, My Sister- Life, published in 1922, is recognized as his most outstanding poetic achievement.
Pasternak’s initial support of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 vanished when the new regime revealed its authoritarian and ruthless features. Like many other Soviet writers during the 1920s, Pasternak felt pressured by the authorities, who were in the process of establishing control over literature, to portray the revolutionary age in epic form. Despite his contempt for the party’s promotion of the epic, and his disappointment over the decline of lyrical poetry, Pasternak realized that, in order to survive as a poet, he had to adjust to the new cultural-political climate and try the epic genre. During the course of the 1920s, therefore, Pasternak wrote four epics: Sublime Malady (1924), The Year Nineteen Five (1927), Lieutenant Schmidt (1926), and Spektorsky (published in installments between 1924 and 1930). There is a perceptible stylistic and thematic difference between Pasternak’s previous works and his epic poems.
During the early 1930s, Pasternak was lifted into the first rank of Soviet writers. He was the only poet of his generation who was allowed to publish. Osip Mandelstam was out of favor with the government, Anna Akhmatova was not publishing, Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin committed suicide, and Marina Tsvetaeva was living abroad. Pasternak was the sole poet whom the government was initially willing to tolerate. During this period, he completed only one cycle of poetry, Second Birth (1932), a book whose optimistic title and tone Pasternak himself soon came to dislike as a collection for which he had compromised his poetic standards, and in which he had simplified the language for the sake of a mass readership.
Starting in 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished all literary schools and associations and moved decisively toward consolidating its control over all writers’ activities and their artistic production. In 1934 the Party established the Union of Soviet Writers and implemented
Author and poet Boris Pasternak. © JERRY COOKE/CORBIS the official new artistic method of “socialist realism” that demanded from the artist “truthfulness” and “an historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development.” Writers were now treated as builders of a new life and “engineers of human souls.” Pasternak’s modernist autobiography Safe Conduct was banned in 1933 and not published again until the 1980s.
The most oppressive period in Soviet history began in 1936, and a reign of terror marked the next few years. Many of Pasternak’s friends became victims of the Great Terror. The poet himself fell from grace and survived by mere chance. He nearly abandoned creative writing, devoting himself almost exclusively to translations. While this relieved him from the pressure of having to write pro-Stalinist poetry during the worst years of the Great Terror, it also pushed him into an increasingly peripheral position. Translating became a means of material survival for him during the darkest years of Soviet history, and his translations from this period alone would assure Pasternak a notable place in the history of Russian literature.
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During World War II Pasternak published only two collections of poetry, On Early Trains (1943), and Earth’s Vastness (1945). Both collections were written in the vein of socialist realism, with all traces of Pasternak’s early avant-garde poetics obliterated. The official critical reception of On Early Trains was warm, but Pasternak himself found it embarrassing and repeatedly apologized for the small number and eclectic selection of poems.
After the war, Stalin launched a campaign against antipatriotic and cosmopolitan elements in Soviet society. This campaign came to be known as zhdanovshchina, after Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee, who obligingly unleashed a slanderous campaign against some major cultural figures. Zhdanov’s scapegoats in literature became the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Akhmatova. Pasternak’s work came under attack too, and he ended up writing almost nothing during zhdanovshchina. Translations provided his major creative outlet.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet culture experienced a period of liberalization known as the Thaw. It was precipitated by the so-called Secret Speech delivered by the new first secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. In this speech, Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s crimes and denounced his personality cult. It was at that time that Pasternak attempted to publish his novel Doctor Zhivago (written between 1945 and 1955). No Soviet publisher, however, was willing to publish this work, because of its controversial portrayal of the Revolution. Pasternak sent the manuscript to an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who offered to publish it. Doctor Zhivago thus first appeared in Italian, without official Soviet approval, in November 1957 and became an overwhelming success. Over the next two years the novel was translated into twenty-four languages.
In 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. This honor played a double role in Pasternak’s literary career: on the one hand, it established his international literary stature, while on the other it made him the target of a vicious ideological campaign unleashed against him by the Soviet authorities. The fact that the poet had been nominated previously for the Nobel Prize for his poetry-specifically in 1947 and again in 1953- did not seem to bear any significance for the cultural bureaucrats. Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and accused of betraying his country and negatively portraying the Socialist revolution and Soviet society-by people who, for the most part, never even read Doctor Zhivago. Under enormous psychological pressure and the threat of deportation to the West, Pasternak was forced to decline the Nobel Prize. But the attacks against him never stopped. Doctor Zhivago was published in the Soviet Union only posthumously, in 1988. During the last decade of his life, Pasternak’s most distinct poetic achievement was When the Weather Clears, a collection of poetry from 1959. It shows him moving toward an increasingly contemplative mood and linguistic simplicity. Pasternak died in his dacha in Peredelkino in 1960.
Pasternak was the only great literary figure of his generation whose works continued to be published throughout his career. Although he had to pay a price, both artistic and personal, for his poetic freedom, he generally managed to preserve his moral and artistic integrity. Pasternak’s work continues the best traditions of Russian literature and is permeated with devotion to individual freedom, moral and spiritual values, intolerance of oppressive governments, and a concern with the present and future of Russia. What distinguishes Pasternak’s contribution to Russian literature is the life-affirming and resilient nature of his work and its remarkable power to present everyday reality in a unique and vibrant vision. See also: CENSORSHIP; UNION OF SOVIET WRITERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnes, Christopher. (1989). Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Vol. 1, 1860-1928. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, Christopher. (1998). Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Vol. 2, 1928-1960. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Conquest, Robert. (1966). Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair. London: Collins and Harvill. Fleishman, Lazar. (1990). Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gifford, Henry. (1977). Pasternak: A Critical Study. London: Cambridge University Press. Livingstone, Angela. (1989). Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mallac, Guy de. (1981). Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Rudova, Larissa. (1997). Understanding Boris Pasternak. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
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