Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [2]
In the spring of 1958, rumors began to circulate that Pasternak was a likely candidate for that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In fact, his name had been mentioned for the prize a number of times before. The Nobel Committee’s attention was not drawn to him solely because of Doctor Zhivago. But the novel, and the politics of the Cold War, certainly had much to do with his nomination this time. On October 23, 1958, it was announced that the prize had indeed been awarded to Pasternak. The Swedish Academy’s telegram cited him “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyric poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.”
The next day the head of the Moscow section of the Writers’ Union, Konstantin Fedin, who was Pasternak’s friend and neighbor in Peredelkino, and who had spoken enthusiastically of Zhivago when he first read it in 1956, called on him and tried to persuade him not to accept the prize because of its political implications. But Pasternak refused to be persuaded. He sent a telegram of acceptance to the Swedish Academy that read simply: “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” On October 25, the attacks on him began with an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (“The Literary Gazette”) suggesting that the publication of the book and the award of the prize were merely a political provocation. On October 26, the campaign expanded to the national press with a vicious article in Pravda (“Truth”). On October 27, Pasternak was tried in absentia by the governing board of the Writers’ Union and expelled from the union, which meant losing his right to living quarters and all possibility of earning money by his work. His house in Peredelkino was surrounded by the secret police, and it was hinted that if he went to Sweden for the award ceremony, he might not be allowed to return. This last possibility, along with the danger in which he had put those closest to him, finally led him to refuse the prize. On October 29, he sent a second telegram to the Swedish Academy: “In view of the meaning attributed to this award in the society to which I belong, I must refuse the undeserved prize that has been bestowed on me. Do not take my voluntary rejection with any ill will.”
Though this second telegram might seem to be a capitulation on Pasternak’s part, it shows no repentance and clearly places the blame on Soviet society. In official circles this was taken as a still greater offense. The attacks on him continued. And the fact that very few of those who attacked him had read the book was no obstacle. At a meeting in Moscow on October 31, some eight hundred writers voted in favor of a resolution asking the government to “deprive the traitor B. Pasternak of Soviet citizenship.” The text of the resolution was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta the next day. In response, Pasternak’s close friends drew up a letter to Khrushchev in his name, asking that this extreme measure not be carried out. Pasternak contributed only two brief sentences to the letter: “I am bound to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work. I cannot imagine my fate separated from and outside Russia.” The letter was published in Pravda on November 1 and eased the tensions somewhat. A second public statement, also drawn up with very little participation from Pasternak, was published in Pravda on November 6 and more or less ended the “Nobel scandal.” Pasternak died a year and a half later. In December 1989, his son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, was finally able to go to Stockholm to receive his father’s Nobel medal and diploma.
Pasternak had maintained friendships with some of the best of the proscribed writers of his time—Boris Pilnyak, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova—who are now acknowledged as among the major figures of twentieth-century Russian literature. He also befriended and encouraged younger dissident writers like Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Sinyavsky. But he was the first to oppose