Biography Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) is one of Russia’s greatest post-revolutionary poets. He was born into a prominent Jewish family of artist Leonid Pasternak and pianist Rozaliya Kaufman, brought up and lived in Moscow. Pasternak’s education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow, he studied musical composition for six years from 1904 to 1910 with Alexander Scriabin at the Moscow Conservatory. He graduated from Moscow University (1908-1913) with a degree in philosophy, and studied philosophy at Marburg University in Germany for a semester in 1912. Around 1909 he started translating Rilke. In 1913, Pasternak published his first book Lyrics, and in a year A Twin in the Clouds was out.

Pasternak greeted the February Revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, then, as many members of intelligentsia, he had some idealistic believes that October Revolution would bring enlightenment and artistic freedom, but soon enough was disaffected by cruelty and violence of the October Revolution.

In 1916, Pasternak took a journey to the Urals, and impressions of that time appeared in his novel Doctor Zhivago. In the period 1917-1921, he worked on the metaphoric verses that he later compiled into the collection My Sister, Life that was published in 1922. As Terras (1985) pointed out, his poetic experimentation with imagery, occasional colloquial idiom and elliptical syntax immediately advanced him to a position of major modern poet among his Russian contemporaries.

In 1922 Pasternak married Evgeniya Lyrie, and they left for Germany and stayed there until 1923. Pasternak published a new edition of My Sister, Life and a fourth book of poetry, Themes and Variations. Pasternak also worked on autobiographical poetry, and some short stories, which he published in a book collection The Childhood of Luvers (1922). In 1923, he briefly associated with LEF (Left Front of Art) but he was ranked as a literary Fellow Traveler, one who did not actively support Bolsheviks.

In 1923 Pasternak’s son Evegeny was born. In 1931 his marriage to Evganiya Lyrie broke up. In 1931 he traveled to the Caucasus and found friends among Georgian poets. In the same year, shocked with the brutality of Stalin’s terror, and disillusioned with Communist values, in 1931 he wrote an unconventional autobiography Safe Conduct. In 1932, when the Union of Writers of the USSR disbanded independent artistic groups, and many of his colleagues and friends disappeared in Stalinist terror and purges, Pasternak “showed his willingness to participate in official literary life” (Terras 1985). When criticism of his work became openly hostile, Pasternak feared publishing his own poetry but he did not tailor his art to the political demands of the government. He began publishing translations instead. In 1935, he published translations of some Georgian poets and subsequently translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, and others. His major translation achievements were Goethe’s Faust (1953) and Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1958). 

In 1945-55 he worked on his only prose novel Doctor Zhivago. The novel spans the 40 years of Russian history, two world wars, three revolutions, civil war, the disasters of collectivization and famine; the purges of the intelligentsia, the military, and the Soviet political elite. Pasternak included his own poems and attributed them to the title character Yuri Zhivago who is “author’s near contemporary and partial alter ego” (Terras 1985). By he time when Doctor Zhivago was completed, any poet who did not have a political agenda or was not engaged in soviet critical thinking was viewed as a political traitor (Barnes 2004). The establishment was solidly against Pasternak and considered his novel anti-Soviet. Rejected in Russia, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled west by Isaiah Berlin and was published first in Italian in 1957, then in English in 1958 and only in 1988 was serialized in Russian literary magazine Novyi Mir.

Meanwhile, in October 1958, the book was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Pasternak’s “important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.” However, Pasternak was threatened with deportation and refused the prize.  Soviet newspapers and public opinion Workers and intellectuals in quiet threats and noisy rhetorical pieces unanimously condemned Boris Pasternak for producing “the wicked slander on Soviet society” (Barnes 2004). The famous line from one of the letters “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him” eventually became a bitter joke, reflecting the situation when masses of people who obediently lifted their hands to condemn what was in the book, had never read it.

Boris Pasternak ended his life in a virtual exile in an artist’s community of Peredelkino near Moscow. He died in 1960. In 1989 Pasternak’s son accepted his father’s Nobel Prize medal in Stockholm. 

Sources

Barnes, Christopher. Boris Pasternak: a Literary Biography. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Gasparov, Boris. Boris Pasternak: Po Tu Storonu Poetiki: Filosofiia. Muzyka. Byt. Nauchnoe prilozhenie. Vyp.116, 2013

Terras, Victor. Handbook of Russian Literature. 1985