Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and writer famous above all for having written the novel Doctor Živago, was born on February 10 131 years ago in Moscow, Russia. Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, he was forced to refuse the important award for political reasons and for the strong pressure received from the Soviet government.
Boris Leonidovič Pasternak was born into a family of Jewish intellectuals from Odessa, now in Ukraine. His father Leonid was an impressionist painter, his mother Rozalija Kaufman a pianist. They were friends of Lev Tolstoy, Rainer Maria Rilke and the musician Skrjabin. Pasternak studied composition at the conservatory, then in 1912 he chose to go to Marburg, Germany, the center of neo-Kantian philosophy, to follow the lessons of Hermann Cohen.
After graduating in philosophy, he worked as a private teacher, attending literary circles and groups of the time. His debut as a poet took place in a Cubo-Futurist group, but his first collections of poems, far from the verbal extremism of the official avant-garde, The twin in the clouds e Beyond the barriers, were almost completely ignored by critics.
When the October Revolution (1917) began, Pasternak was in Moscow. He did not refuse it, but unlike other poets of the time he continued to sing about nature, the stars and the rain, a very frequent theme in his verses. He would have faced the themes of the revolution always through the distance.
You are beside me, distance from socialism.
You say you are close? Between the anguish,
in the name of life, in which we bonded,
carry us, but only you.
(The waves, 1931)
Meanwhile, alongside poetry, he also began to compose prose, partly autobiographical, and to translate Shakespeare, Goethe and the Georgian poets.
In August 1934, during the Congress of Soviet Writers, the revolutionary and intellectual Bukarin, later shot in 1938, indicated Boris Pasternak as the greatest living Soviet poet. Shortly afterwards, the purges began: hundreds of artists and intellectuals disappeared, but Pasternak was saved. Many things were said about his relations with Stalin, as well as about a famous telephone call during which Pasternak obtained that Stalin pardon Osip Mandelstam, a writer arrested in 1934.
The collections of poems On morning trains (1943) e The terrestrial space (1945) showed a greater political commitment of Boris Pasternak, understood as solidarity with his people in war against the Nazis. In general, however, Pasternak always showed an attitude that has been defined as “Hamletic” towards the history and events of his country, never expressing either an explicit consent or a manifest dissent.
Between 1946 and 1956 Pasternak worked on Doctor Živago, known today as his masterpiece. He was convinced, as he said in his autobiography, that the poem was a preparation for the novel, the publication of which was initially not authorized because it was deemed hostile to the Soviet Union. The book appeared in Italy in 1957: it was published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, despite pressure from the USSR and the Italian Communist Party to block it.
The novel, from which a famous film with Omar Sharif, Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin was then made, deals with the problem of the loneliness of the intellectual in the face of the violence of history; it tells about Russia in the First World War, the Revolution of 1917, social transformations and, above all, an impossible love. It cannot be defined as an anti-Soviet book, but it was certainly far from the heroic vision offered by the official literature of the time.
Il Nobel has Boris Pasternak
On 10 December 1958, in the great concert hall of Stockholm, the ceremony for the delivery of the Nobel Prize took place: all the winners were present except one, Boris Leonidovič Pasternak.
The then secretary of the Swedish Academy Anders Österling stood up and said, ‘Your royal majesties, ladies and gentlemen, the Nobel Prize for Literature this year was awarded to the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, for his significant contribution to both poetry and poetry. contemporary than to the great tradition of Russian fiction. As you know, the winner has announced that he does not wish to receive the award. This refusal naturally does not involve any changes regarding the validity of its assignment. At the Academy it remains only to note with regret that the awarding of the prize cannot take place ».
Pasternak received the news of the award on 23 October, while he was in Peredelkino, a complex of dachas a few kilometers from Moscow, he celebrated having lunch with his wife and a friend and the next day he telegraphed seven words to the Nobel Prize secretariat: “Immensely grateful, moved, proud, amazed, confused. Pasternak ».
Immediately, however, the Soviet press attacked him violently, judging him “a traitor”. Radio Moscow called him “a mangy sheep”, the Ministry of State Security threatened him and on October 27 the Union of Soviet Writers expelled him. Italo Calvino, among others, said that the prize had been awarded to him “we must recognize it, with evident political intentions”, but the Academy always maintained the opposite: that the verdict had been unanimous and that the name of Pasternak had already been discussed years earlier, for the poems that until at that moment he had written. Then it came Doctor Živago, Pasternak’s only novel translated into dozens of languages and sold in millions of copies, which was instrumental in awarding the Nobel Prize. Or so they said.
On 29 October, therefore, the Nobel Prize secretariat received a second message from Pasternak in which the writer refused the recognition: “For the significance that this award has been given by the society to which I belong.” Pasternak never wanted to leave his country because, as Nikita Khrushchev wrote to the then secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev would have been like dying for him.
After the Nobel Prize and everything that followed, the physical decay of Boris Pasternak began, who spent his last years under the strict control of the regime. He died on May 30, 1960.
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