Pasternak's Refusal

November 11th, 2009 | Filed under: News, The Written World

Yesterday the Guardian reprinted from its archives an original note from 1958 about Pasternak’s refusal to leave the Soviet Union to receive his Nobel Prize. It’s terrific newspapers take the time to sometimes show their historicity (even if a lot of it is pre-conceived).

I finished in Oct. Ronald Hingley’s biography of Pasternak and I’m only mid-way through Christopher Barnes’ eminent Vol.1 of the poet’s life and works. I am pretty much in the 1920’s after Pasternak had finished, but had not published, My Sister, Life. It’s an inspiring and sometimes harrowing read.

It’s generally known that Stalin sparred Pasternak because he thought he was insane. Russia has apparently a cultural sympathy for religious madmen and mystics, and Pasternak having had at least two mental breakdowns (and who wouldn’t given what he lived through), as well as publishing two volumes of translations of poetry from Stalin’s native Georgia, somehow was able to get on the Great Leader’s goodside (or get lodged in his blindspot). Apocryphally, Stalin wrote on Pasternak’s dossier, “this holy fool is not to be touched.”

By time of the 1950’s and the Nobel, Pasternak had given up being discrete. He is noted as having sometimes asked in crowded tram cars, “how are the concentration camps these days?” His mistress was dragged off with her adult son for two years and change to a work camp. They survived, but the pressure intensified on Pasternak to stop publishing original, non-prescribed work, and generally to ignore decades of historical misery. He himself rashly agreed for Zhivago to be published in Italy after it was turned down repeatedly in the Soviet Union. He likewise immediately accepted the Nobel. It wasn’t long that his family via government heavies forced him to relinquish the prize. But he did so privately and to everyone’s surprise four days later.

There’s a lot about Pasternak, particularly in My Sister, Life that I’d like to learn. I didn’t really want to learn that the CIA had gerrymandered the Nobel committee and ensured Pasternak would win by publishing a Russian edition without his consent. I’m not surprised, but I didn’t need to know that. Likewise, I’m sure the more one looks at his life and the biography of those around him similarly worth studying — Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Bely, Mandelstam, so many others — that there are stories I similarly won’t want to know. But that we need to know and should remember, Nobel Prize or not.