Foreign News: Pasternak’s Way

The most remarkable Russian novel of the 20th century has been translated into 18 languages, but it is a book without a country. Last week its author, Novelist-Poet Boris Pasternak, 68, received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature† for his lyric poetry and for Doctor Zhivago (TIME, Sept. 15), the novel about Russia’s terrible years that no Russian may read.

To the Soviet culture commissars, who refused to publish the book—a bestseller in the U.S. and Europe—the highest honor in the literary world came as a dastardly capitalist insult, and they promptly went into one of their vitriolic temper tantrums. The Moscow Literary Gazette sputtered that the award was made “for an artistically squalid, malicious work replete with hatred of socialism,” written by a traitor, and Pravda said that this “malevolent Philistine” would regret the prize if there were “a spark of Soviet dignity left in him.” Prizewinner Pasternak, a gentle genius of craggily handsome countenance and unflinching integrity, sent the Nobel committee a six-word cable in English: “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.”

Doctor Vitality. The cable might have been written by the fictional Doctor Zhivago himself, for it was touched with his vitality. Indeed, “vitality” is a loose translation for Zhivago, for Pasternak coined his hero’s name from the Russian word for “alive.” Love of life is at the heart of Pasternak’s devastating indictment of the Communist regime. He believes that history is a shadow cast by man, not a bloodstained leash to drag him to future “social betterment.” ‘Says Doctor Zhivago: “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life . . . Life is never a material, a substance to be molded . . . it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.”

And so the tragic drama of Doctor Zhivago is that of an apostle of life, with a profound sense of its Christian sanctity, who is caught in the life-crushing and soul-destroying nightmare of revolution, civil war and tyranny. The poet-doctor is driven across the face of Russia, is loved by people who lose him, and greatly loves a woman named Lara whom he loses. A broken man, he finally dies of a heart attack after he steps off a Moscow streetcar.

As Pasternak admits, Doctor Zhivago is “partly autobiographical.” Like Zhivago, he grew up in a cultured home; Pasternak’s father illustrated one of Tolstoy’s novels. In the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, Boris Pasternak wrote symbolist poetry accented with vivid and highly personal imagery. Attacked as a “decadent formalist,” he switched to translating, e.g., Shakespeare, Goethe. During the purge trials, he risked death by refusing to sign a denunciation of “traitors,” but fellow writers covered up for his defection.

For years he has lived with Tolstoyan simplicity in a rambling dacha near Moscow, where he likes to putter in the garden. Twice married, he has three grown sons. Pasternak prefers to write standing up in his virtually bookless den. There he was touched recently to receive the first copy he had seen of the U.S. edition of Doctor Zhivago. Revealing the underlying pathos of his isolation, he asked his visitor eagerly, “Do you think Hemingway and Faulkner will read it?”

No Childish Task. Whether or not Soviet authorities will permit him to go to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize or let him accept the prize money ($41,420), Pasternak has small fear of official reprisal (“I am an old man; the worst which could happen to me would be death”). Whatever happens, Pasternak’s way will be lonely, upright, and full of that fatalistic fortitude of which he once wrote:

The order of the acts has been schemed and plotted,

And nothing can avert the final curtain’s fall.

I stand alone . . .

To live life to the end is not a childish task.

† Becoming the first Russian writer to win it since 1933, when Ivan Bunin received the award in self-exile in France.