Родился 30 января старого стиля (см. метрику), что соответствует 11 февраля нового стиля, а не 10.

К. К. Андреев

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Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к) (10 February 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian language poet, novelist, and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Outside his homeland, Pasternak is best known for authoring Doctor Zhivago, a novel set during the last years of the House of Romanov and the earliest daysof the Soviet Union. Banned in Russia, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to the West and published in 1957. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Early life

Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February, (Gregorian), 1890 (Julian 29 January) into a wealthy and assimilated Russian-Jewish family. His father was the famous artist, Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and his mother was Rosa (Raitza) Kaufman, a concert pianist. The family claimed to be descended on the paternal line from Isaac Abrabanel, the famous 15th-century Sephardic Jewish treasurer of Portugal. Pasternak was brought up in a highly cosmopolitan and intellectual atmosphere: family friends and regular visitors to his childhood home included pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, composer and mystic Alexander Scriabin, existentialist Lev Shestov, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and writer Leo Tolstoy. Pasternak aspired first to be a composer, turned next to philosophy and then eventually to writing as his vocation. Boris (left) with his brother

Inspired by his neighbour Alexander Scriabin, Pasternak resolved to become a composer and entered the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910 he abruptly left the conservatory for the University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Nicolai Hartmann. Although invited to become a scholar, he decided against making philosophy a profession and returned to Moscow in 1914. His first poetry collection, influenced by Alexander Blok and the Russian Futurists, was published later the same year.

Pasternak's early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Kant's ideas. Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favourite poets such as Rilke, Lermontov and German Romantic poets.

During World War I, he taught and worked at a chemical factory in Vsevolodovo-Vilve near Perm, which undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later. Unlike many of his relatives and friends, Pasternak did not leave Russia after the revolution. Instead, he was fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities that revolution brought to life.

Several of Pasternak's relations moved to Lithuania after the October Revolution and there are 4 direct descendants left there. Several cousins are buried in Rokantiškės cemetery, in Vilnius.

Another cousin, the Polish Communist poet Leon Pasternak, was imprisoned in Poland because of his revolutionary poems at the Bereza Kartuska detention camp. Leon Pasternak defected to the USSR at the beginning of the Second World War, were he enlisted in the Soviet Army. He further wrote the lyrics to several Soviet military marches, and fought in the People's Army of Poland against the German Wehrmacht.

Another relative of Boris, a much older namesake of Leon Pasternak, emigrated at about 1890 from Odessa to Zurich, were he became a Mathematics professor in the Polytechnic. His daughter Eliza is the mother of the famous Bulgarian composer Pancho Vladigerov.

My Sister Life Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near Saratov, where he fell in love. This passion resulted in the collection My Sister Life, which he wrote over a period of three months, but was too embarrassed to publish for four years because of its novel style. When it finally was published in 1921, the book revolutionised Russian poetry. It made Pasternak the model for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetayeva and others.

Following My Sister Life, Pasternak produced some hermetic pieces of uneven quality, including his masterpiece, the lyric cycle Rupture (1921). Authors such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrey Bely, Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Nabokov applauded Pasternak's poems as works of pure, unbridled inspiration. In the late 1920s, he also participated in the much celebrated tripartite correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva.

After the ascension of Joseph Stalin in 1929, Pasternak increasingly felt that his colourful style was at odds with the dictator's demand for Socialist Realism. He attempted to make his poetry more comprehensible to the censors by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the Revolution. He also turned to prose and wrote several autobiographical stories, notably The Childhood of Luvers and Safe Conduct.

Second Birth Pasternak (second from left) with friends including Lilya Brik, Eisenstein (third from left) and Mayakovsky (centre). Boris Pasternak (in the foreground) and Korney Chukovsky at the first Congress of the Soviet Union of Writers in 1934.

By 1932, Pasternak had strikingly reshaped his style to make it acceptable to the Soviet public and printed the new collection of poems aptly titled The Second Birth. Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book alienated the core of Pasternak's refined audience abroad, which was largely composed of anti-communist White emigres. He simplified his style and language even further for his next collection of verse, Early Trains (1943), which prompted his former patron, Vladimir Nabokov, to mock Pasternak as a "weeping Bolshevik" and "Emily Dickinson in trousers."

During the great purges of the later 1930s, Pasternak became increasingly disillusioned with Marxist ideals. He remained a close friend of Anna Akhmatova, as well as Osip Mandelstam. Reluctant to conform to Socialist Realism, Pasternak turned to translation. His work soon included William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear), Goethe (Faust), Rilke (Requiem für eine Freundin), Paul Verlaine, and Georgian poets. Pasternak's translations of Shakespeare remain very popular with the Russian public because of their colloquial, modernised dialogues, but critics accused him of "pasternakizing" the English playwright.

Although Pasternak was widely panned for excessive subjectivism, Joseph Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off an execution list during the 1930s Purges. According to Stalin's biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore,

   "He recognized that Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Bulgakov were geniuses, but their work was suppressed. Yet he could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested. But woe betide anyone, genius or hack, who insulted the person or policy of Stalin -- for the two were synonymous."

Doctor Zhivago Several years before the start of the Second World War, Pasternak and his wife settled in Peredelkino, a village for writers several miles from Moscow. He was filled with a love of life that gave his poetry a hopeful tone. This is reflected in the name of his autobiographical hero Zhivago, derived from the Russian word for live. The character of Zhivago's mistress, Lara Antipova, has long been rumored to have been modeled on Pasternak's mistress, Olga Ivinskaya. However the elder of Pasternak's sisters stated that on a visit to her in Germany in the late 1930s, Pasternak told her of the nascent character of Lara, years before he met Ivinskaya in 1946.

After the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953, Pasternak was unimpressed by Khrushchev thaw. He confided in Ivinskaya, "For so long we were ruled over by a madman and a murderer -- and now by a fool and a pig. The madman had his occasional flights of fancy, he had an intuitive feeling for certain things, despite his wild obscurantism. Now we are ruled over by mediocrities..."

Ivinskaya further recalled,

   "At this period, B[oris] L[eonidovich] was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm in the English original and he hugely enjoyed this merciless satire about a society of animals which mutiny against their human masters, and then gradually revert to a wretched caricature of their original condition. The animals were presided over by a fat hog who vividly reminded B[oris] L[eonidovich] of our head of state. Sometimes he said laughingly that Khrushchev put his collar around the wrong part of his anatomy."

After his own novel was denied publication by the Soviet State, Pasternak arranged for Doctor Zhivago to be smuggled abroad by Sir Isaiah Berlin. In 1957, the novel was printed by the multi-billionaire Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. To the outrage of the Politburo, the novel became an instant sensation throughout the non-Communist world. As retaliation for his role in Doctor Zhivago's publication, Feltrinelli was expelled in disgrace from the Italian Communist Party.

Between 1958 and 1959, the English language edition spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times' bestseller list. Although none of his Soviet critics had the chance to read the proscribed novel, several officials of the Writer's Union publicly demanded, "kick the pig out of our kitchen-garden," i.e., expel Pasternak from the USSR. This led to a humorous Russian saying, "I did not read Pasternak, but I condemn him".

Nobel Prize Pasternak was named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

Boris Pasternak first accepted the award, but was later caused by the authorities of his country to decline the prize. On 25 October, two days after hearing that he had won, Pasternak sent the following telegram to the Swedish Academy:

   Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

However, four days later came another telegram:

   Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it. Please do not take offense at my voluntary rejection.

The Swedish Academy announced:

   This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.

Pasternak had declined under intense pressure from Soviet authorities. In spite of his turning down the award, Soviet officials soured on Pasternak, and he was threatened at the very least with expulsion. In response, Pasternak wrote to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev,

   "Leaving the motherland will equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work."

In addition, the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, may also have spoken with Khrushchev about this, and Pasternak was not exiled or imprisoned.

Despite this, a famous Bill Mauldin cartoon at the time showed Pasternak and another prisoner in the GULAG, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?" The cartoon won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1959.

Death and legacy

Pasternak's post-Zhivago poetry probes the universal questions of love, immortality, and reconciliation with God.

Pasternak died of lung cancer on 30 May 1960. Despite only a small notice appearing in the Literary Gazette,[citation needed] thousands of people traveled from Moscow to his funeral in Peredelkino. "Volunteers carried his open coffin to his burial place and those who were present (including the poet Andrey Voznesensky) recited from memory the banned poem 'Hamlet'." Legacy

The poet and bard Alexander Galich wrote a politically charged song dedicated to Pasternak's memory.

His father's Nobel medal was ultimately presented to Yevgeny Borisovich Pasternak in Stockholm during the Nobel week of December 1989. At the ceremony, acclaimed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performed a Bach serenade in honor of his deceased countryman.

In 1988, after decades of circulating in Samizdat, Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the author's homeland.

In 2007, The Times revealed that the British intelligence service, or MI6, and the American CIA had collaborated to ensure that Pasternak's novel was submitted in accordance with the Nobel Committee's regulations. This was done because it was known that a Nobel Prize for Pasternak would seriously harm the international credibility of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1958, British and American operatives intercepted and photographed a manuscript of the novel and secretly printed a small number of books in the Russian language. These were submitted to the Nobel Committee's surprised judges just ahead of the deadline. According to Yevgeny Pasternak, however, his father was completely unaware of the involvement of Western intelligence services in ensuring his Nobel victory. Yevgeny further declared that the Nobel Prize caused his father nothing but severe grief and harassment at the hands of the Soviet State.

The Pasternak family papers are stored at the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. They contain correspondence, drafts of Doctor Zhivago and other writings, photographs, and other material, of Boris Pasternak and other family members.

Cultural influence A minor planet 3508 Pasternak, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1980 is named after him.

Russian-American singer and songwriter Regina Spektor recited a verse from "Black Spring", a 1912 poem by Pasternak in her song "Apres Moi" from her album Begin to Hope.

Translations The first English language translation of Doctor Zhivago was hastily produced by Max Hayward and Manya Harari in order to coincide with Pasternak's Nobel victory. It was released in August 1958, and remained the only edition available for more than fifty years.

In October 2010, Random House released Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of Doctor Zhivago.

Adaptations The first screen adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, adapted by Robert Bolt and directed by David Lean, appeared in 1965. The film, which toured in the roadshow tradition, starred Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin, and Julie Christie. Concentrating on the love triangle aspects of the novel, it quickly became a worldwide blockbuster, but was unavailable in Russia until Perestroika.

In 2002, the novel was adapted as a television miniseries. Directed by Giacomo Campiotti, the serial starred Hans Matheson, Alexandra Maria Lara and Keira Knightley.

The Russian TV version of 2006, directed by Alexander Proshkin and starring Oleg Menshikov as Zhivago, is considered more faithful to Pasternak's novel than David Lean's 1965 film.

Further reading

   Olga Ivinskaya, Captive of Time; My Years with Pasternak, Doubleday, 1978. Translated by Max Hayward.

EN RU

http://www.jewage.org/wiki/en/Profile:P1764348448

בוריס פסטרנק

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לידה 29 בינואר 1890 (יוליאני) פטירה 30 במאי 1960 (בגיל 70) פרדלקינו, מחוז מוסקבה, ברית המועצות שם לידה Борис Исаакович Пастернак עיסוק סופר, משורר, מתרגם, מחבר רומנים, מחזאי, פסנתרן בן/בת זוג Olga Ivinskaya צאצאים Yevgeny Pasternak מקום לימודים אוניברסיטת מוסקבה, הפקולטה למשפטים, אוניברסיטת מרבורג שפות היצירה גרמנית, רוסית זרם ספרותי פוטוריזם יצירות בולטות דוקטור ז'יוואגו פרסים והוקרה פרס נובל לספרות (1958) מדליית ההגנה על מוסקבה מדליה לגבורת העמל במלחמת המולדת הגדולה 1941–1945 pasternak.niv.ru

בוריס פסטרנק עם המשפחה בשנות ה-20 של המאה ה-20 בוריס לאונידוביץ' פסטרנק (ברוסית: Борис Леонидович Пастернак; ‏10 בפברואר 1890 – 30 במאי 1960) היה סופר ומשורר רוסי יהודי.

תוכן עניינים 1 ביוגרפיה 2 ספריו בעברית 3 לקריאה נוספת 4 קישורים חיצוניים 5 הערות שוליים

ביוגרפיה נולד במוסקבה למשפחה של אנשי אמנות, אביו היה הצייר לאוניד פסטרנק ואמו הפסנתרנית רוזה קאופמן. שני הוריו היו בין הבודדים מיהודי רוסיה הצארית שטיפסו בסולם החברתי והתערו מבלי להמיר את דתם. האב, שהיה צייר חשוב, אף היה פטור מגירוש מוסקבה ב-1891 בגלל השכלתו הגבוהה; מסיבות מוסריות, סירב כל חייו להיטבל. פסטרנק הזדהה רגשית עם הנצרות האורתודוקסית הרוסית, ובשנות ה-40 וה-50 נהג לבקר בכנסיות לעיתים קרובות. הוא אף טען בבגרותו שאומנתו הזקנה אָקוּלִינַה גָבְרִילוֹבְנַה הטבילה אותו בילדותו, אך רוב הביוגרפים שלו מעריכים שמדובר – כמו פרטים רבים אחרים בחייו – בבדותה פרי דמיונו. נישואיו ב-1922, לאחר שמהפכת אוקטובר סילקה כל מכשול חוקי מלא-נוצרים, נערכו על ידי רב, והוא רשם את דתו כ"יהודי" גם במסמכים אחרים.[1] פסטרנק טען בביוגרפיה שלו כי מוצא משפחתו מיצחק אברבנאל, שר האוצר של ספרד במאה ה-15.

בהשפעת אמו נמשך מילדותו למוזיקה ובגיל 13 החל ללמוד אצל המלחין סקריאבין, שהיה ידיד המשפחה. אף שניבאו לו קריירה מזהירה, בגיל 18 נטש את המוזיקה לטובת הפילוסופיה. למד באוניברסיטת מוסקבה, וב-1912 נסע למרבורג שבגרמניה שם למד אצל הפילוסוף הרמן כהן. על אף שכהן הציע לו להישאר בגרמניה ולקבל תואר דוקטור, פסטרנק חזר לרוסיה והתמסר לכתיבת שירה. אך גם כאשר פנה לשירה לא הפנה עורף לאהבותיו הקודמות - שירתו נתנה ביטוי לתהיות פילוסופיות, וליריות מוזיקלית שרתה על השורות. בתקופה זו היה מיודד עם ולדימיר מאיאקובסקי, קשר שהייתה לו השפעה על יצירתו. ספר שיריו הראשון יצא לאור ב-1914, ובשנים שלאחר מכן הוציא לאור ספרי שירה נוספים שהחשוב שבהם הוא "אחותי החיים" (1922). בפרוזה שכתב פסטרנק (ובמיוחד ב"מכתבים מטולה" 1922) שאף לבטא את האידיאלים ששאב ממורהו הרוחני לב טולסטוי, אותו הכיר עוד בילדותו כאשר התארח עם הוריו באחוזתו של טולסטוי יאסנאיה פוליאנה שבפאתי העיר טולה.

פסטרנק התקשה להסתגל לממסד הספרותי ששלט בחיי התרבות ברוסיה לאחר התבססות השלטון הסובייטי. שיריו כמעט ולא נדפסו, ועל מנת להתפרנס עסק רבות בתרגום מן הספרות האירופאית הקלאסית כמו גם מן הספרות בת-תקופתו. בשנות השלושים יצא עליו קצפו של המשטר משום שסירב לתמוך ב"טיהורים" של סטלין. שמו של בוריס פסטרנק היה ברשימת המועמדים להישלח לסיביר, אך ברגע האחרון שמו נמחק מהרשימה. מצבו של בן דודו המשורר היהודי-פולני, לאון פסטרנק, היה פחות טוב. כעונש על פעילותו האקטיביסטית בפולין - כתיבת שירה סטירית בגנות השלטון - הוא נאסר בשנת 1934 ונשלח לכלא ברזה קרטושקה.

כבר בשנות ה-30 עסק פסטרנק, יחד עם כתיבת שירה, גם בכתיבת פרוזה. בשנים 1945–1955 כתב את יצירתו הגדולה - הרומן "דוקטור ז'יוואגו" העוסק בגורל האינטליגנציה הרוסית במחצית הראשונה של המאה ה-20, ובמיוחד בשנות מלחמת האזרחים ברוסיה. גיבורו של הרומן הוא רופא שלאחר מותו נשאר ספר שירים. שירים אלו, שהם החלק האחרון ברומן, הם מפסגת יצירתו של פסטרנק. הספר מבוסס על דמותה של אולגה איבינסקיה, משוררת שהייתה אהובתו של פסטרנק ב 13 השנים האחרונות של חייו. היא תעדה את סיפור האהבה הזה בספר שכתבה .[2]רומן זה תועד בספר "לארה" שכתבה אנה פסטרנק.[3]

"דוקטור ז'יוואגו" נאסר להוצאה לאור בברית המועצות ב-1956. באותה שנה התפרסם במערב, ותורגם לכמה שפות. בעולם, הרומן זכה לתגובות נלהבות ומחברו הוכרז כזוכה פרס נובל לספרות לשנת 1958. אולם במולדתו של פסטרנק, התגובה הייתה שונה לחלוטין - הרומן הוכרז "אנטי-סובייטי" ומחברו הוצא מאיגוד הסופרים של ברית המועצות. עקב כל זאת, נאלץ פסטרנק לוותר על הפרס. בשנת 1987 בוטלה החלטה על הוצאתו מאיגוד הסופרים, הרומן פורסם בברית המועצות ב-1988, כמעט 30 שנה לאחר מותו של המחבר. בשנת 1989 בנו קיבל את פרס נובל של אביו.

נפטר ב-1960 מסרטן הריאה. אף על פי שהתפרסמה על מותו רק הודעה קטנה בעיתון ספרותי, נהרו להלוויתו אלפים רבים.

ספריו בעברית דוקטור ז'יוואגו, מרוסית - פטר קריקסונוב, כתר, ירושלים, 2006. בוריס פסטרנק - מבחר משירתו, בחרה ותרגמה מרוסית מירי ליטווק, עורך - עמוס לויתן, גוונים, תל אביב, 2006. דוקטור ז'יוואגו, רומן, תרגום קודם, תרגם מכתב-היד הרוסי צבי ארד, עם עובד, תל אביב, 1969. מבחר שירים, עברית - עזרא זוסמן, בן-ציון תומר, שמואל שתל, עקד, תל אביב, 1961. לקריאה נוספת ישעיה ברלין, פגישות עם משוררים רוסים, בתוך: רשמים אישיים, עם עובד, תשמ"ג. ויליאם בטקין, טרגדיה של משורר : מבט מירושלים, נדפס במהות, כ'ו, תשס"ג 2003. רויאל נץ, על הקריאה באלתרמן, כלומר על פסטרנק, נדפס בהו!, 1, 2005. יוסף חיים ירושלמי, בוריס פסטרנק בעברית: ביבליוגרפיה, נדפס בדפים למחקר בספרות, אוניברסיטת חיפה, 3, 1986, עמ' 271–296. (המאמר זמין לצפייה

במאגר JSTOR לאחר הרשמה) קישורים חיצוניים מיזמי קרן ויקימדיה ויקיציטוט ציטוטים בוויקיציטוט: בוריס פסטרנק ויקישיתוף תמונות ומדיה בוויקישיתוף: בוריס פסטרנק בוריס פסטרנק , באתר פרס נובל (באנגלית) בוריס פסטרנק - מבחר משירתו , באתר טקסט הספרים של בוריס פסטרנק , באתר "סימניה" משה דור, מכתבים לידידים בגרוּזיה , מעריב, 25 באוגוסט 1967 בוריס פסטרנק , אנשי סגולה - יהודים זוכי פרס נובל, באתר בית התפוצות .

אלגיס וליונס, האיש שלא ויתר על האמת: הניצחון המוסרי של בוריס פסטרנק ו’ד”ר ז’יוואגו’ , באתר מידה בוריס פסטרנק

באתר Find a Grave (באנגלית) הערות שוליים

Efraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature After the October Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1995. עמ' 151-152.

simply smart, בשבי העתים חיי עם פסטרנאק אולגה איוונסקאיה לארה ז'יוואגו , ספרים וספרי יד שנייה :: בוקספר, booksefer (באנגלית)

Anna Pasternak, Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago , New York, NY: Ecco, 2017-01-24. (בenglish) https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A1_%D7%A4...

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Родился 30 января старого стиля (см. метрику), что соответствует 11 февраля нового стиля, а не 10.

К. К. Андреев

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Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к) (10 February 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian language poet, novelist, and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Outside his homeland, Pasternak is best known for authoring Doctor Zhivago, a novel set during the last years of the House of Romanov and the earliest daysof the Soviet Union. Banned in Russia, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to the West and published in 1957. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Early life

Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February, (Gregorian), 1890 (Julian 29 January) into a wealthy and assimilated Russian-Jewish family. His father was the famous artist, Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and his mother was Rosa (Raitza) Kaufman, a concert pianist. The family claimed to be descended on the paternal line from Isaac Abrabanel, the famous 15th-century Sephardic Jewish treasurer of Portugal. Pasternak was brought up in a highly cosmopolitan and intellectual atmosphere: family friends and regular visitors to his childhood home included pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, composer and mystic Alexander Scriabin, existentialist Lev Shestov, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and writer Leo Tolstoy. Pasternak aspired first to be a composer, turned next to philosophy and then eventually to writing as his vocation. Boris (left) with his brother

Inspired by his neighbour Alexander Scriabin, Pasternak resolved to become a composer and entered the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910 he abruptly left the conservatory for the University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen and Nicolai Hartmann. Although invited to become a scholar, he decided against making philosophy a profession and returned to Moscow in 1914. His first poetry collection, influenced by Alexander Blok and the Russian Futurists, was published later the same year.

Pasternak's early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Kant's ideas. Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favourite poets such as Rilke, Lermontov and German Romantic poets.

During World War I, he taught and worked at a chemical factory in Vsevolodovo-Vilve near Perm, which undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later. Unlike many of his relatives and friends, Pasternak did not leave Russia after the revolution. Instead, he was fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities that revolution brought to life.

Several of Pasternak's relations moved to Lithuania after the October Revolution and there are 4 direct descendants left there. Several cousins are buried in Rokantiškės cemetery, in Vilnius.

Another cousin, the Polish Communist poet Leon Pasternak, was imprisoned in Poland because of his revolutionary poems at the Bereza Kartuska detention camp. Leon Pasternak defected to the USSR at the beginning of the Second World War, were he enlisted in the Soviet Army. He further wrote the lyrics to several Soviet military marches, and fought in the People's Army of Poland against the German Wehrmacht.

Another relative of Boris, a much older namesake of Leon Pasternak, emigrated at about 1890 from Odessa to Zurich, were he became a Mathematics professor in the Polytechnic. His daughter Eliza is the mother of the famous Bulgarian composer Pancho Vladigerov.

My Sister Life Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near Saratov, where he fell in love. This passion resulted in the collection My Sister Life, which he wrote over a period of three months, but was too embarrassed to publish for four years because of its novel style. When it finally was published in 1921, the book revolutionised Russian poetry. It made Pasternak the model for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetayeva and others.

Following My Sister Life, Pasternak produced some hermetic pieces of uneven quality, including his masterpiece, the lyric cycle Rupture (1921). Authors such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrey Bely, Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Nabokov applauded Pasternak's poems as works of pure, unbridled inspiration. In the late 1920s, he also participated in the much celebrated tripartite correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva.

After the ascension of Joseph Stalin in 1929, Pasternak increasingly felt that his colourful style was at odds with the dictator's demand for Socialist Realism. He attempted to make his poetry more comprehensible to the censors by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the Revolution. He also turned to prose and wrote several autobiographical stories, notably The Childhood of Luvers and Safe Conduct.

Second Birth Pasternak (second from left) with friends including Lilya Brik, Eisenstein (third from left) and Mayakovsky (centre). Boris Pasternak (in the foreground) and Korney Chukovsky at the first Congress of the Soviet Union of Writers in 1934.

By 1932, Pasternak had strikingly reshaped his style to make it acceptable to the Soviet public and printed the new collection of poems aptly titled The Second Birth. Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book alienated the core of Pasternak's refined audience abroad, which was largely composed of anti-communist White emigres. He simplified his style and language even further for his next collection of verse, Early Trains (1943), which prompted his former patron, Vladimir Nabokov, to mock Pasternak as a "weeping Bolshevik" and "Emily Dickinson in trousers."

During the great purges of the later 1930s, Pasternak became increasingly disillusioned with Marxist ideals. He remained a close friend of Anna Akhmatova, as well as Osip Mandelstam. Reluctant to conform to Socialist Realism, Pasternak turned to translation. His work soon included William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear), Goethe (Faust), Rilke (Requiem für eine Freundin), Paul Verlaine, and Georgian poets. Pasternak's translations of Shakespeare remain very popular with the Russian public because of their colloquial, modernised dialogues, but critics accused him of "pasternakizing" the English playwright.

Although Pasternak was widely panned for excessive subjectivism, Joseph Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off an execution list during the 1930s Purges. According to Stalin's biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore,

   "He recognized that Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Bulgakov were geniuses, but their work was suppressed. Yet he could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested. But woe betide anyone, genius or hack, who insulted the person or policy of Stalin -- for the two were synonymous."

Doctor Zhivago Several years before the start of the Second World War, Pasternak and his wife settled in Peredelkino, a village for writers several miles from Moscow. He was filled with a love of life that gave his poetry a hopeful tone. This is reflected in the name of his autobiographical hero Zhivago, derived from the Russian word for live. The character of Zhivago's mistress, Lara Antipova, has long been rumored to have been modeled on Pasternak's mistress, Olga Ivinskaya. However the elder of Pasternak's sisters stated that on a visit to her in Germany in the late 1930s, Pasternak told her of the nascent character of Lara, years before he met Ivinskaya in 1946.

After the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953, Pasternak was unimpressed by Khrushchev thaw. He confided in Ivinskaya, "For so long we were ruled over by a madman and a murderer -- and now by a fool and a pig. The madman had his occasional flights of fancy, he had an intuitive feeling for certain things, despite his wild obscurantism. Now we are ruled over by mediocrities..."

Ivinskaya further recalled,

   "At this period, B[oris] L[eonidovich] was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm in the English original and he hugely enjoyed this merciless satire about a society of animals which mutiny against their human masters, and then gradually revert to a wretched caricature of their original condition. The animals were presided over by a fat hog who vividly reminded B[oris] L[eonidovich] of our head of state. Sometimes he said laughingly that Khrushchev put his collar around the wrong part of his anatomy."

After his own novel was denied publication by the Soviet State, Pasternak arranged for Doctor Zhivago to be smuggled abroad by Sir Isaiah Berlin. In 1957, the novel was printed by the multi-billionaire Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. To the outrage of the Politburo, the novel became an instant sensation throughout the non-Communist world. As retaliation for his role in Doctor Zhivago's publication, Feltrinelli was expelled in disgrace from the Italian Communist Party.

Between 1958 and 1959, the English language edition spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times' bestseller list. Although none of his Soviet critics had the chance to read the proscribed novel, several officials of the Writer's Union publicly demanded, "kick the pig out of our kitchen-garden," i.e., expel Pasternak from the USSR. This led to a humorous Russian saying, "I did not read Pasternak, but I condemn him".

Nobel Prize Pasternak was named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

Boris Pasternak first accepted the award, but was later caused by the authorities of his country to decline the prize. On 25 October, two days after hearing that he had won, Pasternak sent the following telegram to the Swedish Academy:

   Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

However, four days later came another telegram:

   Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it. Please do not take offense at my voluntary rejection.

The Swedish Academy announced:

   This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.

Pasternak had declined under intense pressure from Soviet authorities. In spite of his turning down the award, Soviet officials soured on Pasternak, and he was threatened at the very least with expulsion. In response, Pasternak wrote to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev,

   "Leaving the motherland will equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work."

In addition, the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, may also have spoken with Khrushchev about this, and Pasternak was not exiled or imprisoned.

Despite this, a famous Bill Mauldin cartoon at the time showed Pasternak and another prisoner in the GULAG, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?" The cartoon won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1959.

Death and legacy

Pasternak's post-Zhivago poetry probes the universal questions of love, immortality, and reconciliation with God.

Pasternak died of lung cancer on 30 May 1960. Despite only a small notice appearing in the Literary Gazette,[citation needed] thousands of people traveled from Moscow to his funeral in Peredelkino. "Volunteers carried his open coffin to his burial place and those who were present (including the poet Andrey Voznesensky) recited from memory the banned poem 'Hamlet'." Legacy

The poet and bard Alexander Galich wrote a politically charged song dedicated to Pasternak's memory.

His father's Nobel medal was ultimately presented to Yevgeny Borisovich Pasternak in Stockholm during the Nobel week of December 1989. At the ceremony, acclaimed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performed a Bach serenade in honor of his deceased countryman.

In 1988, after decades of circulating in Samizdat, Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the author's homeland.

In 2007, The Times revealed that the British intelligence service, or MI6, and the American CIA had collaborated to ensure that Pasternak's novel was submitted in accordance with the Nobel Committee's regulations. This was done because it was known that a Nobel Prize for Pasternak would seriously harm the international credibility of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1958, British and American operatives intercepted and photographed a manuscript of the novel and secretly printed a small number of books in the Russian language. These were submitted to the Nobel Committee's surprised judges just ahead of the deadline. According to Yevgeny Pasternak, however, his father was completely unaware of the involvement of Western intelligence services in ensuring his Nobel victory. Yevgeny further declared that the Nobel Prize caused his father nothing but severe grief and harassment at the hands of the Soviet State.

The Pasternak family papers are stored at the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. They contain correspondence, drafts of Doctor Zhivago and other writings, photographs, and other material, of Boris Pasternak and other family members.

Cultural influence A minor planet 3508 Pasternak, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1980 is named after him.

Russian-American singer and songwriter Regina Spektor recited a verse from "Black Spring", a 1912 poem by Pasternak in her song "Apres Moi" from her album Begin to Hope.

Translations The first English language translation of Doctor Zhivago was hastily produced by Max Hayward and Manya Harari in order to coincide with Pasternak's Nobel victory. It was released in August 1958, and remained the only edition available for more than fifty years.

In October 2010, Random House released Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of Doctor Zhivago.

Adaptations The first screen adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, adapted by Robert Bolt and directed by David Lean, appeared in 1965. The film, which toured in the roadshow tradition, starred Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin, and Julie Christie. Concentrating on the love triangle aspects of the novel, it quickly became a worldwide blockbuster, but was unavailable in Russia until Perestroika.

In 2002, the novel was adapted as a television miniseries. Directed by Giacomo Campiotti, the serial starred Hans Matheson, Alexandra Maria Lara and Keira Knightley.

The Russian TV version of 2006, directed by Alexander Proshkin and starring Oleg Menshikov as Zhivago, is considered more faithful to Pasternak's novel than David Lean's 1965 film.

Further reading

   Olga Ivinskaya, Captive of Time; My Years with Pasternak, Doubleday, 1978. Translated by Max Hayward.

EN RU

http://www.jewage.org/wiki/en/Profile:P1764348448