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The ‘Doctor Zhivago’ Nobel Dust-up
Sixty years ago, the Swedish Academy awarded the Russian author Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, but less than a week later, under pressure from the Soviet government, Pasternak rejected the award. The story, which had more twists and turns than a Cold War-era spy novel, played out in The New York Times with one front-page story after another.
The drumbeats started on Nov. 21, 1957, when the paper noted that Boris Pasternak’s epic novel, “Dr. Zhivago,” was about to hit stores in Italy over the protests of the Soviet government. The Soviets, who had allowed Pasternak to approach foreign publishers in a short-lived show of benevolence, quickly regretted their decision and tried to force the book’s Italian publisher into returning the manuscript for “revisions.” They demurred.
In a five-hour interview on Dec. 17, 1957, Pasternak acknowledged how upset the Soviets were about the novel, telling The Times that he was “unhappy about the storm raging around the book.” He said that he had accepted the offer of a young Communist adviser to help with its “improvement” before it was published elsewhere.
“Doctor Zhivago” was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review on Sept. 7, 1958: “It is easy to predict that Boris Pasternak’s book, one of the most significant of our time and a literary event of the highest order, will have a brilliant future,” wrote the literary critic Marc Slonim. “It also has had an extraordinary past.”
On Oct. 23, 1958, The Times reported that Pasternak would likely win that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
The very next day, the Swedish Academy did indeed award the prize to Pasternak.
That same day, Soviet officials delayed the publication of The Times’s interview with Pasternak, which was conducted by the Moscow correspondent Max Frankel.
Frankel’s interview, which appeared on Oct. 25, 1958, plunged Pasternak into even more trouble, since the author expressed his delight at winning the Nobel. The Times noted that Frankel’s article “was received in a form suggesting expurgations by censors.”
The very next day, Soviet newspapers denounced Pasternak, calling his book an “artistically squalid, malicious work replete with hatred of Socialism.” An editorial in Pravda assailed him, calling him a “malevolent Philistine,” a “libeler” and “an extraneous smudge in our Socialist country.” In the same piece, his novel was dismissed as “a malicious squib,” a “low-grade reactionary hackwork” and “political slander.”
On Oct. 28, 1958, Pasternak was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union.
The next day, Pasternak — bowing to Soviet pressure — cabled the Swedish Academy to let them know he could not accept the award. “In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the underserved prize that has been awarded to me,” he wrote. “Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill-will.”
The cable did little to improve his standing in the Soviet Union; he was even encouraged to leave the country. The Times noted that Pasternak “told two Western correspondents that any message received from him in Stockholm had been sent freely. He declined to discuss his position and urged correspondents not to visit or call him any more.”
Pasternak appealed publicly to Khrushchev on Nov. 1, pleading to keep his citizenship. “Leaving the motherland will equal death for me,” he wrote.
The next day, Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida, announced that he was ill, and said firmly that her husband could no longer talk to reporters. “He must rest,” she said from the veranda of their house outside Moscow. “I am going to cook for him as well as I can, and we shall live very quietly here for one year or longer — with no visits or interviews.”
Pasternak, under enormous pressure, issued a public apology in Pravda on Nov. 6, 1958, in which he said that he had been “mistaken” when he initially accepted the Nobel.
Two days later, the Soviet Writers Union released “a parable of a snake that crawled out of its ‘dungwaters’ to threaten a high-flying, proud eagle,” the Times reported. “The snake was clearly meant to symbolize Boris Pasternak, although the Nobel Prize winner was not mentioned by name.”
Pasternak was lauded at the Nobel ceremony held later that week. “ Pasternak’s $41,420 award, his heavy gold medal and leather-bound scroll are being held in trust for him in case he may some day have a chance to accept them,” the paper reported.
On Feb. 14, 1959, the paper printed a desperate poem recently penned by Pasternak. “I am lost like a beast in an enclosure,” it begins.
But five days later, he told a reporter that he would not retract a single word of “Dr. Zhivago.”
Pasternak died on May 30, 1960. “The life of Boris Pasternak spanned the heights and depths, the glories and tragedies, the joy and pathos that was Russia in the 20th century.”
Throngs of fans paid tribute to Pasternak on June 2, “treading on freshly cut pine boughs to view the wasted face of the 70-year-old poet. His open coffin was surrounded by massive banks of flowers, most of them handpicked from the countryside, including lilacs that are now in bloom, tulips, cherry blossoms, and wildflowers.” Later that day he was given a poet’s burial “under three tall pine trees on a flowering hill in his beloved Russian countryside.”
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