Pasternak died just two years later, still battling with state condemnation, fear and regret. Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss. In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this undeserved distinction which has been conferred on me.

It was further suggested that, if Pasternak travelled to Stockholm to receive the prize, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union entirely.Īs a result, Pasternak sent the following telegram to the Nobel Committee:

In retaliation, Pasternak was threatened with arrest, while the KGB also vowed to send his mistress Olga Ivinskaya back to the gulag, where she had been imprisoned under Stalin. While an incredible honour for Pasternak, the Soviet authorities viewed this accolade as a political attack. Ultimately, Pasternak would smuggle his manuscript into Italy for publication, infamously quipping “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad” as he did.ĭoctor Zhivago was both a literary and political sensation, and in 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Consequently, Pasternak struggled to find a Russian publisher who would accept the manuscript. So, for my most recent read, I tried to branch out a little by reading Boris Pasternak’s explosive epic, Doctor Zhivago.Ĭompleted in 1956, Doctor Zhivago was condemned by Russian officials as ‘anti-Soviet’: censors objected to Pasternak’s subtle criticisms of Stalinism, Collectivisation, the Great Purge, and the Gulag. And yet, as you can probably tell, my foray into Russian literature has been somewhat limited. I was absorbed – transfixed – by Ivan Turgenev’s First Love and Other Stories, as well as by the short stories of Chekhov and Nabokov (although, admittedly, I’m yet to read Lolita all the way through). I remember the time I spent reading The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as immensely rewarding challenges. I love its darkness, its sweeping grandness, and its oftentimes piercing perusal of humanity. I’ve always had such a soft spot for classic Russian literature. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in the world in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with – at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless.

Dr zhivago book