“You are invited to my execution”, Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) said when he handed over the manuscript of his novel Doctor Zhivago to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in May 1956. Feltrinelli’s decision to allow a book banned in the USSR to be published in the West prompted the “Zhivago Affair”, which was one of the fiercest and most famous propaganda battles of the Cold War: Pasternak was nominated for – and won – the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 only to be forced by the KGB and the Union of Soviet Writers to decline the award.
Despite a half-hearted attempt in mid-career to accommodate himself to a political system he had come to despise – Vladimir Nabokov said of Pasternak’s collection, The Second Birth (1932), that it was written by “a weeping Bolshevik” – Pasternak had always been held in deep suspicion by the authorities. Osip Mandelstam’s widow, Nadhezda, put his survival down to his “incredible charm”; Marina Tsvetaeva said he looked “like an Arab and his horse”. But also important was the way he appeared to distance himself, in his poetry, from the idiom and events of his era. During the Great Purges of the 1930s, Stalin apparently crossed Pasternak’s name off an execution list with the words “Do not touch this cloud-dweller”. (SLT)
Despite a half-hearted attempt in mid-career to accommodate himself to a political system he had come to despise – Vladimir Nabokov said of Pasternak’s collection, The Second Birth (1932), that it was written by “a weeping Bolshevik” – Pasternak had always been held in deep suspicion by the authorities. Osip Mandelstam’s widow, Nadhezda, put his survival down to his “incredible charm”; Marina Tsvetaeva said he looked “like an Arab and his horse”. But also important was the way he appeared to distance himself, in his poetry, from the idiom and events of his era. During the Great Purges of the 1930s, Stalin apparently crossed Pasternak’s name off an execution list with the words “Do not touch this cloud-dweller”. (SLT)
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