Soviet pressure made Pasternak refuse his own Nobel
Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) wrote My Sister, Life in 1917 (Berlin, 1922) and later Doctor Zhivago (1957), smuggled abroad after Soviet rejection. Awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was forced to decline; his son Yevgeny accepted it only in 1989.
Born in Moscow to painter Leonid Pasternak’s assimilated Jewish household, he grew up near Tolstoy’s circle—his father illustrated Resurrection under crushing deadlines. A childhood baptism by a nanny sat uneasily with legal limits on Jews. Years at Pochayev Lavra (1904–1907) paired him with Orthodox classmate Peter Minchakievich.
Stage translations of Goethe, Shakespeare, and others paid bills while original verse remade Russian lyric modernism. Zhivago’s panorama from 1905 Revolution to World War II made the novel political dynamite at home and a global bestseller abroad.
Tolstoy was a family friend; the Pasternaks joined the Tolstoyan movement soon after Boris was born, and when the novelist died at Astapovo station in November 1910, Leonid took his son along to sketch him on his deathbed. Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Rilke visited the house. Inspired by Scriabin, Boris first wanted to be a musician and briefly attended the Moscow Conservatory, then left in 1910 for Marburg to study under the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp, declining Cohen's urging to stay for a doctorate.
Romance and war shaped the young poet. Ida Wissotzkaya, heir to a vast tea business, refused his proposal after her family balked at his prospects; another failed affair in 1917 fed My Sister, Life, which on publication in 1922 transformed Russian poetry and changed the work of Mandelshtam and Tsvetayeva. During the First World War he worked at a chemical plant near Perm, later material for Zhivago, and unlike most of his family he stayed in Russia after 1917, remaining in Moscow through the Civil War. He wrote to his cousin Olga Freidenberg for more than 40 years.
Source: Boris Pasternak
