Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Soviet Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.
Background
Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February, (Gregorian), 1890 (Julian 29 January) into a wealthy assimilated Ukrainian Jewish family. His father was the Post-Impressionist painter, Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist Isadore Kaufman and his wife. Pasternak had a younger brother Alex and sisters Lydia and Josephine. The family claimed to be descended on the paternal line from Isaac Abrabanel, the famous 15th-century Sephardic Jewish treasurer of Portugal.
Education
Gifted, brilliant, and non-conformist Ukrainian boys were sometimes sent, after the age of twelve and with the consent of their parents, to the Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra in the western Ukraine. A famous ancient Orthodox monastery under the protection of Russia, where they learned astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, literature, history, logic, music, and rhetoric free from the influence of the Polish Roman Catholic Church. The great medieval library at Pochayiv had survived Polish Roman Catholic hostility. Sometimes willful boys were recommended after a incident of insubordination to some civil as well as religious authority, which were often the same. From 1904 to 1907 Boris Pasternak was the cloister-mate of Peter Minchakievich (1890–1963). Minchakievich came from an Orthodox Ukrainian family and Pasternak came from a Jewish Ukrainian family. Some confusion has arisen as to Pasternak attending a military academy in his boyhood years. The uniforms of their monastery Cadet Corp were only similar to those of The Czar Alexander the Third Military Academy, as Pasternak and Minchakievich never attended any military academy. Most schools used a distinctive military looking uniform particular to them as was the custom of the time in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boyhood friends, they parted in 1908, friendly but with different politics, never to see each other again. Pasternak went to the Moscow Conservatory to study music (later Germany to study philosophy), and Minchakievich went to L'viv University (L'vov, L'wow) to study history and philosophy. The character of Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago is a composite character, his bad dimension is based upon Leon Trotsky and his good dimension is based upon Peter Minchakievich. Several of Pasternak's characters are composites. After World War One and the Revolution, fighting for the Provisional or Republican government under Kerensky, and then escaping a Communist jail and execution, Minchakievich trekked across Siberia in 1917 and became an American citizen. Pasternak stayed in Russia.
Shortly after his birth, Pasternak's parents had joined the Tolstoyan Movement. Novelist Leo Tolstoy was a close family friend, as Pasternak recalled, "my father illustrated his books, went to see him, revered him, and ...the whole house was imbued with his spirit."
In a 1956 essay, Pasternak recalled his father's feverish work creating illustrations for Tolstoy's novel Resurrection. The novel was serialized in the journal Niva by the publisher Fyodor Marx, based in St Petersburg. The sketches were drawn from observations in such places as courtrooms, prisons and on trains, in a spirit of realism. To ensure that the sketches met the journal deadline, train conductors were enlisted to personally collect the illustrations.
Regular visitors to the Pasternak's home also included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Lev Shestov, Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak aspired first to be a musician. Inspired by Scriabin, Pasternak briefly was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910 he abruptly left for the German University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp.
Career
Raised in a cultured atmosphere of music (his mother Rozaliya Kaufman-Pasternak was a pianist), painting and lit. At first planned a musical career and took composition lessons from A. N. Skryabin, but later turned to philosophical disciplines. Later suddenly broke with philosophy as a basis for a profession and turned to lit, although he always maintained a keen interest in philosophical subjects.
First lit works date from 1912, when he joined moderate Futurist group which published its own organ “Tsentrifuga”. Soon broke with Futurism, selecting his own, independent creative path unconnected with any of the lit schools or trends fashionable at that time. 1914 published his first verse collection "Bliznets v tuchakh" ("A Twin in the Clouds") and in 1917 his verse cycle, contained in the collection "Poverk bar’yerov" ("Above Barriers").
The Revol and Civil War were scarcely reflected in his works, and the same is true of his verse collection "Sestra moya zhizn’" (Life My Sister), published in 1922. Placed art above all else, blendingist with the world of nature and with life as a whole and generally rejecting revol force and violence as a means of achieving any goal, considering that reality has its own imperatives and does not lend itself to forcible reorganization and that artistic creativity is incompatible with soc commissions. 1922-1927 sided with Mayakovskiy’s “Lef” ("Left Art Front") associate.
1934 attended 1st USSR Writers’ Congress. Was one of those writeres who were tolerated by Soviet regime by dint of their great artistic talent but who were, at the same time, rejected by the Party critics. Did a great deal of lit translation, translating works of Goethe, Shakespeare, Kleist, Shelley, Verlaine, Petofi.Hans Sachs and Keats.
Also translated many Geo poets. Particularly effective was his translation of “Faust”, published as a monograph in 1955. After World War 2, in addition to a number of poetic works and extensive translations, concentrated on his novel "Doktor Zhivago" ("Doctor Zhivago"), which he began to write in 1948, although he derived the basic idea from it prior to World War 2.
The essential quality of this novel is that it is written from the standpoint of the spirit, not from the standpoint of matter. The novel outlines the principles of human relationships, based on such qualities as genuine feeling, love and purpose as an inner criterion of life. Publication of the novel was refused in the USSR, and in 1957 it was published abroad.
In 1958 it brought Pasternak the Novel Prize for Lit. Pasternak was then subjected to a smear campaign in the Parly press and expelled from the USSR Writers’ Union and its Translators’ Section for “political and moral decadence and treachery' toward the Soviet people, the cause of Socialism, peace and progress”. The question of depriving Pasternak of Soviet citizenship and expelling him from the USSR was also raised.
As a result of this campaign Pasternak was forced to renounce the Nobel Prize and ask Krushchev to let him spend the rest of his life in his native country. Deprived of the right to publish his works and to meet friends and visitors, Pasternak spent his declining years in virtual isolation at the village of Peredelkino, near Moscow.