Boris Pasternak Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born on 10 February 1890 in Moscow into a household where art was daily bread. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a noted painter and illustrator who worked closely with the greats of Russian letters, including illustrating the works of Leo Tolstoy. His mother, Rosa Kaufman (Rosalia Kauffman), was a gifted concert pianist. Their home was a salon for artists and writers; as a boy Boris met figures such as Tolstoy and the visiting Rainer Maria Rilke, encounters that impressed upon him the grandeur and moral gravity of literature. Music filled the apartment as well, and the composer Alexander Scriabin encouraged the young man's early ambition to become a composer. Although he would abandon composition, the cadence and structure of music left a permanent mark on his poetry.

Education and Early Influences
Pasternak studied at Moscow University, first in law and then in philosophy, seeking an intellectual framework broad enough to contain his ethical and aesthetic questions. In 1912 he attended the University of Marburg in Germany, drawn to neo-Kantian philosophy. The rigor of Hermann Cohen's circle appealed to him, but the experience clarified that systematic philosophy was not his calling. He returned to Moscow resolved to make literature his life. The discipline of music and philosophy nonetheless shaped his poetic voice: intricate, precise, and animated by metaphysical curiosity.

Emergence as a Poet
Pasternak began publishing poetry in the 1910s and quickly emerged as one of the most distinctive new voices. While he shared friendships and debates with contemporaries such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and other avant-garde poets, he avoided firm allegiance to any school. His collection My Sister, Life, written around the time of the 1917 revolutions and published in 1922, announced a startling new idiom: dense imagery, unexpected metaphors, and an exuberant sense of nature and conscience intertwined. Readers also encountered in his poems the residue of musical training, with lines moving like phrases shaped by breath and tempo. Over the decade he published further books that confirmed his stature as a leading poet of his generation.

Revolution, Civil War, and Artistic Conscience
The upheavals of 1917 and the civil war that followed transformed Russian life. Pasternak, unlike many cultural figures, chose to remain when his parents emigrated to the West. This decision, and the responsibilities it entailed, deepened his dedication to writing in Russian for a Russian audience. He moved in the same imaginative constellation as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva, poets whose work and fates he followed closely. Tsvetaeva's correspondence with him became a landmark of 20th-century literary exchange, and Mandelstam's persecution by the state scarred his conscience. When Joseph Stalin's regime began demanding ideological conformity, Pasternak sought an independent path that neither courted confrontation nor betrayed his sense of truth.

Navigating the 1930s
The tightening strictures of the 1930s put writers under all-encompassing scrutiny. Pasternak's poetry, with its spiritual and formal independence, no longer fit expectations of Socialist Realism. He turned increasingly to literary translation, producing admired versions of Shakespeare's tragedies and other classics, including Goethe, while keeping his own voice alive in smaller, carefully judged poetic projects. A notorious phone call from Stalin in the mid-1930s, asking whether Mandelstam was a "great poet", confirmed for Pasternak the fraught proximity of power and art. He answered cautiously and refused to take part in denunciations, a stance that helped him avoid arrest but also isolated him. Mayakovsky's suicide and the silencing of many peers deepened his sense of a generation at risk.

War Years and Later Poetry
During the Second World War he wrote poems that, while patriotic, remained personal and reflective, celebrating endurance and the sacredness of ordinary life. He lived and worked in the writers' settlement at Peredelkino near Moscow, a place at once protective and supervised. His translations for the stage brought Shakespeare to Soviet audiences in resonant, idiomatic Russian and secured his livelihood. After the war he formed a profoundly important relationship with Olga Ivinskaya, an editor who became his confidante and muse. Her presence nourished the novel he was composing; her later arrests and imprisonment, a consequence of her loyalty to him and the suspicion surrounding his work, revealed the continuing hazards of that loyalty.

Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak had long harbored the ambition to write a large prose work that would gather the moral and historical experience of his time. Doctor Zhivago, completed in the mid-1950s, follows the physician-poet Yuri Zhivago through revolution, war, and private tumult. The book emphasizes inner conscience over political slogans, the inviolable dignity of individual perception over collectivist doctrine. Soviet journals rejected the manuscript. With the help of intermediaries, among them the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and the emissary who first carried the manuscript abroad, Sergio D'Angelo, the novel was published in Italy in 1957 and then widely translated. Its cycle of poems, "Poems of Yuri Zhivago", brought Pasternak's lyric mastery into the orbit of his narrative, culminating in the emblematic poem "Hamlet", with its intimate meditation on fate and responsibility.

Nobel Prize and Ordeal
In 1958 the Swedish Academy awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing both his poetry and Doctor Zhivago. The honor triggered a fierce campaign in the Soviet press, orchestrated by cultural authorities who framed the award as an anti-Soviet provocation. Pasternak was expelled from the Writers' Union and faced threats of exile. Under intense pressure, he sent a telegram declining the prize, an act of renunciation that did not end the harassment. His companion Olga Ivinskaya, already a former prisoner, would again be targeted by the security apparatus and spend additional years in labor camps. The episode revealed the limits of the post-Stalin thaw under Nikita Khrushchev and turned Pasternak into a global symbol of artistic conscience. Abroad, writers and readers rallied to him; at home, friends such as Akhmatova offered quiet solidarity.

Personal Life
Pasternak married twice, first to Evgeniya Lurye and later to Zinaida Neigauz. His family life was complex, marked by devotion to his work and the strains imposed by politics and notoriety. The emigration of his parents, who settled in Germany and later in England, left him anchored to Russia by choice and vocation. Ivinskaya's role in his later life, both emotional and literary, is inseparable from the story of Doctor Zhivago. The women and friends around him sustained him through the campaigns of vilification and the intermittent reprieves that allowed him to continue to write.

Final Years and Death
The final years at Peredelkino were a mixture of seclusion and intense attention. Pasternak continued to write short lyrics, revise, and correspond with friends and translators abroad. His health declined, and he died on 30 May 1960 of cancer at his home in Peredelkino. At his funeral, ordinary readers and young poets gathered despite official disapproval, reciting his verses in an impromptu act of remembrance. The scene testified to the quiet, persistent readership he had always trusted.

Legacy
Boris Pasternak's legacy is twofold. As a poet, he renewed Russian lyricism with a sensibility that fused musical intuition, philosophical depth, and a reverence for the natural world. As a novelist, he created in Doctor Zhivago a narrative that defended the sovereignty of the individual conscience against the abstractions of ideology. His connections with towering figures across decades, Tolstoy and Rilke in his youth; contemporaries such as Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva; and, on the other side of the divide, Stalin and the cultural bureaucrats, map the convulsions of Russian culture in the 20th century. The courage of Olga Ivinskaya and the loyalty of readers ensured that his work survived the storms of his lifetime. In the years after his death, Soviet authorities slowly relaxed their stance; Doctor Zhivago eventually appeared in his homeland, and his poems returned to print. Today he stands as a writer who made of private integrity a public act, and who preserved, in the most trying circumstances, a vision of language as a form of truth.

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