Today in fiction
On May 30, 1887, Julian West goes to sleep.
-- "Looking Backward 2000-1887" (1888)
by Edward Bellamy
From "The Book of Fictional Days"
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Today in Literary History
On this day in 1960, Boris Pasternak died, at the age of 70. Pasternak's last years were dominated by the publicity and persecution that attended the publication of "Doctor Zhivago" (1958 in the U.S., 1988 in the Soviet Union), and the announcement that he had won the 1958 Nobel prize. The Soviet line, communicated by quiet threat and noisy rhetoric, was that Pasternak and his novel were anti-communist; that by accepting the Nobel, Pasternak was agreeing to "play the part of a bait on the rusty hook of anti-Soviet propaganda"; that he was worse than a pig for having "fouled the spot where he ate and cast filth on those by whose labor he lives and breathes."
Pasternak was un-Soviet but passionately Russian, and he had severe medical problems: In response to calls that he be "allowed" to go to his "capitalist paradise," he not only did a turnaround on the Nobel -- thus becoming the first ever to refuse it -- but more or less apologized to the authorities. This would in turn bring contempt from many of Pasternak's peers, Solzhenitsyn and others, who believed that he acted cowardly in choosing contrition over New York or the Gulag.
Letters revealed after Pasternak's death show that he was more persecuted throughout his last 18 months than previously thought. It also became clear that one of the major reasons he was desperate to stay in Russia was his mistress and collaborator, Olga Ivinskaya. She had already spent five years in a labor camp for her association with Pasternak, and he felt that his presence in Russia was her only protection from further attack. This proved to be true: Within six months of Pasternak's death Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years in Siberia. She had been Pasternak's model for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, and all this seemed to echo Lara's fate: "One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid ..."
But not so: Olga Ivinskaya returned from Siberia, and championed Pasternak until her death in 1995. She lived to see "Doctor Zhivago" finally published in Russia, and to write her memoir, "A Captive of Time: My Years With Pasternak" (1978) -- in which she quotes these lines from Pasternak's poem "Autumn":
You fall into my arms
You are the good gift of destruction's path,
When life sickens more than disease
And boldness is the root of beauty --
Which draws us together.
-- Steve King
To find out more about "Today in Literary History," e-mail Steve King.
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