The Secrets We Kept

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) was primarily a poet, though he is best known for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. His poetic style shows influences of Russian symbolism, which involves elements of mysticism and defamiliarization (viewing familiar things from a different perspective) as well as futurism, which promoted the breakdown of forms and the praise of mechanism. His first collection of poetry, Twin in the Clouds, was published in 1914, but it was his 1922 collection titled My Sister, Life that made him an influential poet. By the 1930s, he reworked some of his poems to make them easier for a wider audience to understand. Pasternak also wrote translations of works by Goethe and Shakespeare, among others, to support his family.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 is a recurring subject of Pasternak’s writing, including Doctor Zhivago. Vladimir Lenin called the 1905 revolution “The Great Dress Rehearsal” for the October Revolution, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in which Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed. In both cases, social revolt sprang from anger toward the tsar and the ruling classes over widespread poverty and the need for workers’ rights. Pasternak’s poems from the mid-1920s indicate support for the revolutionaries, but as time wore on and he saw more of the effects of Stalin’s regime, he parted ways with friends and colleagues who felt he should alter his writing to suit the Communist Party. Stalin’s paranoia about political rivals led to the Great Purge, from 1936 to 1938, which extended to writers and artists who were seen as anti-Soviet. Friends of Pasternak’s were imprisoned and killed. Certain that he would meet a similar fate, he appealed directly to Stalin, who reportedly removed Pasternak’s name from the execution list, calling him “the cloud dweller” or “holy fool.”

However, the Communist Party still put pressure on Pasternak. In 1949, the KGB arrested his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, in hopes that she would give up damning information on him. She refused and was sentenced to five years of hard labor in the Gulag; her sentence was reduced to three after Stalin’s death. Though he started work on Doctor Zhivago a decade earlier, Pasternak finished it a few years after Ivinskaya’s release. Publishers in the USSR rejected it for not upholding socialist realism, the predominant national literary style until the Gorbachev regime in the 1980s. In socialist realism, the values of communism are glorified and themes often idealize the proletariat. Yuri Zhivago, the main character in Pasternak’s novel, is a doctor and a poet who is more concerned with the well-being of individuals than that of society. An Italian named Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published the novel in 1957. Pasternak agreed to the publication outside the USSR, hoping that Feltrinelli’s standing with the Italian Communist Party would make the Soviet publishers relent. The book became an international bestseller, helped in part by the US Central Intelligence Agency’s purchase of hundreds of copies to disseminate in an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign.

In 1958, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Aware of the danger the award put him and his loved ones in, he eventually declined the honor. Despite refusing the prize and writing open letters of apology, Pasternak was pilloried and denounced in the USSR for the remainder of his life. Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter, Irina, were arrested after his death for dealing in foreign currency from Pasternak’s international sales. Irina served one year of her three-year sentence, and Olga served four out of eight.

In 1988, under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”), Doctor Zhivago was published in Russia for the first time. In 2003, it became part of the Russian high school curriculum.