Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence, 1921-1960 [Paperback]

This selection of Boris Pasternak’s correspondence with his parents and sisters from 1921 to 1960 sheds new and revealing light on the great writer’s life and work.  His letters are accomplished literary works in their own right, on a par with his poetry in their intensity, frankness, and dazzling stylistic play. In addition, they offer a rare glimpse into his innermost self, significantly complementing the insights obtained from his work.  Those glimpses are especially poignant in that after 1923 Pasternak was never to see his parents again.

The collection reflects the events of Pasternak’s life during forty turbulent years. His father was a distinguished painter and his mother, a concert pianist; his admiration for them colors the entire correspondence. But other topics also find a place: descriptions of his life under the harsh Soviet regime, reflections on his work, on his meetings with famous contemporaries, and on current events, including arrests and executions. In particular, the dramatic happenings of 1956–1960—the publication of Doctor Zhivago, being awarded the Nobel Prize, and the international political storm that followed—weighed heavily on Pasternak and his family. As an evocation of his times, his letters are as powerful as his literary works, with their intimate biographical detail, emotional honesty and—despite the tightening censorship—the openness and candor of their revelations.

Best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak is most celebrated in Russia as a poet—perhaps the most influential Russian poet of the twentieth century. But this is only one of the many little-known facts of Pasternak’s life that come to light in this extensive selection of his correspondence with his family from 1921 to 1960.

Pasternak was born into a prominent Jewish family in Moscow, where his father, Leonid, was a professor at the Moscow School of Painting and his mother, Rosalia, was an acclaimed concert pianist. The highly cultural environment of his parents’ home was open to such guests as Rachmaninov, Rilke, and Tolstoy; even after their voluntary exile, his family were to play a crucial role in Pasternak’s life and work. In the early 1920s he wrote largely autobiographical poetry and novellas, but from the mid-1920s on he moved away from personal themes to focus on the meaning of the revolution. In the 1930s and 1940s, Pasternak’s works fell out of favor with the authorities and were not printed; he was obliged to earn a living from translations. Despite the appalling difficulties in communication, his ongoing dialogue with his family became ever more important during the last twenty-five years of his life.

World War II and Stalin’s wave of mass persecutions after the war led to many interruptions and prolonged suspensions of the family’s correspondence. When Doctor Zhivago brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Pasternak was forced to decline the honor because of official pressure in his home country: the novel was banned in the Soviet Union, and Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. An authentic and penetrating account of Russian life in the turbulent era of revolutions and wars, the story of Yuri Zhivago and his great love, Lara, was partly modeled on Pasternak and his companion, Olga Ivinskaya.

At times equalling the drama and intensity of his fictional work, these letters, along with more than fifty illustrations and photos, offer unprecedented insights into the life and work of one of Russia’s literary giants.