The arch-rival of the Soviet Union, the United States, saw an opportunity to use the book and its attempted suppression as a cultural weapon against the Soviets. The Soviets raged against the book, but that only increased its popularity, and soon "Doctor Zhivago" was published in multiple languages around the world. Working for a Western publisher was verboten for Soviet authors, but Ivinskaya convinced Pasternak to take a chance and Pasternak agreed to have the book translated and published in 1957. He submitted it for publication in the Soviet Union in 1955, but it was rejected for its anti-Soviet messages, with the country's foreign minister writing that it was "malicious libel of the USSR." However, a copy of the manuscript fell into the hands of a scout for an Italian book publisher. Through all of this, over the course of decades, Pasternak had worked on and off on his magnum opus, a story about a man named Yuri Zhivago and the two women he loved around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1934, Joseph Stalin himself called Pasternak to scold him for trying to get a poet friend of his released, and Pasternak's friend and lover Olga Ivinskaya was sent to the gulag for three years as a punishment to the man. His artistic, bourgeois background and beliefs quickly put Pasternak at odds with the Soviets, and he spent decades in their crosshairs. He stayed and wrote, composing poetry and novellas and translating many works into Russian to support himself.
Pasternak was born in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to a family of artists and musicians, and unlike many of his family members and friends, he didn't flee when the Communists took over his country. The book took a twisted and dangerous path to publication in a repressive state, and the government he resisted for so long prevented him from ever seeing that prize in his lifetime. Like Loading.Fifty-nine years ago today, Russian author Boris Pasternak, author of "Doctor Zhivago," was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France
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