The poet of Doctor Zhivago and the refused Nobel Prize
The Doctor Zhivago affair brought publication, international politics, and a writer's survival into collision around one book.
A major Russian poet, translator, and author of Doctor Zhivago. The novel's first publication in Italy and his 1958 Nobel Prize drew fierce Soviet condemnation, and he declined the prize under pressure.
Career Timeline
- 1914Publishes first poetry collection, Twin in the Clouds
- 1957Doctor Zhivago first published in Italy
- 1958Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature; declines under pressure
Related historical events
Olga Ivinskaya — The Muse Who Paid the Price
In 1946, Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya at the editorial office of Novy Mir. She became his lover and literary muse for the next 14 years, widely regarded as the principal model for Lara in Doctor Zhivago. But the relationship exacted a brutal price. In October 1949, the MGB arrested her as a lever against Pasternak. Held in Lubyanka Prison, she refused for months to denounce him as a 'British spy,' and miscarried his child in custody. Sentenced by the Special Board to five years for 'anti-Soviet agitation,' she spent four years at the Potma camp in Mordovia doing agricultural labour. Released after Stalin's death in 1953, she remained Pasternak's mainstay through the Nobel Prize persecution. Just two and a half months after his death, in August 1960, she was re-arrested, this time on a 'smuggling' charge related to foreign royalties, and sentenced to eight years; her daughter Irina Yemelyanova was also imprisoned. Ivinskaya was paroled in 1964, published her memoir A Captive of Time (1978) in Paris, and died in Moscow in 1995. Pasternak left her the manuscript of his last, unfinished play, The Blind Beauty.