Word: pasternak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...late as the winter of '41-'42, Pasternak slept on a shakedown bed under the stairway of an unheated Moscow tenement house. There he received anonymous gifts of food, rather like a Hindu holy man before whose hovel little dishes are placed by unseen hands. During the Terror of '36-'37, he lost his "living space" and food-ration privileges. When Red Army Marshal Tukhachevsky et al. were executed, Pasternak was asked to sign a resolution of approval, and refused: "My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn...
...with Russian intellectuals and made his rare public appearances S.R.O. affairs. At one such reading, in 1947, a sheet of his manuscript slipped to the floor, and before he could stoop to retrieve it the audience chanted the next stanza of his poem by heart. Eyes brimming with tears, Pasternak choked out "Spasibo Dorogiye" (Thank you. dear ones). At another reading, his listeners yelled "Sixty-six! Sixty-six!", meaning the sixty-sixth sonnet of Shakespeare. The telltale line: "Art made tongue-tied by authority...
Over the years, Pasternak has written countless poems "for the drawer" in hope of future publication, though he periodically weeds and destroys some of his backlog. Occasionally absent-minded in conversation (he sometimes lapses into a preoccupied refrain of "da, da, da, da, da"), Pasternak is methodical in his writing habits. He first puts a watch on his desk, draws a pencil from the box he keeps there, and writes in longhand, reusing every sheet of paper (once on each side for separate works): "It's not only economical, but it's more cozy. The paper...
...Pasternak, the father of three grown sons, is married to Zinaida Nikolaevna Neuhaus, a plump, inconspicuous half-Italian woman (she is his second wife; little is known of his first, Eugenia, whom he divoiced in 1931). At Peredelkino, Boris Pasternak guards one of the few outposts of the "Other Russia" that exist in the U.S.S.R. On Sunday, over groaning helpings of zakuski (Russian hors d'oeuvres) and repeated toasts, Pasternak holds open house for bright young artists and intellectuals-or did until the Nobel Prize fracas. French, German or English may be spoken (Pasternak is fluent in all three...
...sense is Boris Pasternak a popular hero in Russia, or a practical rallying point of resistance. The West certainly has no grounds for claiming him as a political ally, and at best will have to live up to him as a moral one. Yet Zhivago has become one of those portents of freedom whose ends are incalculable. Among Moscow students a couplet goes...