Word: pasternaks
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Like a man in a frenzy of rage who cares neither what he says nor who hears him, the Soviet state howled its fury at defenseless, white-haired Novelist Boris Pasternak. Pasternak himself, after first telegraphing his joyful acceptance, seven days later refused the Nobel Prize awarded his poems and his novel, Doctor Zhivago: "In view of the meaning given to this honor in the society to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize . . . Do not meet my refusal with ill will." Still the screaming invective poured out, and the U.S.S.R. spilled it across the world without...
While Party Boss Nikita Khrushchev sat approvingly on the same platform, Komsomol Leader Vladimir Semichastny cried that Pasternak was a "pig" who "dirties the place where he sleeps and eats, dirties those with whom he lives and by whose labor he exists." A mass meeting of 800 "intellectuals" in Moscow's Cinema House demanded unanimously that Pasternak be stripped of his citizenship and thrown out of the country. In the village of Peredelkino outside Moscow, where Pasternak lives in a dacha given him by Stalin,* the local writers' colony complained: "We cannot continue to breathe the same...
Radio Moscow, in ten languages, trumpeted that Pasternak had no place in Soviet society, that he was a man who "in spirit has long been a traitor to his country and has now spat in its face." The satellites fell tamely into line as the literary hacks of Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania echoed the denunciations by Soviet hacks. Only Antoni Slonimski, head of the cantankerous Polish Writers' Association, sent Pasternak a congratulatory telegram and, at week's end, was still unrepentant...
...Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Russia's greatest living poet has written Russia's greatest novel since the Revolution...
...Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak...