1958 Russia has a long history of censorship and the persecution of writers – never more so than under the USSR regime. This was the harsh environment in which Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) prosecuted his literary career. By a mixture of cunning, silence (on public matters) and inner exile, Pasternak contrived to produce an enduring masterpiece of Russian literature chronicling the Revolution – this despite the Stalinist purges and the coercion of the Writers’ Union propaganda machine. He was not permitted to collect the Nobel Prize awarded him in 1958 for Dr Zhivago (whose publication in the West had been financed by the CIA). And there was a strong sentiment among diehards in Moscow that he should be expelled for a work so clearly dissident from the party line. In the mild warmth of the so-called ‘thaw’, on this day in 1958, Khrushchev actually offered him the opportunity to leave – without dishonour. Pasternak refused. ‘I am linked to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work … To leave my country would be for me the equivalent of death’, he wrote in a letter to the premier. He died barely a year later. His passing was hardly noticed by the Soviet-controlled press, but thousands attended his funeral at Peredelkino. Over his grave the poet Andrey Voznesensky defiantly recited Pasternak’s banned poem, ‘Hamlet’:
But the order of the acts is planned,
The end of the road already revealed.
Alone among the Pharisees I stand.
Life is not a stroll across a field.