The Choice

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 shame.

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 air. It is necessary to ask the government that Pasternak be excluded from the forthcoming population census."

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.

The Aroused. Not since Russian troops crushed the Hungarian rebellion had world opinion been so repelled by a Soviet action. In London 14 distinguished writers, ranging across the political spectrum from T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster to Bertrand Russell and J. B. Priestley, wired the Soviet Writers' Union not to dishonor the great Russian literary tradition by "victimizing a writer revered by the entire civilized world." In Paris, Franc,ois Mauriac, Albert Camus and Jules Romains expressed their disgust. The Authors League of America cabled that the U.S. writers most popular in Russia were "those who interpreted life in America most critically." and demanded that Pasternak have the right to express himself with the same "freedom and honesty."

Feeling ran high in Sweden, the home of the Nobel Prizes. Even the Communist newspaper Ny Dag thought that Pasternak should have been allowed to accept the prize. Last week the Nobel Prize for Physics went to three Soviet scientists, and Russia greeted the news with joy. The winners were allowed to accept the prize (see SCIENCE). But the Russian insults to neutral Sweden for rewarding Pasternak had left a sour taste in the mouths of the 15 Nobel judges (among them: U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold). They had honored Pasternak not because he was anti-Communist but because they considered him a great poet.

Wandering Ghosts. In the modest dacha at Peredelkino, craggy, buffeted Boris Pasternak, 68, asked foreign reporters and visitors not to visit or call him any more. He had spent years as an "internal emigre," and he knew the rules of the game. He had defied those rules by sending his manuscript to a Communist publisher in Italy, who rejected Moscow's (and Pasternak's) attempts to call it back. He was obviously pleased by its international reception, because Doctor Zhivago has not been published in Russia. Now he could listen to Moscow radio's unbridled denunciations, urging him to leave Russia, promising that "no obstacles would be put in his way."

The Choice was a bitter one: he could stay as a "stateless person," of whom thousands wander Russia like ghosts, or he could leave his roots and his homeland for the West. It was a choice Boris Pasternak had made once before, in 1923, when his father, Painter Leonid Pasternak, had fled the Soviet Union, taking his family with him. After two years in Berlin, Boris Pasternak returned to Moscow, telling friends: "I simply cannot create outside Russia."

Though of Jewish origin, Boris Pasternak long ago became a zealous follower of the Greek Orthodox Church, and shared its deep, mystical identity with Russia and its stress on suffering and martyrdom. At week's end he made his answer in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev--who has, officially, not said a word about the Pasternak case. Wrote Pasternak: "I am bound to Russia by birth, life and work. I cannot imagine my fate apart from Russia and outside her. Whatever my mistakes and errors have been, I could not imagine that I would find myself in the center of a political campaign such as has been blown up around my name in the West . . . To go beyond the frontiers of my motherland is to me equal to death, and I am therefore asking that this extreme measure should not be taken. With my hand on my heart, I have done something for Soviet literature, and I may still be useful to it."

Whatever Nikita Khrushchev decides, the affair Pasternak would go down in history as a major cultural blunder, undoing much of the good will built up by gifted fiddlers and agile folk dancers. A system presumably so adept at propaganda can make a fool of itself when its pride is touched.

*As a reward for translating a collection of Georgian poems into Russian.

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