Free Republic

On this day in 1890, the writer Boris Pasternak was born into an affluent and cultured Russian-Jewish family. His father, Leonid, was a renowned artist and professor at the Moscow School of Painting; his mother Rosa, nee Kaufman, was a concert pianist. His parents’ social circle included notable figures of the day such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leo Tolstoy. The influence of this creative community led the young Pasternak to study first music and then philosophy, both in Russia and abroad. In 1912 he abandoned academia to pursue his true calling: poetry and prose. The outbreak of World War I...

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, pundits offered a variety of reasons for its failure: economic, political, military. Few thought to add a fourth, more elusive cause: the regime’s total loss of credibility. This hard-to-measure process had started in 1956, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave his so-called secret speech to party leaders, in which he denounced Josef Stalin’s purges and officially revealed the existence of the gulag prison system. Not long afterward, Boris Pasternak allowed his suppressed novel “Doctor Zhivago” to be published in the West, tearing another hole in the Iron Curtain. Then, in 1962, the literary magazine...

A secret package arrived at CIA headquarters in January 1958. Inside were two rolls of film from British intelligence — pictures of the pages of a Russian-language novel titled “Doctor Zhivago.” The book, by poet Boris Pasternak, had been banned from publication in the Soviet Union. The British were suggesting that the CIA get copies of the novel behind the Iron Curtain. The idea immediately gained traction in Washington.

Another TCM alert: tonight at 8PM it's airing "Doctor Zhivago". Definitely worth seeing as Hollywood film that actually showed how terrible life was in Soviet Russia. The only thing I don't like about it is its hero cheating on his cute wife with Lara. Otherwise, a truly great film with Rod Steiger stealing the show as the opportunistic lawyer Komarovsky.

A Russian literary expert says the U.S. secret service oversaw the publication in Russian of Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago," paving the way for him to win the world's most coveted literary prize. PRAGUE, December 14, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- In 1958, Boris Pasternak, the great Russian poet and novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for what the Nobel committee described as his "important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition." Best known in the Soviet Union for his poetic verse, it was his "epic" novel "Doctor Zhivago" that gained him...