Dr. Zhivago and Boris Pasternak

 "Leaving the motherland will equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work."

This was the lines by  Pasternak in the letter wrote to Premier Khrushchev declining the Nobel Prize and  responding the demand of communist propagandists that he  leave Soviet Union. He was unable to imagine life away from the land where he was born on Feb. 10, 1890. 

Even before the Bolshevik revolution, he had a place in the high ranks of Soviet poetry. During 1930s he concentrated more in the translation of English classics into Russian.  His translations of “Hamlet," "Henry IV," "Romeo and Juliet," "Anthony and Cleopatra" and "Othello" are considered to be the  quality seldom equaled.

"Doctor Zhivago” the winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, was never published in Soviet Union but was a best seller in the western world. 

‘Yuri Zhivago’ the central character, son of a rich Russian Industrialist is an excellent physician, who studied philosophy and literature, and develops ideas of his own--his main aim being to preserve his own spiritual independence. 

The story tells about the life of five persons through the revolution,  Yury Zhivago, Tonya, Yury’s wife; Lara, a nurse; her soldier husband Pasha (who believed to be dead and later appeared as Commissar Strelnikov), and Misha philosopher and friend to Yury. Another powerful character is ‘Komarovsky’ who represents the opportunistic elements that infiltrate in the process of revolution which eventually will take control of the revolution. 

When revolution came Yuri welcomed it sharing the dream of the universal justice. But when the Comrades started to tell him how to live and how to think, he rebels and left Moscow for a tiny village beyond the Urals Mountains.  Here the main romantic theme develops.  Finally Yuri returns to Moscow, as a broken Man to die in the street of a heart attack. 

The story goes on through the Bolshevik revolution, Second World War and the agony of human beings.  Through Yury’s love for Lara, Pasternak brilliantly portrays a loving family man utterly torn in two and eventually destroyed by his love for another woman.

On Tuesday, May 31, 1960 Boris Pasternak died in his sleep at his home in Peredelkino, a writers' colony about twenty miles outside of Moscow. He was 70 years old.