PASTERNAK LETTERS TELL OF WORK ON 'ZHIVAGO'

Author: Associated Press

Date: Thursday, April 23, 1987
Page: 20
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

The letters, in the current edition of Ogonyok, speak of Pasternak's efforts to present Russian history in the novel and his dislike of the way the finished work was treated by censors.

Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature but fell from favor for political reasons. He died in disgrace in 1960.

Soviet officials say "Doctor Zhivago" will be published for the first time in the Soviet Union next year. The book recounts how the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war disrupted the lives of the main characters and the traditional way of life.

"This novel will be my expression of my views over the arts, over the Gospels, the life of a person in history, and many other things," Pasternak wrote in an October 1946 letter, Ognoyok said.

In July 1946, Pasternak wrote to a cousin, Olga Freydenberg, that he had started a novel that would cover the past 40 years of Russian history.

"This is a very serious work. I am already old. I may die quite soon and I cannot postpone the free expression of my real thoughts until God knows when," he wrote.

In an apparent reference to an ideological campaign against some writers in the postwar years under Josef Stalin, Pasternak wrote of the unhappiness it caused him and his wife.

"At the beginning, all this which happens now did not affect me at all," he said.

"But more often and often, Zina started coming back from the city, all unhappy, suffering and even old, because of the feeling of damaged pride for myself," he said. "And only in this way, unpleasantness, in the shape of my pain for her, found a way to me," he wrote.

"How old this all is, how stupid and how tiresome," he added.

Ognoyok said the novel was completed in the winter of 1955-56. It said the manuscript was sent to Novy Mir (New World) magazine and to the state publishing house for literature.

"But those plans got postponed and then were frustrated because a number of very influential writers spoke out against publication," Ogonyok said.

A savage campaign of political denunciation started. Pasternak was expelled from the national Soviet Writers Union, and the Moscow writers union called for him to be stripped of his citizenship.

"Doctor Zhivago" was published in the West.

Under pressure, Pasternak renounced his Nobel Prize in 1958.

In December 1957, Ogonyok said, Pasternak wrote to Elena Blaginina, a poet who had sent him a letter of support.

"I had some troubles; I was under certain moral pressure. Which was repulsive in its duplicity and I had to submit partially," he wrote.

"I had to take part in an attempt to stop publication of my novel somewhere very far from here, and in a way so unreal, that this attempt was destined to fail," he wrote.

Pasternak wrote that he thought that if the book had actually been published, even in a censored or reduced form, the public stir about it would have quieted.

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