Point Counterpoint: Zhivago and Its Critics

For over three decades the words Doctor Zhivago signified not only a novel written by Boris Pasternak, but also the "Pasternak Affair," a shameful matter that had little to do with Pasternak's novel and a great deal to do with cultural politics Soviet-style. On October 23, 1958, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to Boris Pasternak for Doctor Zhivago. Western readers had barely had a chance to read the novel, published in Italy a year earlier; Soviet readers were not to have that opportunity for thirty years more. "Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed," in the words of his cable to Sweden, Pasternak accepted the prize,1 and the "Pasternak Affair" exploded. Beginning that very day, and throughout the days that followed, Pasternak was the target of an attack unprecedented in the post-Stalin Soviet Union for its ferocity and venom. This man, a recognized luminary of Russian literature virtually since the publication of his earliest poems in 1913, was branded a "liter...