Doctor Zhivago (88 page)

25.
The Garden of Gethsemane
See Matthew 26:36–46, Mark 14:32–42, Luke 22:39–48.

Boris Pasternak, poet, translator, and novelist, was born in Moscow in 1890. The son of the celebrated painter Leonid Pasternak and the concert pianist Rosa Kaufman, Pasternak was greatly influenced by the composer Alexander Scriabin and by Leo Tolstoy, both family friends. Pasternak was quickly recognized as one of the major poets of the post-revolutionary period, but during the purges of the 1930s, he came under severe critical attack and, unable to publish his own poetry, devoted himself to translating classic works by Goethe, Shakespeare, and others. After the war, Pasternak began writing
Doctor Zhivago
, his masterpiece in the great tradition of the Russian epic. The life of the physician and poet Yuri Zhivago, like Pasternak’s own, is closely identified with the upheavals of twentieth-century Russia, but the novel’s forthright portrayal of those events contradicted the official view of them, and it was denied publication. Despite serious efforts to repress it, the novel was first published in Italy in 1957 and soon became the object of international acclaim, spending twenty-six weeks at the top of
The New York Times
best-seller list. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but, facing threats from Soviet authorities, refused the prize. He died a year and a half later, on May 31, 1960.

Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Gogol. They were twice awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for their version of Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
and for Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
), and their translation of Dostoevsky’s
Demons
was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France, where Pevear is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris.