00:00The Nobel Prize
00:13I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled.
00:18Their virtue is lifeless, and it isn't of much value.
00:22Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
00:25Boris Pasternak
00:27The Nobel Prize in Literature, 1958, was awarded to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
00:34for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry
00:39and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.
00:44Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890,
00:49into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage.
00:52Their home was open to family friends, such as composers Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Skrebin,
01:01as well as writers Rilke and Leo Tolstoy.
01:05Pasternak had a happy childhood, being brought up by prominent intellectuals in a cosmopolitan atmosphere.
01:12He studied music at the Moscow Conservatory and philosophy at the University of Marburg, Germany.
01:20In 1914, he published his first collection of poems.
01:24His work at a chemical factory in the Urals during the World War I was later used as material for his novel Dr. Zhivago.
01:33In 1917, he fell in love with a Jewish girl and wrote My Sister Life, a collection of passionate, metaphoric poems
01:43that brought him international recognition and had an impact upon Russian symbolist and futurist poetry.
01:51Pasternak cautiously supported the Russian Revolution, but was shocked with the brutality of communists.
01:58His parents and sisters emigrated to Europe in 1921.
02:03During the Great Terror of 1930s, Pasternak became disillusioned with the Soviet reality.
02:10His translations of Georgian poets, favoured by Joseph Stalin, probably saved his life.
02:16Stalin spoke with Pasternak in 1934 over the phone
02:20and questioned his association with poet Ossip Mendelstam, who was executed upon Stalin's order.
02:30Later, Stalin crossed Pasternak's name off the arrest list, quoted as saying
02:35Don't touch this cloud dweller, alluding to his book The Twin in the Clouds.
02:42During 1940s-1950s, Pasternak wrote his autobiographical novel Dr. Zhivago.
02:49A model for Lara, in the novel, was the poet's muse, beautiful and kind Olga Ivinskaya, an editor of Novemir magazine.
03:00In 1949, when she was pregnant from Pasternak, she was arrested by KGB on false accusations of spying
03:08and spent four years in prison camp.
03:11Their unborn baby was lost, and Pasternak suffered a heart attack.
03:17After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953,
03:20Olga Ivinskaya was released and reunited with Pasternak,
03:25who completed Dr. Zhivago.
03:27He tried to publish it in the Soviet magazine Novemir, but was rejected.
03:32The manuscript was secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was first published in Italy in 1957.
03:40Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958,
03:45but Soviet authorities declared him a traitor and attacked him with a campaign of persecution,
03:52terrorizing Pasternak up until his death in 1960.
03:55He was so abused by the Soviet authorities that he became unable to go to accept the Nobel Prize
04:03and was forced to decline the honor.
04:05He lived his life of fear and insecurity that was imposed upon him and millions of others
04:11under the Soviet totalitarian system.
04:15He ended his life in poverty and a virtual exile in an artist's community of Peridelkino near Moscow.
04:22His last poems are devoted to love, to freedom, to reconciliation with God.
04:29Pasternak was rehabilitated posthumously in 1987.
04:34In 1988, after being banned in the Soviet Union for three decades,
04:39Dr. Zhivago was published in the same Novemir magazine as a sign of changing times.
04:45In 1989, Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel Prize winner in Stockholm.
04:53Pasternak's son withические a lei byателей father,
04:53M Pushkin Bangladesh, Zwellза,
05:01Pasternak's son of ours for ten years.
05:06In 2001, he was received a Lehigh War.
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