Talk:Boris Pasternak

Nobel Prize
Did Pasternak merely "decline to accept it", or was he prevented by the Soviet authorities from doing so? I always understood the latter was the case. JackofOz 00:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * He declined to accept because Khruschev's campaign at his systematic persecution implied that, once departing for Stockholm, he would be stripped of Soviet citizenship and would never be allowed to return home. Pasternak was old and, knowing that his end was near, chose to die in Russia rather then accept the prize and end his days abroad. --Ghirla | talk 01:08, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Ghirla. Doesn't this need some reference in the article?  From what you say, discretion was the better part of valour, but if political circumstances had been different, there would have been no reason for Pasternak to decline the award.  He may have declined to accept it, but only in the face of undesirable consequences if he had done so.  JackofOz 02:07, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's exactly how I and other people in Russia interprete his reclusion. I'm not a native speaker, so I trust you would articulate the passage better than myself. --Ghirla | talk 08:07, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I've made some changes to the article using your information.  JackofOz 09:00, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * UYGHTFREGRFTEVDCGFDVRFGDCGDFCX 50.5.60.185 (talk) 16:39, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Conversion of Pasternak's Father
This is mentioned as having a profound effect on Pasternak but the date of his father's conversion or Boris' age at the time of his father's conversion is not mentioned here, or in the WP article on Leonid. It would seem that the date of this occurence ought to be mentioned. Hi There 22:38, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Pasternak's father, Leonid Pasternak, did not convert in his lifetime. He himself states this in his reply to the famous article by Bialik (reprinted in almanac "Год за годом", Moscow, 1989). Documents on Boris Pasternak's circumcision in Jewish tradition and on his and his parents belonging to the Jewish faith (иудейское вероисповедание) at the time of his admission to Moscow University have been published more than a decade ago (originally in collection of documents "Лица" cf see details here, in Russian), then in two detailed biographies of Boris Pasternak (by Natalia Ivanova and by Dmitry Bykov). Letter by Boris Pasternak to his father from Marburg (1912), where he discusses the very impossibility of conversion from Jewish faith is widely known see here again, in Russian. --SimulacrumDP 16:30, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

This would seem to be in conflict with plenty of secondary sources available in English (a quick search turns up http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/sforres1/alum-readings/2003/past.html, as well as a few encyclopedia entries). Obviously, these English-language sources may be simply unreliable, and we may be able to ascertain this; however, there is a conflict here that has to be resolved.

At the end, this may be far from a black-and-white issue, but that is a different matter than verifiability. Feketekave (talk) 21:49, 1 October 2008 (UTC)


 * After seeing this argument, I conclude that SimulacrumDP is probably right. If he (or she) is saying that Boris Pasternak was raised as a Jew (Judaist), at least up until the time that BP was admitted into Moscow University, then the idea that his father converted to Christianity is inaccurate.  And I believe this, as after Boris Pasternak's birth, Leonid continued to paint Russian Jews (famous ones, of course).  At least from the time of Alexander I or Alexander II, I believe that practicing Jews were allowed to live in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.  I'm very curious if there's any documentation of LP's supposed conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, or of BP's supposed baptism into the Russian Orthodox Church.  If anyone wishes to find them, I bid them lots of good luck. Marcus2 (talk) 22:34, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I am completely at a loss as to how the fact that Pasternak's father did not ask for Aryan certificates from his portrait subjects has anything to do with the matter. It would also be interesting to see any solid evidence for what religion, if any, was practiced at Pasternak's childhood home. Feketekave (talk) 21:05, 27 October 2008 (UTC)


 * SimulacrumDP might have some solid evidence, but unfortunately, the user is inactive! Marcus2 (talk) 23:21, 13 November 2008 (UTC)


 * At least one of Pasternak's biographers also states that his father, Leonid Pasternak, never converted:


 * "Leonid Pasternak retained sufficient independence to reject conversion to Christianity, even though this could easily have been arranged and seemed likely to assist his career. In practice, however, his Jewish affiliations proved no obstacle to his appointment in 1894, to the teaching staff of Moscow's School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture." Source: Pasternak: A Biography by Ronald Hingley, Knopf (1983) pg 14


 * Another reference to the family's religion can be found in "Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion," by Edith W. Clowes Northwestern Press (1995) pg 31:


 * "Likewise Pasternak, who was himself Jewish, was very conscious of the effects of Jewishness in his and his family's life. For example, in 1891, Jewish tradespeople were removed from Moscow. Pasternak's father did not have to go because he had a University degree and held the title of 'honorary citizen' (E. Paternak, 'Boris Pasternak', 20). In 1906...Pasternak and his family left Moscow for a time because, as his father Leonid Pasternak put it 'the Cossacks were having a feast,' reaction had set in, and Jews were easy targets (E. Paternak, 'Boris Pasternak', 88)."


 * And Edith Clowes source for this information was Boris Pasternak: materialy dli'a biografii, by E. B. Pasternak (Boris Pasternak's son), Moskva: Sovetskiĭ pisatel (1989). DOhistorybuff (talk) 19:25, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Birthdate
There is one confusion here: It's right that he was born Jan 29 (old style), i.e. Feb 10 (Gregorian). Avia 08:02, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (January 29 1890...


 * It's now been fixed. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  23:37, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Contradicts entry on Doctor Zhivago regarding publication date in Russia
This entry and the one specifically on Doctor Zhivago offer conflicting dates for the eventual publication of the book in Russia. They differ by a year. Anyone know? Fitzhugh 05:42, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * It was published in Novy Mir magazine starting from the January 1988, the announcement of intended publications were made in 1987 and, naturally, the censorship agreement was obtained in 1987, thus, the confusion. I have changed the date to 1988 Alex Bakharev 01:29, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Best English translation of Zhivago?
Any recommendations? The Harvill one I've got is awful. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.98.144.27 (talk) 23:19, 27 April 2007 (UTC).

Vandalism
Someone has vandalized this page recently. They replaced Russian/Soviet with France. I made some corrections but one France remains and I am not sure if it is correct or not. Help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.231.71.63 (talk) 01:56, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Obviously, not. Fixed Alex Bakharev (talk) 04:28, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Leon Pasternak
Do we really need the phrase:
 * His cousin, Polish poet Leon Pasternak was not so lucky. As a result of his political activities in Poland — writing satirical verses for socialist revolutionary periodicals - he was imprisoned in 1934 in the Bereza Kartuska detention camp.

Was the fate of his cousin so important for Boris Paternak? Alex Bakharev (talk) 04:28, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Legacy Section
1. The word Pasternak in Russian meaning parsnip has nothing to do with Boris Pasternak.

2. I believe that Pasternak had a more important legacy than a verse of his being used in some song and an asteroid being named after him. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.163.66.166 (talk) 21:05, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Copyright problem
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Ethnicity
Under ethnicity it says russian, which is a nationality. Should this not be changed to either represent his ethnicity or change the title ethnicity to nationality? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.95.114.167 (talk) 14:46, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * ethnicity IS nationality - you are confusing this with CITIZENSHIP, which is the political side of a person HammerFilmFan (talk) 19:55, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Pasternak's Ethnicity was Jewish not Russian he was not an ethnic Russian. Jewish was regarded as an ethnicity in the Soviet Union. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kingathelstan (talk • contribs) 01:05, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

List of works
OK, where is it? --Gergyl (talk) 22:44, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Quotes
The article is getting well referenced and becoming, I think, a really useful resource. I am concerned about the level of quotation used, especially from the Ivinskaya biography. She does offer a unique perspective, however Wikipedia doesn't like to rely on primary sources (see WP:PRIMARY). The article is a bit of a quotefarm; the biography is still under copyright. The guidelines say While quotations are an indispensable part of Wikipedia, try not to overuse them. Long quotations crowd the actual article and remove attention from other information. Many direct quotations can be minimized in length by providing an appropriate context in the surrounding text. A summary or paraphrase of a quotation is often better where the original wording could be improved. Consider minimizing the length of a quotation by paraphrasing, by working smaller portions of quotation into the article text, or both. (It's a long quote). Most of the quotes can be successfully paraphrased, while keeping the reference, helping to improve the article even more. Best wishes Span (talk) 20:43, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Marriage
When did this guy get married? And who was his wife? Should be mentioned somewhere in the article, unless I missed it. Clickclickdecker (talk) 17:41, 31 December 2011 (UTC)


 * His wife Zinaida Pasternak is mentioned but not their meeting or wedding, that I can see. It would be good to add. Span (talk) 19:32, 31 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I've inserted minimal info about Pasternak's two wives. HuPi (talk) 23:15, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There should also be basic data about his children; the article has odd gaps.Parkwells (talk) 14:59, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Safe Conduct
Is an autobiography, not a collection. The collection in mind is probably My Sister-Life, written in 1917, published in 1922. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.85.48.190 (talk) 08:39, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

My Sister, Life
The title of Pasternak's cycle of love poems is rendered variously (e.g., here) as 'Sister my life', 'My Sister, Life', 'My Sister --Life', 'My Sister-Life' and other variants, several of which occurred in the WP article before my copyedit. My reading is that 'Sister' and 'Life' are intended to be in apposition—not hyphenated nor separated by an em rule, as suggested by the layout of some printed covers. For this reason, in adopting a consistent style, I have opted for the simple and unambiguous comma, which also looks tidiest in the infobox and other contexts. Cheers, Bjenks (talk) 09:26, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

Animal Farm
In the Khrushchev thaw section, the original quote from the Ivinskaya biography (1978, p142) was: "'At this period, [Boris Leonidovich] was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm in the English original and he hugely enjoyed this merciless satire about a society of animals which mutiny against their human masters, and then gradually revert to a wretched caricature of their original condition. The animals were presided over by a fat hog who vividly reminded [Boris Leonidovich] of our head of state. Sometimes he said laughingly that Khrushchev put his collar around the wrong part of his anatomy.'"

This was paraphrased in the article as


 * "During this period Pasternak was reading a clandestine copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm in English. He relished the caricature of Nikita Khrushchev as the swine dictator Napoleon."

which is a different thing. Ivinskaya isn't saying that Napolean was based on Khrushchev, but that Napolean reminded Pasternak of Khrushchev. The point is that Pasternak was reading and appreciating Animal Farm. I have edited to that effect. Large chunks of the article consisted of direct quotes from the biography; (this is still the case). Span (talk) 21:35, 23 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Nice catch! Thanks for looking into it, too. I only reverted the initial edit because it looked slightly OR-y to me. Now that you've checked the source and confirmed, it appears to be good for the article. Evanh2008 (talk) (contribs) 21:38, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

"independent minded stance on the socialist state" Clarify this  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 8.225.200.133 (talk) 23:56, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Some problems
A lot of good work here, but ...
 * 1) Boris_Pasternak. This should be about legacy of Pasternak, not about legacy of Olga Ivinskaya (first two paragraphs).
 * 2) Too much about Stalin's epigram (although should be noted). It was important for Mandelshtam and Akhamatova. Pasternak did not talk with Stalin about epigram, but about Mandelshtam.
 * 3) Introduction. It tells: "Furthermore, tactics pioneered by Pasternak were later continued, expanded, and refined by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet dissidents." What tactics? What? Did he want to damage "international credibility of the U.S.S.R."? Was his persecution his "tactics"?
 * 4) "My Sister, Life ... decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetayeva". ??? Where that comes from?
 * 5) Too much about Olga Ivinskaya in this article, something should be moved to her article.
 * 6) This English translation of his "Hamlet" is terrible (I saw better).

There is an interesting biography of Pasternak by Dmitri Bykov. Here is one interesting observation about persecution of Pasternak from the literature: Soviet authorities wanted this Nobel prize to be given to Mikhail Sholokhov, however his And Quiet Flows the Don (approved by Stalin) was significantly more "anti-Soviet" than Doctor Zhivago (novel) (disapproved by Khrushev)... This is true. My very best wishes (talk) 05:41, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Needs more secondary sources
This article relies too much on Ivinskaya's memoir of Pasternak and his own writings, essentially a primary sources. There are many excellent academic books on Pasternak which should be used to strengthen the facts and interpretation.Parkwells (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

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Early Education
The early education section within the Early life section carries a very biased tone. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A03F:1614:2A00:C016:1EA:B11A:4677 (talk) 09:43, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

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Citation style
Dear fellow editors, I am leaving the present message out of courtesy to other editors interested in, or watching, the present article. I have noticed that its sources are referenced using various citation styles, some using citation templates (cite book, cite web, cite news, etc.), while others use basic ref tags coded with bare, pseudo-Harvard-style references. I would therefore like to volunteer my services and propose to adopt a consistent approach to coding all citations as follows: Here is an article that illustrates the application of this approach. Here is another example of a different approach I have personally adopted in the past, but wouldn't propose to use here. Since this kind of work often requires a series of long editing sessions, I always deploy both the In use and Under construction templates while I am busy applying these changes, thus ensuring that edit conflicts can be avoided. Please would interested editors let me know their views on this proposal? If I haven't heard back within one week, then I'll go ahead and begin to apply a consistent citation style, as I believe it will benefit this article in the long term, should it ever be submitted to a peer review towards achieving A-class or even Featured Article status. Thank you. With kind regards; Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(become old-fashioned!) 15:36, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
 * 1) use citation templates throughout the article, as done currently for cite web and cite news;
 * 2) for all book citations, maintain the current approach of using Harvard-style citations, but change them by coding cite book templates in the Sources section, with corresponding sfn templates in the body of the article's prose, to link back to those books listed in the Sources section.

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Wikipedia:Neutral point of view about CIA role in Pasternak's winning of the Nobel Prize
For section the Nobel Prize about CIA role in the Pasternak's winning of the Nobel. There is opposite opinion said in Washington Post by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée (During Cold War, CIA used ‘Doctor Zhivago’ as a tool to undermine Soviet Union April 5, 2014): "While the CIA hoped Pasternak’s novel would draw global attention, including from the Swedish Academy, there was no indication that the agency’s motive for printing a Russian-language edition was to help Pasternak win the prize, something that has been a matter of speculation for some decades."

So, there may need probably some clear-up (if there is no exact citations) for wording like
 * "...a massive propaganda campaign to influence the Nobel Prize committee to consider Zhivago for the award" -- as said above (Finn, P. Couvée, P.), there was no indication that the agency’s motive for printing a Russian-language edition was to help Pasternak win the prize.


 * "The issue of whether or not the CIA had a hand in creating the international controversy that led to Pasternak's winning the Nobel Prize was definitively settled on 11 April 2014..." -- Nobel Literature Prize is not awarded obviously for "the international controversy".

Also I would ask citation about
 * "In order to turn Pasternak's novel into an international bestseller worthy of consideration for the Nobel Prize, the CIA purchased thousands of copies of the novel as they came off the presses throughout Europe" (Nobel committee does not watch the work is a bestseller or not to consider about Prize obviously, that is why I guess the phrase is probably to have no source or wrong cited.).

While considering the clear-up, bear in mind that Nobel Prize was awarded on October 23, 1958, so all printed books after that date were not connected with the Nobel winning at all (for example, as cited the miniature books, but they were printed by CIA only in 1959, -- this is good story about the CIA activities, but has nothing to do with the 1958 Nobel Prize). PoetVeches (talk) 15:51, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, indeed. Moreover, this is a content fork. This is already included on page Doctor_Zhivago_(novel) where it belongs. On this page this is briefly mentioned in section about the book, which is sufficient. I therefore removed this section from this page. My very best wishes (talk) 02:47, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

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Needs a complete rewrite from scratch
Very difficult to read with excessive quotes and coverage of his personal life. I think it should be completely redrafted and condensed to read like a biography.♦ Dr. Blofeld  07:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)