Under a white birch tree near a brook sat a young man writing poetry. Occasionally, when the words on paper somehow refused to echo the music in his mind, he wept. The place was Molodi, a village 38 miles from Moscow, and the time was the year of peace 1913. The quiet gardens surrounding his parents' summer house, legend had it, had once served as a battlefield for the Czar's Cossacks and Napoleon's retreating French. Near by, graves dotted the ground.
For nearly 50 years, during which most of his country and the world became a graveyard, the poet continued to write—and one of the things that shaped his vision was the contrast between the graves and his youth's calm summer landscape, the eternal tension between life and death. In Doctor Zhivago, one of this century's remarkable novels, Boris Pasternak carried that theme to its climax. With this embattled book he restored to the world the image of what Russia has long been, despite violence, madness and corruption —a preacher to the nations on the text of death and resurrection.
In Stockholm this week Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was to have received one of the world's great literary honors—the Nobel Prize. The elaborate ceremonies, honoring, among others, three Soviet scientists, were bound to be dominated by the man who was not there. According to a terse speech, prepared weeks ago, by Anders Osterling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Boris Pasternak was chosen because of his "important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition. Mr. Pasternak informed us that he does not wish to accept the prize. In view of these circumstances the Academy can only express its regrets."
The Territory of Conscience. In far-off Peredelkino, in his fir-and birch-engirdled, two-story dacha 15 miles southwest of Moscow, Boris Pasternak was mute but not inglorious. Against the sky he could see silhouetted the blue, oniontop cupolas of the village Orthodox Church, symbol of the Christian faith that enables his hero, Dr. Yurii Zhivago, to endure the torment, humiliations, sins and tragedy of war and revolution. On the walls of his study glow the illustrations that his artist-father drew for Resurrection by the great Tolstoy, whom Boris Pasternak has called "the territory of conscience." On that territory he consecrated Doctor Zhivago.
"I had to write this book," he said weeks ago, before the Kremlin clamped down. "These 40 years of storm were calling for an incarnation." In his token submission to Nikita Khrushchev and Pravda (TIME, Nov. 10-17), Pasternak recanted not a line of his book, expressed not a moment's regret that it has been published outside Russia. To a German reporter who saw him for a few moments after the Nobel announcement and the resulting political storm, Pasternak said: "I am sorry, I didn't want this to happen, all this noise . . . But I am glad I wrote this book." Months ago Pasternak had told friends: "Stockholm will never happen, since my government will never permit such an award to be given to me. This and much else is hard and sad. But it is these fatalities that give life weight and depth and gravity, and make it extraordinary—rapturous, magical, and real."