От Кибирова до Пушкина

Harvard University

Renato Poggioli

Department of Comparative Literature

15 Holyoke House

Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

20 January, 1958

To the Nobel Committee

of the Swedish Aсademy:

Börshuset

Stockholm 6, Sweden

I hereby nominate the Russian writer BORIS PASTERNAK, born in 1890 in Moscow, and still living there, for the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Boris Pasternak has distinguished himself with at least three great collections of verse: My Sister, Life (1922); Themes and Variations (1923); and The Second Birth (1932). They reveal a lyrical voice as powerful as those of Yeats, Valéry, and Rilke. He is certainly the greatest poet to appear in Russia since Alexander Blok.

His main collections of tales and memoirs, The Childhood of Lüvers (1925) and The Safe-Conduct (1931) (the latter never reprinted in Soviet Russia), reveal him also as a master of prose of European stature.

During the last few years he has written a vast novel, Doctor Zhivago, now available only in Italian translation (Milan, 1958). This novel, patterned after Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is certainly the greatest work of fiction ever written in Soviet Russia, where it will be probably fail to appear.

Besides this, Pasternak is the author of the best Shakespearean translations into the Russian language (Hamlet; Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra).

I strongly believe that there are now very few international figures which can compete with this candidate. If I had to nominate a few alternatives, I should however like to mention the following names: Ignazio Silone and Alberto Moravia (Italian novelists); Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italian poet); St.-J. Perse (Aléxis Léger, French poet); Jorge Guillén (Spanish poet); Robert Frost (American poet); Vladimir Nabokov (Russian-American novelist).

Renato Poggioli

Professor of Slavic

and of Comparative Literature

Перевод: