От Кибирова до Пушкина

25 Wellington Square

Oxford

Telephone 55245

27th February, 1958

Gentelmen,

You have done me the honour of inviting me to nominate a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature for the year 1958.

I have, accordingly, much pleasure in nominating for this Prize BORIS LEONIDOVICH PASTERNAK.

My grounds for this nomination are the following:

1. For the past twenty five years Mr Pasternak has been widely recognized as Russia’s greatest living poet. His volumes of verse, Sestra moya zhizn’ (mainly written in 1917 and published in 1922), Temy i var’yatsii (1923), Vtoroe rozhdenie (1932), and Zemnoy prostor (1945) are works of highest literary quality. Published in the Soviet Union, where Mr Pasternak, who was born in Moscow in 1890, has lived the whole of his adult life, they have exerted a deep influence, poetic and human, upon men of letters and the reading public in his native land. Outside Russia too, Mr Pasternak’s poetic work has been universally acknowledged as a significant landmark in the history of European poetry. In Britain, for example, his importance as one of the greatest of contemporary poets has been emphasized by such distinguished authorities on European literature as D. S. Mirsky (A History of Russian Literature, London, 1949, pp. 501–503), Sir Maurice Bowra (The Creative Experiment, London 1949, pp. 128–158), and Professor C. L. Wrenn (Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol. II, 1951, pp. 82–97).

2. Mr Pasternak has, moreover, acquired a well deserved reputation of being one of the most successful translators of our times. His translations into Russian include works by Goethe, Verlaine, Byron, Keats, and Petöfi. But it is above all as a translator of Shakespeare that he has excelled. His Russian versions of Hamlet (published in 1940), Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and both parts of Henry IV (to be found in the two volumes edited by M. Morozov: William Shakespeare v perevode Borisa Pastemaka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1949) are rapidly becoming classics, and have received high praise from English critics (see, in particular, the article by Prof. C. L. Wrenn, cited above).

3. Since 1945 Mr Pasternak was known to be working on a novel; this he completed in 1952–53: the result was a work of some 800 pages, entitled Doktor Zhivago. It is known that he regards this book as his most important work, and thinks of it, in his modesty, as a justification (as if such were needed) of his literary career. So far it has proved impossible to publish this work in the Soviet Union; however, at Mr Pasternak’s request, Doktor Zhivago was published in November, 1957, in an Italian translation, by Feltrinelli in Milan. Five editions of this Italian version have already appeared, and an English, a French, and a German translation of the novel are expected to come out this year. The world-wide interest which Doktor Zhivago has aroused is due, in my opinion, in large part to the qualities of the author’s prose (which is in the great tradition of the Russian nineteenth century novel), to the deep sincerity and truthfulness with which he has described life in Russia during the crucial and dramatic years 1900–1929 (the book has an epilogue concerned with the period of the Second World War)(, and to the human and spiritual values to which this novel bears an eloquent and moving testimony. The last section of the book contains twenty-five poems (ten of which were published in the Soviet literary journal Znamya, vol. 4, 1954, pp. 92–95): several of them bear witness to the author’s Christian beliefs, and deserve, in my opinion, to be numbered among the finest works of religious poetry.

Dimitry Obolensky