He turned it down, but the only thing I found after a quick Google search was that it was done “under pressure.”
What was the deal?
The simple answer is, Pasternak was a Russian patriot. He loved Russia, in spite of all he saw wrong with it, and didn’t want to live anywhere else.
Soviet authorities told him, essentially, “Sure, go ahead and collect your Nobel Prize- but don’t expect us to welcome you with open arms when you try to come home with it.”
Faced with the prospect of being exiled from his homeland forever, Pasternak chose to refuse the prize.
To clarify: Pasternak feared he wouldn’t be allowed to return to Russia, if he left to claim his prize.
This didn’t make sense to many Western anti-communists, who assumed an intellectual dissident would WANT to get out of Russia. But in reality, many of the Soviet Union’s most outspoken dissidents were rabid Russian nationalists who didn’t want to leave. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of Russia. He hated living in the U.S.A., and returned to Russia immediately, after the fall of communism.
Alex “Gulag Archipelago” Solzhenitsyn? Alex “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” Solzhenitsyn? I’d think if anyone would need to leave the USSR to write his best work, it would have been him. Odd.
By the way, what did the Soviets have against the Nobel Prize? Was it more related to why Pasternak was winning?
Because they had banned Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak’s nomination was widely interpreted (rightly or wrongly) as an attempt to embarass them.
That’s nationalism for ya. Not easy to understand to many of us in the more (small-l) liberal cultures in the West, where individual freedom is key and there is a tradition of self-imposed exiles of conscience and of intellectuals claiming to form a borderless “republic of letters”. Besides, what would guarantee them that once they left, Soviet agents would leave them alone?
Once in the West A.S. almost immediately started slamming western secular society for being spiritually and morally bankrupt, materalistic and hedonistic. Today he is an anti-globalist who decries pernicious “humanist” values as bringing about the fall of “Christian” civilization.
Is Solzhenitsyn still a member of the Duma? I seem to remember him getting elected back in the early 90s.
Could it just be that they don’t want to leave the only place they’ve really ever known, or just don’t want to leave home? I mean, yes, the USSR was a hideous regime, but Russia was still their home.
A.S. was always against communism, but it does not mean that he was ever facinated by Western civilization. In his political views he has been much closer to monarchy than to any of the western democratic values…
In regards to Pasternak I think one should not underestimate the consiqunces he and his family and friends might have suffered if he accepted the prize.