Outside of Russia, Boris Pasternak is best known as the author of “DoctorZhivago.” In Russia, he is better known as a poet, literary translator, and pioneer of the Soviet Dissident movement.

With two exceptions, the following quotations are from “Meetings with Pasternak,” by Alexander Gladkov. Gladkov, a Soviet playwright and GULAG survivor, befriended Pasternak when they wrre both evacuated from Moscow during World War II. Their friendship continued, with interruptions, until Pasternak’s death in 1960.

The other quotes were supplied from Olga Ivinskaya’s “A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak.” Ivinskaya, a widow with two children, began a relationship with a married Pasternak in 1948. She is best known as the inspiration for Pasternak’s greatest poetry and for the character of Lara in “Doctor Zhivago.”

For a non-Russian audience, Pasternak’s references to Pushkin will need clarification. Alexander Pushkin, a Russian aristocrat of partially Black African descent, is universally acknowledged as Russia’s greatest poet and one of her greatest playwrights and prose stylists. He is also regarded as the quintessential Russian. This is Pasternak’s reason for using Pushkin to argue against racism.

Holy Week Blessings,

Brendan

Page 72. “The salvation of real art from the steady advance of bogus art — much more to be feared than incomprehension or indifference — is not to be found in working harder at it. Art is inconcievable without risk, without spiritual self sacrifice, and without freedom or boldness of the imagination. Real art always comes as a surprise. You cannot foresee the unpredictable, or regulate the unruly…”

Page 73. “In order to exist, evil must masqerade as good. The pretense alone makes it immoral. One may say that rvil always had an inferiotity complex; it does not dare to be frank. Intellectuals of Nietzsche’s kind thought that the chief trouble about evil was just this — its sense of inferiority, its propensity to disguise itself as its opposite. They believed that evil had only to fly its true colors for it to become moral. But evil cannot do this: even the Nazis have to dress up the blackest of their crimes — racism — in various arguments about its benefits to the German people.”

“I have Jewish blood in my veins, but nothing is more alien to me than Jewish nationalism — except perhaps, Great Russian chauvinism. On this issue I’m all for complete Jewish assimilation and personally I only feel at home in Russian culture, with its great range of influences, as did Pushkin…” –February 10, 1942.

Page 78. Next… we talked about Stalin and the question which so preoccupied people in the Thirties and Forties: did Stalin himself know all about the crimes of his repressive regime? …After a brief pause for thought Pasternak said: “If he knows nothing, then that is also a crime — perhaps the greatest of which a leader can be guilty.”

He went on to speak of Stalin as, “a giant of the Pre-Christian era of human history.” I asked whether he had perhaps meant to say, “of the Post-Christian era,” but he insisted upon the way he had put it and gave his reasons at great length. But I did not put any of this down.– February 20, 1942.

Page 90. “In our days political denunciation is not so much an activity as a whole philosophy…”

“The number of amoral, cruel, vicious ideas which came in under the cloak of the great word Revolution!”

Page 134. “History is life’s answer to the challenge of death — it is the conquest of death with the help of memory and time. History is naturally a product of the Christian era. Before it, there were only myths, which are anti-historical by their very nature. The prime feature of the Christian era is that it fixed historical events in time. Myths are outside time…”

“I am not in the least worried by this talk of Anti-Semitism which sometimes seems to start up quite suddenly… The theory of race is quite specious and is needed only to justify odious practice. Try to explain the Mulatto Pushkin from a racist or extreme nationalist viewpoint!” –1947.

Page 138. “I like the Russian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century and that of the second half of the twentieth.” –1947.

Page 145. At the end of the summer of 1954, among the first of the great wave of ‘rehabilitated prisoners let out of the camps, I returned to Moscow after an absence of six years. And before long at the same writer’s savings bank in Lavrushinski Street where we first met, I saw Pasternak again. As I went in he was filling out a check at the counter. When I spoke to him, he turned round, looked closely at me, recognized me, and embraced me warmly….We went out together…. The one volume edition of his poems, which he had given me during the war with such a kind dedication, had been sent out to me in the camps from home, and I had kept it by me throughout my years of imprisonment. I had usually got up earlier than everyone else in the barracks in order to read it in the mornings, and if someone ever prevented me from doing so, I always felt as though. I had not washed. “Oh, if only I had known this then, in those black years!” he said. “Life would have been so much more bearable just to think that I was ‘out there’ too…”

All subsequent quotes are from Olga Ivinskaya and were spoken under Nikita Khrushchev.

Page 142. 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.

Page 323. “I can’t hear very well. And there’s a mist in front of my eyes. But it will go away, won’t it? Don’t forget to open the window tomorrow.” –Last words, May 30, 1960.