Pasternak Was Forced to Refuse the Nobel
Quick answer: Boris Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel for Doctor Zhivago and was forced to refuse it within a week. The story of the smuggled novel and what it cost him.
On 23 October 1958, Boris Pasternak learned he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and sent Stockholm a telegram of almost boyish happiness: immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed. Six days later he sent a second telegram refusing the prize. In between lay one of the ugliest public campaigns ever aimed at a writer by his own country: denunciations in Pravda, expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers, orchestrated meetings demanding his exile, and a Komsomol chief's widely reported jibe that even a pig does not soil the place where it eats.
The offence was a novel. Doctor Zhivago, the book Pasternak considered his life's justification, could not be published in the Soviet Union, had escaped abroad in a briefcase, and had made its author world famous at the precise moment his own country decided to make him an outcast. He was sixty eight years old, and he had roughly nineteen months left to live.
The novel no Soviet journal would print
Pasternak had been a major Russian poet for four decades, celebrated since the early 1920s, and had survived the Stalin years partly by withdrawing into translation; his Russian versions of Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust became standard. Through the war years and after, he worked on the book he thought of as his real testament: a novel following the physician and poet Yuri Zhivago through revolution and civil war, ending with a cycle of Zhivago's poems. It was not an anti Soviet pamphlet. It was worse, from an official standpoint: a book that treated the revolution as weather rather than salvation, and one man's inner life as the thing that mattered.
He finished it in 1955 and submitted it to the journal Novy Mir. In September 1956 the editors rejected it with a long letter explaining, in effect, that the novel's spirit was one of non acceptance of the socialist revolution. Publication at home was dead, and Pasternak knew it.
A manuscript walks out of the country
In May 1956, before the formal rejection had even arrived, Pasternak handed a typescript to Sergio D'Angelo, an Italian who worked at Radio Moscow and scouted books for the Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. By D'Angelo's account, Pasternak saw him off with a remark that he was hereby invited to watch him face the firing squad; the line is widely reported from D'Angelo's own telling. Pasternak understood the stakes and handed the briefcase over anyway.
Soviet officials spent the next year pressuring author and publisher to stop the book. Feltrinelli, a millionaire communist with a stubborn streak, published the Italian translation in Milan in November 1957. Translations followed across Europe and America, and the novel became an international sensation. A Russian language edition also appeared abroad, and decades later, when intelligence archives were opened in 2014, it was confirmed that the CIA had quietly helped print and circulate Russian copies. The book had become a front in the cold war whether its author wanted that or not.
Eight days in October
The Nobel announcement cited Pasternak's achievement in both lyric poetry and the tradition of the great Russian epic. At home, the machinery engaged within hours. Pravda ran attacks calling the prize a political provocation and the novel a slander. On 27 October the Union of Soviet Writers expelled him, stripping him of his professional standing. Meetings were convened at which writers, some of them his friends, voted for resolutions demanding he be deprived of citizenship and sent abroad. Vladimir Semichastny, head of the Komsomol, delivered the pig insult to a full hall with Khrushchev in attendance.
Exile was the threat that broke him, along with fear for those around him, particularly Olga Ivinskaya, his companion and the widely acknowledged model for Zhivago's Lara, who had already served a camp sentence in the early 1950s because of her closeness to him. On 29 October Pasternak wired Stockholm that, in view of the meaning given to the award by the society he lived in, he must refuse it. Days later he wrote to Khrushchev directly, pleading that leaving Russia would for him be equal to death. He was permitted to stay. He was not permitted to be forgiven.
The cost of staying
Pasternak lived out his remaining time at his house in the writers' village of Peredelkino outside Moscow, cut off from publication, supported by translation work and by the loyalty of friends. In early 1959 he gave a short poem called The Nobel Prize to a Western correspondent; its publication abroad brought him an interrogation and a warning of treason charges. The pressure never really lifted.
He died of lung cancer on 30 May 1960. The state kept the funeral announcement minimal, but word spread by hand and mouth, and thousands came to Peredelkino to carry and follow the coffin while his poems were recited over the grave. The crowd itself was the review the state had tried to prevent. After his death the campaign found one more target: Ivinskaya was arrested that August and sent to a camp again, along with her daughter, on currency charges connected to royalties.
Vindication he never saw
Every part of the verdict was eventually reversed. In 1988, under glasnost, Novy Mir, the same journal that had rejected the novel three decades earlier, serialized Doctor Zhivago for Soviet readers at last. In 1989 Pasternak's son Yevgeny travelled to Stockholm and received his father's Nobel medal in a ceremony the laureate had been denied by thirty one years.
The writers' union expulsion was posthumously rescinded, the novel entered the Russian school curriculum, and Peredelkino became a museum. It is a clean ending, and worth stating plainly: Pasternak saw none of it. What he got was the writing of the book, the knowledge that it existed in the world, and the choice, made under duress but made, to stay in the country and the language that made him.
What a working writer can take from it
One thread here is about the long book behind the visible career. Pasternak was a famous poet who spent his last two decades on a novel many colleagues considered a mistake, in a form he was not known for, with no plausible path to publication. He did it because it was the work he believed he owed. Most writers carry some version of that project, the one that fits no current market. Pasternak's example does not promise such work will be rewarded. It shows that such work can be finished, and that finishing it can matter more to the writer than the reward that is later withheld.
The other thread is about separating the work from the verdict. Within a single week the same book brought Pasternak the world's highest literary honour and his own country's fullest contempt. Neither changed a sentence of the novel. Prizes, rejections and scores are information about reception, not about the text, and a writer who internalizes that distinction becomes very hard to destroy. Practise on small stakes: send poems out steadily and read the responses as weather. Writory's contest returns a score to every single entrant each month partly for this reason, so the habit of being read and rated becomes ordinary rather than terrifying.
What poets can take from this
- Keep one project alive that answers to your conscience rather than the market, and give it regular hours.
- Separate verdicts from text: a prize or a rejection changes a poem's reception, never its sentences.
- Finish the long work before deciding its fate; Pasternak completed Zhivago with no route to publication in sight.
- Protect the people around your writing life, and be honest with yourself about the costs your choices impose on them.
- Read the Zhivago poems at the end of the novel as a masterclass in giving a fictional poet real poems.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the voice of someone giving back a prize, a medal, a trophy, a title, and telling the truth about why. Let the reader feel what the refusal costs, without the speaker ever saying the word 'sorry'.
Questions
Why did Pasternak refuse the Nobel Prize?
He did not want to. He first accepted with delight on 23 October 1958, then faced a state campaign: expulsion from the writers' union, press denunciations and credible threats of permanent exile, plus danger to people close to him. On 29 October he sent a second telegram refusing the prize, and wrote to Khrushchev that leaving Russia would for him equal death.
Why was Doctor Zhivago banned in the USSR?
The journal Novy Mir rejected it in 1956 on the grounds that the novel's spirit amounted to non acceptance of the socialist revolution. It reached the West through Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1957 and was only published in the Soviet Union in 1988, during glasnost.
Did Pasternak's family ever receive the Nobel medal?
Yes. His son Yevgeny Pasternak accepted the medal in Stockholm in 1989, twenty nine years after the writer's death. By then Doctor Zhivago had finally been published in his homeland.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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