Boris Pasternak
Poet and author of Doctor Zhivago; a Nobel Prize he was forced to renounce
He accepted the Nobel Prize in literature for 1958—and on 29 October of that year renounced it under state pressure.
His is the most awkward case on this list, and it must be stated plainly. Of his infant baptism we know only from him—from a 1959 letter to Jacqueline de Proyart, in which he says his nurse baptised him in secret; there is no parish record, no witness, no family confirmation, and the family was non-religious but not Christian. It can be printed only in that form: on his own late testimony.
His adult religiosity is documented: he attended Russian Orthodox services, Doctor Zhivago is full of Christian thought, and into Gordon's mouth in the novel he put a direct call for the Jews to dissolve themselves into Christianity. When he was told that Israeli readers had been offended, he answered: "No matter. I am above race." Those are his words, and he stands on the Jewish side of this reference with them, not without them.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The letter to J. de Proyart, 1959; Doctor Zhivago, the Gordon chapter — the only testimony to the baptism is his own; “I am above race”
Basis: documents and evidence.