Dictionary of Literary Influences

Owens, James Cleveland

George Orwell and other publications of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which strongly influenced his later political allegiances (Osborne 1981, 83–4). In Osborne’s early days working as an actor and fledgling playwright, his agent and his mentors in theater pressed him to study the plays of Arthur Pinero and Terence Rattigan. He did so, but remained skeptical as to whether those writers’ craftsmanship was accompanied by meaningful content. Osborne compared Pinero’s and Rattigan’s plays to “the construction of an artefact like a carriage clock, which revealed its beautiful precision to all, particularly . . . those who were obliged to write and explain its workings to their readers” (Osborne 1981, 196).

Jean Anouilh, Tennessee Williams, and D. H. Lawrence were far more important figures in Osborne’s development. Not only did those writers’ frank—and often stark—studies of humanity influence Osborne’s style, but he also credited the trio’s controversial works with helping to prepare English audiences for his plays (Carter 1969, 15). Many critics have cited Bertolt Brecht as a seminal influence on Osborne but have often overstated the case. The two did share a realist approach and an interest in political topics, but Osborne’s plays were driven by emotional intensity, while Brecht’s goal was to achieve detachment from the emotions (Carter 1969, 177–79). The Brecht case is a salutary example of the limits to the search for antecedents, particularly in the case of such an original and pioneering playwright

Archives

The largest collection of Osborne material is found at the John Osborne Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

The British Library, St. Pancras, London, also holds a number of Osborne manuscripts.

Printed Sources

Carter, Alan. John Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969).

Hinchcliffe, Arnold P. John Osborne (Boston: Twayne, 1984; Copyright by G.K. Hall & Company).

Osborne, John. Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Volume II, 1955–1966 (London: Faber, 1991).

———.A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography, 1929–1956 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).

———.Plays, Volumes I–III (London: Faber, 1993– ). This is the most complete collection of Osborne’s dramatic works.

Christopher Pepus

OWENS, JAMES CLEVELAND (1913–1980)

James Cleveland Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama. The youngest child in the sharecropping family of Henry and Mary Emma Owens, Jesse Owens spent his youth and adolescence on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, among enclaves of Polish and Italian immigrants and southern black migrant families. Owens’s years of education were remarkable not so much for classroom performance, but for records broken in track and field events and for the people who would continue to influence and guide Owens throughout the rest of his life. Junior high track coach Charles Riley taught Owens focus and form. Minnie Ruth Solomon eventually became his wife, while fellow athlete David Albritton remained a lifelong friend. Running for Larry Snyder and Ohio State, Owens set world records in the 220yard dash, long jump, and 220-yard low hurdles, propelling himself into a place on

410

Owens, James Cleveland

the track team representing the United States at the 1936 Olympiad XI in Berlin. Owens’s four gold medals at the Berlin Games, against the backdrop of Hitler and Nazi Germany, gave Owens space on the public stage. In the years following the Olympics, Owens looked back on his early years in Alabama and the chance his family took in moving to Cleveland in search of a better life. Using his postOlympic name recognition and profile, Owens engaged in multiple business ventures. At the core of his most meaningful work, however, was championing the cause of youth around the world and using sports as a means to give children focus and meaning. Running gave Owens a voice, and in his later years Owens spearheaded, along with the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) of Los Angeles, the ARCO Jesse Owens Games for boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 15. Likewise, Owens continued to be an ambassador for the Olympic movement. Responding to the death of Owens in 1980, then-president Jimmy Carter declared the athlete a symbol of the human struggle against tyranny, poverty, and racial bigotry.

Inscribed on Owens’s gravestone are the words athlete and humanitarian, the seeds of which are evident in Owens’s own account of his childhood as told to friend and ghostwriter Paul Neimark and recorded in three autobiographical writings. Owens recalled being asked as a child who he wanted to be like when he got older, to which he replied, George Washington Carver. Owens also recalled wanting to be a runner. The oral tradition was strong in the Owens’s Alabama home, with Sunday mornings given to Baptist services and dinners time for conversation. In Blackthink, Owens writes that his parents did not know how to read. There was no one in Oakville to teach them and no time to learn. Neither Owens’s parents or grandparents had been allowed to own a book, but when the Owens family moved to Cleveland, Emma Cleveland saved to buy a Bible. The Bible was kept on a shelf above the fireplace and Owens remembers reading passages aloud. During the course of his grade school and high school education, Owens came across the principles of Booker T. Washington, adopting Washington’s code of self-reliance rather than the militant confrontations promoted by Marcus Moziah Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois. Coming out of his own experience in Alabama, Owens advocated goals for breaking the cycle of poverty and enjoyed promoting his ideas through public speaking appearances and work with underprivileged inner-city children. Though Owens did not nurture an active reading life, he admired the noted orators of his time, including Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, and Roscoe Conkling Simmons.

Archives

Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), Los Angeles, California, typescript interviews for ARCO Jesse Owens Games.

Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield, Illinois, typescript interviews with Jesse Owens and Ruth Owens.

Jesse Owens Foundation, Chicago, Illinois.

Ohio State University Archives, miscellaneous letters and correspondence.

Printed Sources

Baker, William J. Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1986). Owens, Jesse, with Paul Neimark. I Have Changed (New York: William Morrow, 1972).

———.The Jesse Owens Story (New York: Putnam’s, 1970).

———.Jesse: The Man Who Outran Hitler (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Fawcett Books Group, 1978).

Devon Niebling

411

P

PADEREWSKI, JAN IGNACY (1860–1941)

Jan Paderewski was a Polish pianist, composer, and statesman born in Podolia (part of Russian-occupied Poland) to an impoverished noble family. His education started at home with tutoring in music and Polish and French literature (his literary self-education continued throughout his lifetime). Paderewski studied piano and music theory at the Music Institute of Warsaw (1872–78), composition with Friedrich Kiel and Heinrich Urban in Berlin (1881–83), and piano with Theodore Leschetitzky in Vienna (1884-86). His international fame commenced with his Parisian debut in 1888; until his death, Paderewski gave thousands of concerts in all European countries, North and South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. His activities prior to 1914 focused on performance and composition (opera Manru, 1901; Symphonia “Polonia,” 1909; Piano Concerto in A, 1889; numerous pieces for solo piano, songs, etc.). During World War I, he campaigned for the independence of Poland, giving over 300 speeches and becoming a charismatic orator. In 1918–19 he served as the first prime minister of independent Poland, subsequently returning to his career as a piano virtuoso. Paderewski published numerous articles and speeches on musical and political subjects and was himself the topic of almost 20 poems. He was the most decorated pianist in history, knighted by George V, and recipient of honorary doctorates from such universities as Lwów (1912), Yale (1917), Cracow (1919), Oxford (1920), Columbia (1922), University of Southern California in Los Angeles (1923), Poznan´ (1924), Glasgow (1925), Cambridge (1926), and SUNY, New York (1933).

Fluent in Polish, Russian, German, English, and French, Paderewski was a voracious and discriminating reader. He preferred “classicizing” and “romantic” literature to either expressionist or modernist texts, even though he knew Marcel Proust and numerous members of the literary establishment. Dedicated to a lifetime of selfimprovement, Paderewski amassed a huge library and continuously read novels, poetry, and drama. His favorite writers included Turgenev, Gogol, Molière, and

413

Paderewski, Jan Ignacy

Shakespeare. He did not like either Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, considering one too melancholy, the other a pretentious fake. In Polish literature, he was best acquainted with the nationalistic historical novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz (whose patriotic zeal he shared), realistic stories of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (one was used as the basis for his opera Manru), romantic dramas of Adam Mickiewicz, and simple poems of Adam Asnyk. His poetic preferences may be seen in the choice of texts he set as songs: Asnyk and Mickiewicz are juxtaposed with a French proto-modernist, Catulle Mendès. Paderewski’s speeches reveal his talent as an orator through the use of rhetorical figures and effective, though old-fashioned and lofty, language. The composer befriended a number of American and Polish poets who made him the subject of their work, including Richard Watson Gilder, Charles Phillips, Charles Underwood Johnson, John Huston Finley, and Maryla Wolska.

Archives

Paderewski Studies Center at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland: Paderewski’s library and archives, including most personal letters.

Archivum Akt Nowych, Warsaw, Poland: Paderewski’s political archives.

Library of the F. Chopin Academy of Music, Warsaw, Poland: Paderewski’s manuscripts. Polish Museum in Chicago, Illinois: Documents about his American years.

Société and Musée Paderewski in Morges, Switzerland: Swiss archives, memorabilia.

Other holdings at the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, Stanford University; Pil⁄ sudski Institute in New York; Polish Music Center at University of Southern California.

Printed Sources

Annales Paderewski. Periodical published since 1977 by Société and Musée Paderewski in Morges. With popular articles and historical source studies.

Opien´ski, Henryk. Ignacy Jan Paderewski, 2nd ed. (Kraków: PWM, 1960). With valuable musical insights by a musicologist and composer.

Orl⁄ owski, Józef, ed. Ignacy Jan Paderewski i odbudowa Polski (Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Reconstruction of Poland), 2 vols. (Chicago: The Stanek Press, 1939–40). Comprehensive collection of political documents and photographs ca. 1910–20.

Paderewski, Ignancy Jan, and Mary Lawton. The Paderewski Memoirs, Stephen Citron (pref.), DeCapo Press [1930] (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938, 1939). Lawton’s text based on interviews, covering the period to 1914.

———. Pamie˛tniki 1912–1932, Andrzej Piber (intro., trans., ed.), (Kraków: PWM, 1992). Second part of the memoirs, edited from notes.

Perkowska, Malgorzata. Diariusz koncertowy Ignacego Jana Paderewskiego (Paderewski’s Concert Diary) (Kraków: PWM, 1990). Fundamental reference work cross-listing all of Paderewski’s concerts and his whole repertoire; with a chronicle of life.

Piber, Andrzej. Droga do sl⁄ awy. Ignacy Paderewski w latach 1860–1902 (The Road to Fame; Ignacy Paderewski in the Years 1860–1902) (Warszawa: PIW, 1982). Source-based biography of Paderewski’s early career, with numerous quotes and references to archival material.

Trochimczyk, Maja (ed.). “The Unknown Paderewski,” special issue of the Polish Music Journal 4, 2 (Winter 2001). http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/PMJ/index.html. Articles, libretto of Manru, reprints of numerous source readings, bibliography, list of works.

Zamoyski, Adam. Paderewski (New York: Atheneum, 1982). First critical biography, based on thorough archival research in numerous collections outside of Poland, with new information about the biography and personality of the composer.

Maja Trochimczyk

414

Pankhurst, Emmeline Goulden

PAISLEY, IAN RICHARD KYLE (1926– )

Ian Paisley was born in Armagh, Northern Ireland, the son of a Baptist minister. Educated at the Barry School of Evangelism in South Wales (1942) and the Theological Hall of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ulster (1942–46), Paisley also received an honorary doctorate of divinity from Bob Jones University in South Carolina in 1966. The minister of the Ravenhill Mission Church in East Belfast (renamed Martyrs Memorial Church) since 1946, Paisley founded and served as moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster since 1951, a church that espoused fundamentalism, anti-ecumenism, and militant anti-Catholicism. Paisley entered politics in the 1960s, leading a campaign against reforms seen as aiding Roman Catholics. A member of Parliament at Westminster for North Antrim since 1970, in 1971 Paisley founded the Democratic Unionist Party, which occupies the extreme Unionist position in Northern Ireland’s political spectrum. Although he has expressed opposition to both bodies, Paisley has served as a member of the European Parliament since 1979 and as a representative to the Northern Irish Assembly since 1999. Paisley has built a formidable reputation as a charismatic preacher and orator and as an advocate for his constituents, both Protestant and Catholic. However, he is also the most visible spokesman for uncompromising, if nonviolent, Unionism, steadfastly opposing any solution for the Irish Troubles that involve cooperation or power-sharing with Irish Catholics or the Irish Republic. Paisley has also denounced British and Unionist politicians who advocate compromise, famously preaching for divine vengeance on Margaret Thatcher for her role in the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and claiming David Trimble had betrayed Unionists by signing the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Founder, editor, and frequent contributor to the Free Presbyterian Church journal Revivalist (1951– ) and the newspaper Protestant Telegraph (1966– ), Paisley has written numerous sermons and religious tracts as well as a number of political polemics and autobiographical sketches. Paisley claims as his literary influences Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin as well as evangelical ministers such as George Whitefield and Presbyterian Divines such as Charles Hodge and Henry Cooke (Cooke 1996, 45–53).

Archives

Paisley’s private papers are not available for research. Many public records may be found at the European Institute of Protestant Studies, Free Presbyterian Church, Belfast.

Printed Sources

Bruce, Steve. God Save Ulster! The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Cooke, Dennis. Persecuting Zeal: A Portrait of Ian Paisley (Dingle: Brandon Press, 1996). Moloney, Ed, and Andy Pollak. Paisley (Dublin Swords: Poolbeg Press, 1986).

Paisley, Rhonda. Ian Paisley, My Father (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1988).

Smyth, Clifford. Ian Paisley, the Voice of Ulster (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press 1987).

Padraic Kennedy

PANKHURST, EMMELINE GOULDEN (1858–1928)

Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst was born in the industrial English city of Manchester into an affluent liberal manufacturing family. Her mother, a supporter of

415

Pankhurst, Emmeline Goulden

women’s suffrage, took Emmeline from a young age to women’s rights meetings, where she heard such prominent suffragists as the American Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Pankhurst attended a day school in Manchester, and at age 15 was sent to a boarding school in Paris that was based on the then-radical idea that girls’ education should be as rigorous as that of boys. In 1879 she married the radical socialist and women’s rights advocate Dr. Richard Pankhurst and they had five children. Living in London and later in Manchester, they mixed with the avant-garde lateVictorian society, including William Morris, Grant Allen, and Annie Besant. Emmeline participated with her husband in radical reform efforts, especially relating to women’s rights. After the death of her husband in 1898, Pankhurst continued radical activism, serving as a Poor Law Guardian and as a member of the Manchester School Board. Prioritizing the cause of women’s rights and rejecting the ineffective tactics of the moderate suffragists, in 1903 she and her two daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). To bring attention to the cause of votes for women, they developed dramatic militant tactics of civil disobedience and violent action. Frequently arrested, the Pankhursts and their supporters went on much publicized hunger strikes while in prison. When Britain entered World War I, Emmeline Pankhurst, along with her daughter Christabel, suspended the actions of the WSPU and supported the government in its war effort. In contrast, Sylvia, an opponent of the war and a socialist who was concerned with the rights of working-class rather than elite women, broke with her mother and sister and was expelled from the WSPU. After the war, satisfied that women over 30 had gained the vote and no longer active in the campaign for equal political rights, Emmeline Pankhurst joined the Conservative Party. She died in the same month that British women finally achieved political rights equal to men’s.

Pankhurst’s childhood readings had decisive influence on the development of her later feminist activism. She was profoundly impacted by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which awakened in her “that spirit of fighting and heroic sacrifice . . . and appreciation of the gentler spirit which is moved to mend and repair the ravages of war” (Pankhurst 1914, 3). She was also drawn to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and his lesser-known Holy War. Another favorite was Homer’s Odyssey, with the same motif of heroic journey and struggle that could be seen as a metaphor for her activist career.

Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution probably had the greatest influence on her thought and career. Strongly identifying with the French throughout her youth, Pankhurst relished Carlyle’s romantic glorification of rebellion and the emphasis he placed on the role of great people in shaping history.

In adulthood, Pankhurst read the radical visionary literature that was popular with the fin de siècle social and political rebels. Family reading in the Pankhurst household included the Fabian Essays in Socialism, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Prince Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England. These radical books also shaped the political ideas of her homeeducated daughters, especially Sylvia. In addition to the political works, Sylvia was also drawn to the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, and especially Robert Burns. She also read the contemporary playwrights Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw and the novelists Anatole France and John Galsworthy. Neither Emmeline nor Christabel apparently read extensively after founding the

416

Pasolini, Pier Paolo

WSPU—the motto of the organization, “Deeds, not Words,” probably also included written words.

Archives

Home Office Papers, Public Record Office, London. Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Museum of London.

Fawcett Library, London. Includes letters by the Pankhursts and extensive collection of suffragette periodicals and other memorabilia of the WSPU.

Sylvia Pankhurst Papers, International Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam.

Printed Sources

Holton, Sandra Stanley, “In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst.” In British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, Harold Perkins (ed.), (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). Analysis of the cultural influences shaping Pankhurst’s worldview.

Jorgensen-Earp, Cheryl R. “The Transfiguring Sword”: The Just War of the Women’s Social and Political Union (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997). Analysis of the philosophic traditions that shaped the Pankhursts’ justification of violent militancy.

Pankhurst, Christabel. Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London: Hutchinson, 1959). Discussion of early influences on her mother.

Pankhurst, Emmeline, My Own Story (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914). Pankhurst, Sylvia. The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1935). Winslow, Barbara. Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Mar-

tin’s Press, 1996). Discussion of the literary influences on Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst and on the adult Emmeline Pankhurst.

Nancy Fix Anderson

PASOLINI, PIER PAOLO (1922–1975)

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna on March 5, 1922. His father, Carlo Alberto Pasolini, was an officer in the fascist army; Suzanna Colussi, his mother, was a teacher. Raised in a family of only two sons, the young Pasolini attended a famous Bolognese high school, the Liceo Ginnasio Statale Luigi Galvani (1935–41). He studied art history and Italian literature at the University of Bologna from 1942 to 1944. From 1942, he wrote essays and book reviews about Italian poetry and published a first book of poems about the small town where he lived, Poesie a Casarsa. He also gave private lessons in Latin, Greek, and Italian literature. On November 26, 1945, Pasolini defended a master’s degree thesis about Giovanni Pascoli. That same year, he began writing poems using Frioulan, his mother’s Italian dialect. In 1947, he joined the Italian Communist Party but was expelled in 1949 for homosexuality. Between 1961 and 1975, Pasolini directed 24 movies (half of them were short films). He was the author of some fifty books, half of them published after his death. Very few of Pasolini’s books were translated into English. Friend and novelist Alberto Moravia considered Pasolini “the major Italian poet” of the second half of the twentieth century; outside Italy, he was better known as a film director. Three days after the release of his controversial film Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), his body was discovered on waste ground near Ostia, not far from Roma. Pasolini was one of the most polyvalent authors of the twentieth century, writing poetry, novels, plays, essays, and film scripts; he also was a journalist

417

Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich

and book critic, painter, actor, film director, and even cameraman for some of his short film essays. During the 1960s he wrote many articles about semiotics and film theory, speaking against prominent positions held by Roland Barthes and Christian Metz.

Pasolini was a book critic for newspapers and journals for most of his adult life. In high school, Pasolini read Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Bartolommeo Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and William Shakespeare. He admitted that his discovery of Arthur Rimbaud in 1938 changed his life. During World War II, Pasolini read André Gide, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Arthur Schopenhauer, and many Italian poets including Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale. In 1966, while convalescent for a month, he rediscovered Plato and Mircea Eliade, then wrote his first plays in just a few weeks: six tragedies in an ancient Greek style. In October 1966, Pasolini went to New York City, where he discovered Allen Ginsberg and visited Harlem. In most of his films, Pasolini told stories as if they were myths; this is specially true with Oedipus Rex and Medea, but also in Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom (freely adapted from Sade) and The Gospel According to St. Matthew, his most beautiful and respectful movie. In his adaptations, Pasolini often transposed situations from other contexts into contemporary settings to make them clearer and stronger.

Archives

Associazione “Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Rome. Personal archives, books, manuscripts, photos, drawings, correspondence, films.

Printed Sources

Bax, Dominique (ed.). Pier Paolo Pasolini. Alberto Moravia (Bobigny, France: Théâtres au cinéma, No. 11, 2000). Includes many good articles about Pasolini’s books and films.

Boyer, Alain-Michel. Pier-Paolo Pasolini. Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987). Excellent essay that deals precisely with his literary influences; includes a vital 30-page biography.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Descrizioni di descrizioni (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). Includes hundreds of book reviews written by Pasolini.

———.The Letters of Pier Paolo Pasolini: 1940–54, N. Naldini (ed.), Stuart Hood (trans.), (London: Quartet Books, 1992).

———.Poesie a Casarsa (Bologna: Libreria Aniquaria Landi, 1942).

Yves Laberge

PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH (1890–1960)

Boris Pasternak was born to a Jewish family in Moscow. His father was a famous impressionistic painter, his mother a pianist. In his youth he showed a dedication to music. Under the impact of Alexander Scriabin he wished to become a composer. In 1909 Pasternak began his studies of philosophy at the Moscow State University, then in 1912 at the University of Marburg, Germany. Back in Russia, he became in 1913 a member of the futurist literary circle “Tsentrifuga” (Centrifuge). In 1935 Pasternak traveled to Paris to the Congress of Defense of Culture against Fascism in Europe. In the following years he translated Hamlet by William Shakespeare and Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into Russian. In 1947 Pasternak began to write his famous opus, Doctor Zhivago, which was published in 1957 in Italy by Fel-

418

Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich

trinelli Press. On October 23, 1958, Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for literature. Just in the same month he had been excluded from the Soviet Writers’ Union. On May 31, 1960, Pasternak died of cancer in Moscow. In 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev was Soviet general secretary, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was published in Russia for the first time.

There were various Western influences in Pasternak’s creative life. In grammar school he learned German with high proficiency and read the works of Goethe (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Faust). Later, in 1912, Pasternak studied at the University of Marburg in Germany under Professor Hermann Cohen, a neo-Kantian philosopher of international repute. Cohen suggested that Pasternak teach philosophy, but the young Russian rejected an academic career. Nevertheless, metaphysics deeply influenced his later literary work as Pasternak studied the works of Immanuel Kant (Kritik der Reinen Vernunft) and Edmund Husserl (Logische Untersuchungen), which provided a basis for the writer’s symbolism. Under the influence of German philosophers Pasternak showed a special sensitiveness to human existence. Influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke (Das Stundenbuch), the rhythm of lyrics symbolized for Pasternak the heartbeat of human life. During the First World War, Pasternak became acquainted with Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor), and he referred to his poem “Marburg,” written in the Urals in May 1916, as a “Shakespearean drama.” In his novel Doctor Zhivago, the writer is very critical of the Russian revolution and Marxist ideology. The main figures in the novel, Jurii Zhivago and Lara, are not socialist heroes but ordinary beings who are caught by the cataclysms of Russian revolution and civil war, “the demonic forces.” Pasternak stood in the tradition of liberal and humanist Russian literature of the nineteenth century; additionally his concept of good and evil shows a great affinity to Goethe and Shakespeare: the protagonists Jurii Zhivago and Lara resemble Goethe’s Werther and Lotte. Jurii Zhivago has also some Shakespearean traits that Pasternak called “a drama of duty and self-denial.” In this context, Pasternak was also influenced by Edward Young’s Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality. For his individualism Pasternak was frequently criticized by the Soviet press. The main reproach was that he was too apolitical and too skeptical of the feats of socialism. Moreover, the Christian themes in the novel provoked harsh criticism in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev wanted to deprive him of Soviet citizenship. The manuscript of Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and became a bestseller in the West. But in contrast to his stigmatized novel Doctor Zhivago, translations of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet won Pasternak the highest Soviet literary prize.

Archives

Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury I Iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Litera-

ture and Arts), Moscow.

Printed Sources

Barnes, Christopher J. Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography (Cambridge, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Conquest, Robert. Courage of Genius. The Pasternak Affair. A Documentary Report on Its Literary and Political Significance (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1961).

Fleishman, Lazar. Boris Pasternak. The Poet and His Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

419