LETTERS OF CAMUS AND PASTERNAK
The letters printed below were exchanged between Albert
Camus and Boris Pasternak during the spring and summer of 1958. At
that time,
Doctor Zhivago
had already been published abroad (in Italy
in November 1957 and in France in June 1958), but the violent public
campaign of abuse to which Pasternak was subjected after he received
the Nobel Prize in October 1958 had not yet begun. Nevertheless,
pressures were already mounting and he was under great strain.
In
October 1957, the secretary of the Soviet Writers' Union, Alexei Surkov,
hinted in an interview with the Italian Communist party newspaper,
Unita,
that publication of
Doctor Zhivago
abroad would do its author
no good.
In
that same month Pasternak was denounced by the
secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union and the following spring he
was again summoned by the secretariat to discuss his sending the novel
abroad.
The Pasternak-Camus correspondence is preceded by an extract
from a letter from Pasternak to Pierre Souvtchinski, a Russian friend
living in France, in which the poet tells of his discovery of Camus.
Pasternak did not sign his letters to Camus in the hope that
without his signature they were more likely to get through the Soviet
censorship.
Emily Tall
Boris Pasternak to Pierre Souvtchinski
April 14, 1958
How my heart rejoices at the discovery of Camus! I cannot muster
the courage to write him about it in my monstrous fractured French.
He is most precious to me as a unified whole, as a phenomenon. By
that I mean the thrust of his intellect and all that which a powerful
This correspondence has not been published before. Nineteen eighty
marks the twentieth anniversary of both Camus's and Pasternak's deaths. The
French originals of these letters will appear in
Canadian Slavonik Papers
(Number 2, June 1980).
