Taiwan Today

Elsewhere in this number is a review of Dr. Zhivago, a book which has made the Soviet writer, Boris Pasternak, world famous. With this book, Pasternak has won the Nobel Prize for literature. If he were allowed by the Soviet authorities to cash in on his forty-one thousand U.S. dollars of prize money, his book would probably never have been known to many but the most avid readers, because it is a thickish tome with a meandering plot. But as he was forced to give up this much-coveted prize, his book became a best seller overnight. Though the Tass news agency has announced that Soviet authorities had declared that he is free to leave the country, Pasternak would not likely dare go to Stockholm for his prize.

This should be a good lesson to the leftist intellectuals. From their ivory tower in the free world society, they too often undervalue the liberty and freedom they enjoy. The four freedoms are to them as natural as the air they breathe. They have no idea, or rather they refuse to believe, that in countries under Communist rule, such freedoms are denied to all people. When confronted with facts, they like to entertain the wishful thinking that they would be different and that when the Communists take over their country, they would be the favorite sons of the revolution. They could enjoy the freedom, though it be denied to the "reactionaries" and bourgeoisie. The leftist intellectuals held precisely such views in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and China before the Communists took over. Pasternak himself might have entertained the same illusion. The mere fact that he rode out all the storms in the Stalin era showed that he must have been a fairly good Communist.

But despite his past record, despite the fact that he had been an established writer in the Soviet Union, he was hounded by his fellow writers as soon as they found he had written something that fetched him the Nobel prize while those that had been awarded the Lenin prizes were ignored. It was primarily due to jealousy that set his fellow Soviet writers against him. The book itself could have been only a minor cause, because the Soviet authorities had been aware of it all along. Whatever was the motive, Pasternak was stripped of the title "Soviet writer." This means that he can no longer publish works in the Soviet Union and that he would be deprived of all the privileges he may enjoy as a writer. But this is not all, he has been called names. The book has been called "an artistically squalid, malicious work, replete with hatred of socialism." Simultaneous with the announcement by Soviet authorities that he was free to leave the country, he was threatened with expulsion from the Soviet Union and "an ignominious end." The situation had become so ugly that he had to appeal to Khrushchev to spare his life. In his letter to the Soviet dictator, he said: "A departure beyond the borders of my country would be the equivalent of death for me and for that reason I request you not to take that extreme measure." Pasternak would have to consider himself as lucky if he could survive the present storm, for anyone who writes a book "replete with hatred of socialism" is punishable by death or exile to Siberia.