Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow to an assimilated Jewish family in 1890. His mother, Rozalia Kaufman, was a talented pianist, while his father, Leonid Pasternak, was an accomplished artist. The Pasternak family belonged to Moscow’s creative scene, and young Boris grew up around professional musicians and artists, as well as novelists and poets. His mother’s pals included Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow

Leonid Pasternak, who knew Lev Tolstoy, created one of the best portraits of the famous writer. The parents considered their children’s artistic activities as part of the greater civic and cultural duty of the Russian elite.

The intelligentsia, a cultural phenomenon that had formed in tsarist Russia by the middle of the nineteenth century, was not a distinct social group with identifiable limits or measurable qualities. Those who associated with the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century generally opposed the tsarist state and supported the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Many Russian academics and artists hoped that liberating society from the totalitarian regime would usher in an era of unprecedented creativity.

The Pasternak family, like the majority of intellectuals, artists, and university students in the early 1900s, desired Russia’s social and cultural independence from the tsars’ absolute authoritarianism and the control of a corrupt bureaucracy. Despite his cultural integration, Leonid Pasternak refused to renounce his Jewish heritage and undergo baptism. Little Boris, however, attended his Russian nanny, Akulina, a highly pious woman, to Orthodox church services.3 He soaked up the mystical Byzantine aura of old Moscow, with its hundreds of cathedrals and small churches, black-cloaked, bearded priests and monks, long Orthodox liturgies, magnificent choral singing, and the languorous impact of incense.

He never lost his early connection to the realm of Byzantine-Russian faith, which would eventually save him. Pasternak studied German philosophy in Marburg and had began writing poems by the time Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1914. After an early eruption of patriotic enthusiasm, the country’s mood shifted to resentment toward the tsarist regime as the carnage increased. The Great War sealed the destiny of those who, like the Pasternaks, identified with Russia’s intellectuals.

When the revolution broke out in Petrograd in March 1917, ecstatic crowds celebrated it as “the dawn of freedom.” The Pasternaks, like many of their friends, felt that Russia would not only win the war, but would also join the ranks of Western democracies. However, these dreams were quickly dashed by the harsh reality of anarchy, mob violence, and economic collapse. In October 1917, a group of socialist extremists led by Lenin and Trotsky deposed the well-intentioned and liberal, but ineffective Provisional Government.

Boris Pasternak saw the Russian Revolution as an extension of natural forces, the awakening of people’s spiritual strength, and a leap into the unknown. However, when Russia fell into murderous catastrophe, Pasternak stood above the battle. In 1921, he released a collection of love lyrics written in a radically new language and featuring bright and innovative verse forms. The poems were praised by the best Russian writers, including Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who saw them as fitting for the revolutionary times.

As the Bolshevik rulers sought to establish the new order in Russia, they began to destroy the most fundamental elements of Pasternak’s milieu: freedom for individual creativity, nonstate sources of support for intellectual and artistic endeavors, and opportunities for civic solidarity and intellectual debate. The Bolsheviks arrested, murdered, and exiled thousands of nobles, clergy, bourgeois, and educated professionals, the groups that gave rise to the intelligentsia.

Lenin and his associates saw the intelligentsia as a social class and a potentially deadly political opposition movement, even more so than the tsarist administration.