Lost Like a Beast

The laughter of his guests had suddenly died away, and Boris Pasternak sat disconsolately at his own 69th birthday party listening to the angry words of his wife. "How many times have I told you not to trust journalists?" she shrilled. "They are only exploiting you for personal gain. If this continues, I'll leave you." Sadly the old poet murmured, "I promise you, Zinochka"--but nothing could change the fact that just as the ugly furor over Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel Prize seemed to be fading away, something new had happened to stir things up again.

Pasternak insisted that he had given Anthony Brown of the London Daily Mail a batch of poems, all in longhand, to be delivered to a friend, Jacqueline de Proyart, curator of the Tolstoy Museum in Paris. Now he learned that Brown had taken it upon himself to publish in the Daily Mail a poem bearing the title Nobel Prize. The poem, said Pasternak, was written "in a black, pessimistic mood that has now passed." The very fact that Brown had plucked it out from all the others "shows what motivated the young man," the old man went on indignantly. Whether or not, as the Daily Mail insisted, Pasternak had known that his words would be published, the poem carried its own unmistakable message:

I am lost like a beast in an enclosure;

Somewhere are people, freedom, and light.

Behind me is the noise of pursuit,

And there is no way out.

Dark forest by the shore of the pond,

The trunk of a fallen fir tree

Cuts off my way.

It is all the same to me, come what may.

What offense have I committed?

Am I a murderer or a villain?

I who forced the whole world to weep

Over the beauty of my land.

Now almost in my coffin,

I believe the time will come

When the spirit of good will conquer

Wickedness and infamy.

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