Doctors Kept Close Watch On Pasternak

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28776, 23 December 1958, Page 11

Doctors Kept Close Watch On Pasternak

(Rec. 8 p.m.) HAMBURG, December 21. Boris Pasternak disclosed today that doctors watched him day and night during the controversy over his best selling novel “Dr. Zhivago, the Associated Press reported.

“Maybe they feared 1 would commit suicide,” the Nobel Prize winner told a Moscow correspondent of the independent Hamburg weekly paper, “Welt Am Sonntag.” “Mv house was a real hospital at that time. They gave me a Woman doctor as nurse. I told her she could go home, as she did not need to worry about me,” Pasternak said.

“But she did not go. Apparently she was not allowed to because she was under orders. Maybe they feared I would commit suicide. I was always surrounded by doctors. They even sleet under my roof.” The Soviet novelist also revealed that he had just finished translating a drama by the Polish poet. Slowacki. on the life of Mary Stuart He said that he did it to express his thanks for the “courageous and honourable attitude of my Polish colleagues, who stood nt my side under difficult circumstances and have supported me in public.

“For the third time I have translated a drama on the theme of Mary Stuart.” Pasternak said. “I enjoyed it very much.” Of “Dr. Zhivago” Pasternak “I think I made a contribution to the development of Russia.

Therefore I am calm. “There are political thunderstorms at any time and everywhere You have seen them in Germany, too. “Such thunderstorms are natural phenomena. You just have to take them. My ‘Dr. Zhivago’ was the work of my life. I spent much strength on it. “Therefore I knew it would be a success. But if they want to print anything else written by me. they do not need to reach for the moth-proof box. I am not dead yet. I am still working.” The novelist said he was getting scores of letters and parcels from abroad every day. including many poems. “I am touched by the fact that 1 have so many friends in the world,” he went on. “I would like to thank them. But often I have not enough time.” Pasternak told the interviewer that he has two Christmas requests for his publishers abroad: (1) “Not to publish any immature things written by me,” and <2) “To publish a book of poetry which is very near to my heart.”

The poetry anthology, he explained, was “non-political and very personal” and similar to the poems of Austria’s Rainer Maria Rilke.