On this day in 1958, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Six days later, he refused to accept it, stating in a telegram: "Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure." Below is Irving Howe's review of Pasternak's masterwork, Doctor Zhivago, the novel that surely inspired the Nobel committee to bestow such an honor upon him.

Doctor Zhivago, the novel which climaxes the career of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak, is a major work of fiction; but it is also—and for the moment, perhaps more important—a historic utterance. It is an act of testimony as crucial to our moral and intellectual life as the Hungarian revolution to our political life. It asks for, and deserves, the kind of response in which one's sense of the purely "literary'" becomes absorbed in a total attention to the voice of the writer.

The book comes to us in extraordinary circumstances. A great Russian poet who maintains silence through years of terror and somehow, for reasons no one quite understands, survives the purges that destroy his most gifted colleagues; a manuscript sent by him to an Italian Communist publisher who decides to issue it despite strong pressures from his comrades; the dictatorship meanwhile refusing to permit this book, surely the most distinguished Russian novel of our time, to appear in print—all this comprises the very stuff of history, a reenactment of those rhythms of brutality and resistance which form the substance of the novel itself.

Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible. Quietly and resolutely Pasternak speaks for the sanctity of human life, turning to those "eternal questions" which made the 19th Century Russian novel so magnificent and besides which the formulas of Russia's current masters seem so trivial.

The European novel has traditionally depended on some implicit norm of "the human." In our time, however, this norm has become so imperiled that the novel has had to assume the burdens of prophecy and jeremiad, raising an apocalyptic voice against the false apocalypse of total politics. Some of the most serious Western writers hive turned impatiently from the task of representing familiar experience and have tried, instead, to make the novel carry an unprecedented amount of speculative and philosophical weight. Sacrificing part of the traditional richness of the European novel, they have kept searching for new, synoptic structures that would permit them to dramatize the modern split between historical event and personal existence. As a result, their work has occasionally thinned out into parables concerning the nature and possibility of freedom.