Pasternak was given the Nobel Prize on October 23, 1958. The award was for Doctor Zhivago, his novel about a man caught in the revolution and the civil war, and the book had been banned at home and smuggled out to be published in the west. The honor became a test.
He had accepted at first. Pasternak cabled his thanks to the Swedish Academy, and then the storm broke in Moscow, where the book and its author were denounced as traitors. The pressure was organized and relentless, and it came down on a sick man in his late sixties.
He was made to refuse. Pasternak was expelled from the writers' union and threatened, and he withdrew from the prize, writing that the reaction in his country made acceptance impossible. The words were not his own choice, and everyone knew it.
The novel outlived the scandal. Doctor Zhivago became one of the most read books of the century, and a film version in 1965 spread it further, and the man who had been reviled in his own country was honored everywhere else. The prize stayed with the book.
Pasternak died in 1960, and the Nobel went unclaimed by him, though his son accepted it decades later. The affair showed what a writer risked in the Soviet Union, and it made Doctor Zhivago a monument to what the state tried to suppress.