BIRTHDAYS
Boris Pasternak
Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as
the author of Doctor Zhivago,
a novel which takes place between the Russian
Revolution of 1905 and the Second
World War. Due to its independent minded stance on the socialist state, Doctor Zhivago was refused publication in the USSR. At the instigation of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. Pasternak was
awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature the following year, an
event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. In the midst of a massive campaign against him by
the CPSU and the Union of Soviet
Writers, Pasternak reluctantly agreed to decline the Prize. In his resignation
letter to the Nobel Committee, Pasternak stated the reaction of the Soviet
State was the only reason for his decision.
By the time of his death from lung cancer
in 1960, the campaign against Pasternak had severely damaged the international
credibility of the U.S.S.R. He remains a major figure in Russian literature to this day. Furthermore, tactics
pioneered by Pasternak were later continued, expanded, and refined by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet dissidents.
Fanni Kaplan
Fanny
Yefimovna Kaplan (February 10, 1890
– September 3, 1918), was a Russian political revolutionary and an attempted assassin of Vladimir
Lenin.
Faina Yefimovna Kaplan, a.k.a. Fanya
Kaplan, was born one of seven children to a Jewish peasant family in the
Ukraine. She became a political revolutionary at an early age.
In 1906, during the political chaos of
early 20th Century Russia, she was arrested in Kiev after an accidental
explosion of a terrorist bomb, which she had been transporting, killing a maid
in her hotel. She was sentenced to life at hard labor and served in various
gulags throughout Siberia.
On August 30, 1918, Lenin was speaking at a rally in a Moscow factory. As
he was leaving the building, Kaplan called out to him and when he turned around
she fired several bullets at him. Lenin was hit in the left shoulder and jaw.
He survived, but it is believed that these injuries were the ultimate cause of
the strokes that led to his death in 1924.
Kaplan was taken into custody by the
Cheka, where she gave the following statement:
My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot
at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver.
I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a
traitor to the Revolution.
Although she was "severely"
interrogated, she refused to implicate any of her colleagues. She was executed,
shot to death on September 3, 1918.
unfortunately the 10 th of Februrary is the death of famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. He was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. He was killed in a duel with D'Anthès. Pushkin's early death at the age of 37 is still regarded as a catastrophe for Russian literature.
ReplyDeleteMy congratulations to Ludmila Artemieva this day. She is widely regarded as one of the most talented women and considered by many movie reviewers to be the greatest living film actress.
ReplyDeleteCommemoration events for Alexander Pushkin
ReplyDeletewill be held in Moscow
on 10 February 2013
the 176thanniversary of the poet’s death.
On that day from 10 am until 6 pm admission will be free to the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum on Prechistenka Street and its affiliates on Arbat Street — the Alexander Pushkin Memorial Flat at 53 Arbat Street, and the exhibition halls of the State Pushkin Museum at 55/32 Arbat Street (entrance from Denezhny Pereulok).As is traditional, the State Pushkin Museum has prepared a special programme for the poet’s Commemoration Day:
2.45 pm —a minute’s silence. At the precise time in 1837 the poet’s heart stopped beating;
2.47 pm —a speech about Alexander Pushkin;
3 pm —concert by masters of the arts.