Salon

The mood at the Bolshoi Theater last Monday as Moscow's Pasternak Foundation handed out this year's Pasternak prizes to authors and critics was more solemn than in previous years. The winners received medals, custom-made from white gold and designed by poetry doyen Andrei Voznesensky, who also lit an enormous candle onstage during the ceremony. The candle was lit in reference to Boris Pasternak's famous poem from "Doctor Zhivago" about a candle in winter, and has taken its place as a symbolic tradition.

Voznesensky, who belongs to the last generation of poets who were taken seriously by huge audiences, considers himself Pasternak's disciple. The two poets struck up an unusual friendship when Pasternak was already old and isolated from official Soviet literary life and Voznesensky a teenager with an ardent love for poetry. It is only natural that, at this point in his life, Voznesensky also wants to serve as tutor to the younger generation. The Pasternak Foundation prize puts an emphasis on budding talent, to the point of distinguishing between "Debut" (this year's winners Alexander Krivenko and Denis Voroshilov were both from Kharkov), and "Late Debut" (Ivan Duda from St. Petersburg).

But perhaps more interesting than the straightforward prizes for poetry were the awards in the "Over the Barriers" category. This group of awards centers on contributions to the study of Russian poetry, and of Pasternak, in particular. The awards went to Lazar Fleishman and Mikhail Gasparov, who is pictured above.

Fleishman is a renowned scholar, a welcome guest at such reputable institutions as Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley and Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. A graduate of Riga University in Latvia and a long-time member of the Slavic department in Tartu, Estonia, where the study of literature was freer than at other Soviet universities, Fleishman published "Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics" in 1990. Since 1985, he has been teaching at Stanford University.

Gasparov is the top figure in Russian humanities, the author of numerous academic books on the history of Russian verse and poetry, and of hundreds of accessible prefaces to and commentaries on editions of ancient, foreign and Russian authors. In the opinion of numerous critics, he is also the most lucid prose writer in Russia today. Accepting the award, Gasparov said, with the modesty so typical of his style, that it was a great honor not just for him, but for the philological studies that he represents.