“I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?”

25Aug14

This Bill Mauldin cartoon celebrated the plight of Russian author Boris Pasternak. 

 Pasternak won the Nobel prize for literature 1958, after his manuscript for Dr. Zhivago was smuggled out of the USSR, translated and published in Western Europe.  

 Pasternak narrowly avoided being exiled from Russia by the authorities, because the text was subtly critical of Stalinism, the purges and the Gulags.

 Maudlin’s cartoon won a Pulitzer prize. The cartoon shows a Soviet Gulag scene, with two prisoners talking while they work on splitting a tree trunk in a forest. The caption reads: “I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?”

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Tags: Bill Mauldin, Boris Pasternak, Mauldin, Nobel Prize, Pasternak, Pulitzer Prize