Translator Says Russia Will Block Nobel Award

The Soviet Government is almost certain to keep Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak from accepting his award, the English translator of Doctor Zhivago asserted yesterday.

"They can manage it in several ways," said Harry M. Hayward, Research Fellow at the Russian Research Center. "His expulsion from the Society of Russian Writers is sufficient excuse to deny him a passport to Stockholm and thus simply to detain him. Or they could issue the passport and still hold him by refusing to transmit his application for the Swedish visa."

Hayward explained that Russia, unlike this country, issues passports only for specific purposes and for durations exactly parallel to purposes.

One method of punishment would be to allow Pasternak to make the trip, receive the award, and then just refuse the author re-entrance into the Soviet Union. There could be little western indignation to this action, since it is comparable to the United States' treatment of Charlie Chaplin, Hayward observed. But to exile Pasternak would break a tradition established with Trotsky's demise, and more defamation of the Russian world might result from Pasternak's work.

Begun in 1954

According to Hayward, some prefatory poems were published in 1954, during the "thaw" after Stalin's death, and the entire work was promised to be in print the next year. Now the novel could not possibly be published in Russia without very big changes in policy, stated Hayward.

Pasternak's work was recently denounced by Pravda and its author was advised to refuse the proffered award. There has been no official Soviet exhortation that the writer denounce the novel himself, as he was nearly pressured into doing in a letter to an Italian publisher several years ago, when the book was first set up to be printed.