Nobel Passions

100 Years of Nobel Prizes

October is nobel prize season.

It was 1895 when Alfred Nobel – a Swedish chemist and armaments manufacturer – signed the third and final version of his last will and testament, the basic gist of which is familiar to most inhabitants of our planet. After Nobel’s death, his heirs, outraged by the will’s overall intent, tried to contest it, but this did not stop the first Nobel Prize from being awarded in 1901.

From that time forward, the annual announcement of Nobel Prize recipients has been a cause of worldwide speculation, expectation, and consternation.

Russians, who consider Nobel almost a native son, regard the prize with special reverence and affection, and are equally likely to be brought to a state of prideful ecstasy or bitter fury by the announcement of its laureates.

There is a common misconception here that the Nobel Prize was funded by “Russian money.” It is true that Nobel spent part of his childhood in Russia and studied under the renowned Russian chemist Nikolai Zinin. It is also true that, until he invented dynamite, he (along with his brothers) earned most of his fortune from the oil fields of Baku, so it would be more accurate to say that the Russian Empire contributed to his wealth. In reality, Nobel was a citizen of the world who lived and worked in many countries. But that is not really the point.

For the people of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation, it has always been exceptionally important who among their fellow citizens was awarded a Nobel Prize and who was not. There’s no denying that Russia has seen more than its share of dramas large and small revolving around this honor.

One reproach directed at the Nobel Committee every time the prize is awarded to someone deemed unworthy is that “Lev Tolstoy never got one.” Indeed, the Nobel Committee passed over Tolstoy, who had completed all of his masterpieces by the time the prize was established. Another great writer who was never awarded a Nobel Prize was Vladimir Nabokov. Unlike Tolstoy, who was probably truly indifferent to the honor, Nabokov showed a suspicious disdain for both the prize and many of his fellow writers who had received it. Some of the remarks he made about Faulkner and Pasternak suggest that he felt he was the one who should have been standing at the podium in Stockholm giving an acceptance speech. He never got the chance.

Russian writers who did get a Nobel Prize almost always occasioned indignation and the gnashing of teeth, and not just on the part of writers passed over. In 1933 the prize was given to Ivan Bunin – an émigré! – which was, of course, seen in the Soviet Union as an intentional snub and failure to recognize the communist state’s outstanding literary achievements. Then in 1958, just as the Stalin era was fading and relations with the West were finally improving, the Nobel Committee again provoked the wrath of the Soviet government by awarding the prize to Boris Pasternak, for his novel Doctor Zhivago. This was followed by the Soviet regime’s unbridled campaign of harassment against Pasternak, his forced rejection of the prize, and his death.

One might assume that by this point the Nobel Prize would have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the Soviet government, not to mention its people, who were almost universally prepared to condemn Pasternak’s work, while claiming that they had never read it.

In fact, it was not so simple. First of all, 1958 was also the year that the Nobel Committee, which had behaved so “shamelessly” in the literary realm, partially redeemed itself by awarding the prize to no fewer than three (fully deserving) Soviet physicists: Igor Tamm, Ilya Frank, and Pavel Cherenkov. And then during the sixties and seventies – the heyday of Soviet science – several more great scholars became Nobel laureates: Leonid Kantorovich (economics), Pyotr Kapitsa (physics), and Lev Landau (physics), among others. Alas, these men did not always toe the line. They spoke their minds, did not shy away from free thinking, and used their influence to protect the dissidents who worked at their institutes. The government had a hard time reconciling the competing goals of showcasing these exemplars of Soviet science and keeping them quiet.

When it came to Soviet writers, the situation was more complicated. In the post-Stalin era, Bunin was mostly returned to favor, and compilations of his works began to be published in the USSR (some, such as Cursed Days, the author’s notes and observations on the immediate post-revolutionary period in Russia, remained utterly taboo). But the image of the lyrical poet in emigration, longing for his homeland, had a place within liberalized post-Stalinist ideology. Let him have his prize!

Then, in 1965, the Soviet leadership received a nice little present from the Nobel Committee: Mikhail Sholokhov was awarded the prize for literature for And Quiet Flows the Don. Soviet literary authorities had been engaged in various machinations on Sholokhov’s behalf as far back as 1958, when they hoped to persuade the committee to pick him over Pasternak. They did not at first succeed, but in 1964 they received unexpected assistance from Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused to accept the prize himself and sent a rather odd letter to the Nobel Committee reproaching it for recognizing a Soviet work that was banned in the USSR while passing over a talented writer like Sholokhov. For some reason, the Committee actually listened to the man who had thrown their award in their faces, and the Soviet government and people were given cause for rejoicing.

Finally, the Soviet Union had its claim to literary fame. Yet the authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don continues to be a matter of dispute. Even if Sholokhov did actually write it, he was never able to produce anything remotely like it again, either because of his lifelong battle with alcoholism, or because he had been turned into a figurehead, and figureheads cannot be brilliant novelists. Or maybe he simply could not risk exposing the fact that And Quite Flows the Don was written by someone with an entirely different writing style than his.

Legend has it that Sholokhov did not bow to King Gustaf VI Adolf when he was handed the prize, and that he went on to dress this violation of basic etiquette up as an act of ideologically justified defiance: Cossacks bow to no one…

No sooner did the Soviet nomenklatura start to savor its success than the Nobel Committee again let it down. The seventies – the decade of détente, of an easing of international tensions and of frequent visits by Brezhnev to the West and by Western leaders to the USSR – started with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nothing could change this fact: neither the Soviet government’s smear campaign against him nor the letters of protest that the country’s most prominent writers were forced to sign. Solzhenitsyn was made of sterner stuff than Pasternak, and he was not about to turn down the prize.

Five years later came another blow. Once again, a great Soviet physicist was awarded the prize, but this time it had nothing to do with the achievements of Soviet science: Andrei Sakharov was given the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote human rights. This decision by the committee brought another flood of “popular fury” and letters from academicians, but again, the fact of the award could not be changed.

In 1987, as perestroika was building up steam and Soviet ideology was gradually losing its hold, the powers that be were again given cause for displeasure: the Nobel Prize was awarded to Joseph Brodsky, who twenty years earlier had been tried for “social parasitism” (in other words, for working odd jobs to allow time for his poetry), exiled to the Russian North, and then compelled to emigrate. In the perestroika era, the news of Brodsky’s prize was met with jubilation by both lovers of his poetry and the press, although there were still a few hardliners who tried to cast the poet as alien to the ideals of the Soviet people. They did not manage to generate much outrage.

A pivotal moment and sign of the times came with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that point, Gorbachev was at the height of his popularity in the West, but in Russia, with the Union disintegrating and the economy collapsing, he was increasingly despised. As the population spent hours standing in line for food, it felt many emotions, but pride and jubilation were not among them. For the rest of the decade, the Nobel Committee did little to concern the post-Soviet consciousness.

In 2000, Russia’s Zhores Alferov received the Nobel Prize for physics. Newspapers reported that the little understood discoveries recognized by the Nobel Committee led to the invention of the mobile telephone. Most people were also not too clear on exactly what it was that Alexei Abrikosov and Vitaly Ginzburg contributed to physics (something about superconductors and superfluids), which might explain why their prize did not generate much attention, despite the laureates’ undoubtedly outstanding scientific and personal achievements.

Since then, there has been another set of awards associated with Russia, again in the field of physics. In 2010 the prize in physics was awarded to two English physicists, the Russian emigrants Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” Now they are Sir Andrei and Sir Konstantin, since Queen Elizabeth has knighted them for their services to science. The Russian press at first sang the praises of the “Russian physicists” who had earned the Nobel Prize – until it was learned that both had stated publicly that they would never return to Russia, because it was impossible to work there.

How sad! So ends the first century of Russia’s relationship with the Nobel Prize. Let us hope that during this second century of the Nobel Prize, Russia will have a more positive relationship with the institution.