xt7gf18sfn15 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7gf18sfn15/data/mets.xml  Thomas Merton 1958-10-31 This letter is from collection 75m28 Thomas Merton papers. archival material 75m28 English  Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Thomas Merton correspondence Letter from Thomas Merton to Helen Wolff, October 31, 1958 text Letter from Thomas Merton to Helen Wolff, October 31, 1958 1958 1958-10-31 2023 true xt7gf18sfn15 section xt7gf18sfn15 oét 31,1958

Dear Helen Wolff:

It would be hard to tell you how grateful and how moved I was when I
received your letter and its encltsure from Pasternak. The German was not too
hard, and I think I got his full waning. I can ask no greater satisfaction
than this thomht that I have really been able to give this great man at least
a small part of the understanding and appreciation he deserves. He has more
than amply repaid me by assuring me that I me not wrong to believe that I
really had entered into the depths of his thought, and thatthere fies a very
great deal in comon in our ideas and sepirations. This is to me a matter of
great wonder and sigrfificance, for from the very beginning I had the feeling
that there was no other modern writer who said the thims I myself believed
and felt in the way Pasternak did. This is mt a matter of "ideas" and concepts,
but of a deeper and more fundamental grasp of life, in and thawing-h life itself.

I am awed by the comurity of ideals and purposes that has made itself evident.

This is of course all the more reason to feel deeply shocked at his tragic
situation. I wonder how any man is going to be able to stand the shock of what he
must have gone through. After years of isolation, isblated by his own greatness
as well as by the phazisaism all around him, his fate of being on the stage
taldng part in a play for which he was not cast, after all this it finally
seem that his part in it has become clear-c and he is thrown out of the theater.
To have the Nobel prize in one's hands and to have it snatched may by fools.

I kmw Pasternak does not care for prizes or for mmy, but he is taxman as anyOne
else is, and what men would not suffer when his nation brutally forbids him to

be loved and understood by the worldt And then to be thrust into coz-lplete solitud
I have a suspicion that this in itself will not worry him, but there will be m
such poverty, such hardship. Will they let him do fl work? I hope nothing worse
happens.

I did not know when I wrote you the other day that he had already been force
to reject the prize. Phi letter must have been a little quixotic, but you must
understand that we see and hear almost nothing down here, and it is a miracle
that I ever heard of Pasternak or read him in the first place, and then heard
of the Nobel Prize affair. Be sure that if my letter is good for arvthing, you
should not h-sitate to use it in any way you see fit, and use me to Support
any move on behalf of Pestemak. That is the least I can do. I pray for him
constantly, and will say mass for him when I get a stipend for m7 own intention.

I was profoundly stuck by mat he said in his letter, about the need to

go beyond the good that has already been accepted. This I take very mch to
heart. This contact with Pasternak leaves me with a sense of great responsibility
to transcend not only the good but the best-- or at least to strive in that direc-
tion and accept the sacrifices this involves. One cannot resign oneself to confer-
table mediocrity in the presence of the words and example of such a man. He has
shmm the world something of the fire and the light that belong to man's future
on earth and in heaven. He is one of the 0 men who has a spiritual message
that is new and makes real sense, and poin out a real way tl’mo'gh our darkness.
Obviously such a. man cannot survive long in a. world like this, especially in
Russia, where all that is trivial and stupid is placed on a pedestal and must
not be questioned.

I am deeply grateful to you for passing on my letter to him and sending me
this reply..CDrdially and faithfully yours in Christ