Who said no to the Nobel Prize?
2001-10-04 08:44
Stockholm - Two Nobel laureates - French writer Jean-Paul Sartre and Le Duc
Tho, a communist Vietnamese leader - refused the prestigious prize
of their own volition, while others have been forced to decline the
honour for political reasons.
In keeping with his practice of rejecting all official
honours, French writer and founder of the existentialist movement
Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964.
He based his "objective reasons" for rejecting the prize on his theory that the conflict resulting from the coexistence of two cultures - that of the east and that of the west - "must be resolved between
men and cultures, without intervention from institutions."
Le Duc Tho was the main North Vietnamese negotiator in the
1973 Paris Peace Accords, which marked the end of United States
military involvement in Vietnam.
The Vietnamese statesman was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 together with US
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but refused the prize on the
grounds that the situation "that continues in South Vietnam under
the Saigon administration and the United States" made it impossible
for him to accept it.
Kissinger, on the other hand, accepted the
prize.
Soviet author Boris Pasternak, winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1958, warmly thanked the award committee in Stockholm
in a telegram sent from the USSR.
But under pressure from Soviet
authorities, he later refused the prize, saying in a letter to the
committee that the award had taken on a significance in Soviet
society that was entirely different to its original meaning.
At the
core of the controversy was Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago",
published in 1957 in Italy after being smuggled out of the USSR.
The USSR's communist government criticised the novel for "seeing
the vicissitudes of the revolutionary years through the eyes of our
enemies."
Pasternak's novel was eventually published in the USSR in
1988, shorlty before the downfall of the Soviet regime, and 28
years after Pasternak's death.
Three scientists - 1938 chemistry laureate Richard Kuhn of
Austria, and the 1939 winners of the Chemistry Prize, Adolf
Butendandt, and the Medicine Prize, Gerhard Domagk, both from
Germany - were obliged by the Nazi regime to refuse their Nobel
prizes. - Sapa/AFP
- SAPA