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p The unfortunate, and now old story about Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zbivago made his name known throughout the world. The publication of this novel abroad, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the author (which Pasternak had declined), and the public indignation aroused in the U.S.S.R. by these facts created an unhealthy stir round the poet’s name.

p The story is unfortunate because the excitement started by the bourgeois newspapers about Pasternak made his name into a trump 111 card in the cold war, in the game of nerves. It is a pity because all this sensationalism overshadowed the main thing in Pasternakhis poetry. His name was shifted into the sphere of politics, whereas Pasternak by the very nature of his talent was farther removed from politics than anyone else. His poetry is his glory, and so let us dwell on it first of all.

p Pasternak was undeniably one of the most remarkable poets of the passing age of aestheticism with its refined individualistic lyricism, However, he did not wholly belong to those poets who dwell in ivory towers. He was closer to the feelings of a modern man who cannot turn away from the events of our quickly changing age.

p Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) was the son of a wellknown artist. His native milieu was the bourgeois intelligentsia, and he began to write in the period after the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1905 when decadent, defeatist and erotic moods were becoming widespread in Russian literature.

p His first books of verse (The Twin in the Clouds, 1914, Over the Barriers, 1917, and My Sister, Life, 1922) were remarkable for their extremely involved system of metaphors. His syntax was like a crossword puzzle. Even then, however, Pasternak did not shun social themes entirely. But he turned them into material for his metaphoric word-game. His semantic riddles acquired an importance in themselves. As a result, the titles of his poems and their content were often at odds. There was his poem The Tenth Anniversary of Krasnaya Presnya, for instance, dedicated to this anniversary of the Moscow workers’ revolutionary revolt. One would have thought that the author could not help but make at least some mention of the workers’ bloody battle with the police. But no; this is what Pasternak wrote in 1915:

p The frost cared nothing for the moans,
And firing caressed with love the snow,
The streets were innocent as always,
A plea.
          Unviolable,
                    sacred.

p It is surely rather far-fetched that firing should want to caress the snow, and then why were the streets “innocent like a plea"? No normal logic can explain anything here. Further on Pasternak compares windows with “slits in horsecloths" for the horses’ eyes.

p Pasternak’s subjectivity, capriciousness and paradoxicality were indeed unprecedented in poetry. Yet whatever he touched with his 112 magic wand he turned into a glorious festival. Symptomatically he exclaimed in bemusement as a very young poet:

p Oh, freshness! Oh, the drop of emerald
Amid the grapes intoxicated with the rain!
Oh, glorious, divine minutiae!
Oh, sleepy fleece of disarray!

p Needless to say, the essence and importance of Pasternak is not to be sought in this monophonic word play. I have cited this example more in support of my belief that Pasternak became so completely carried away by the play of sounds or the fascination of his unorthodox comparisons that he had no thought for their meaning. It happened for the simple reason that he was obsessed with the joy of living; because he was as happy as a nightingale rejoicing in its trills, and this happiness was an infectuous thing. Everything in life, from trifles to the Universe, was included in the happiness of his poetic play, in his joie de vivre. But what about politics, was it included too? Politics, the focal point of the life of society? It may be the focal point for others, concentrating the interests of hundreds of thousands of people. But for Pasternak, in his uninhibited world, in his primordial chaos, it appeared no larger than a grain of sand, it was a poetic toy like the sun, the stars, the smile of his beloved, the trilling of a nightingale, a fly on the wall of a tea-room at some intermediate railway station. One of his poems is actually called: “Flies in a Muchkap Tea-Room".

p Tremendous events occurred in our world: the First World War, the October Revolution, the German Revolution, millions killed, the fall of Kaiser Wilhelm’s empire, crowns rolling off the monarchs’ heads, the fall of the tsarist empire, famine and cold, the sufferings of hundreds of millions of people. But from Pasternak’s poetry you would never guess what, if anything, was happening in the world. In his amazingly talented poetry in the book My Sister, Life dated summer 1917 we find these lines:

p Well muffled, I’ll pull my window slightly open
And call out to the kids below:
What century is it today, d’you know?

p Pasternak shocks you twice: first, with the sound and structure of his poetry, its monophonism and the startling unpredictability of the metaphors and comparisons. But all these were storms in a tea-cup and there conies the second shock: the narrowness of his social horizon. Blok was sensitive to history. Mayakovsky was a 113 Hercules of history, handling great rocks of it and piling them up with ease. Pasternak’s field of action was the size of a jeweller’s or a watchmaker’s work table.

p Be that as it may, I remember how in 1918-1920 we all took down Pasternak’s poetry by hand (Valery Bryusov wrote about this too). I took it down in my note-book too, and then copied it into my diary as something out of this world, as extraordinary as a nightingale bursting into song in winter.

p Pasternak’s poetry cannot be re-told in your own words. It goes to your head like wine.

p His poetry is turned to all that is peaceful, kind and beautiful. Its very essence is rejection of violence; it is tremendously human. The patriotic feeling which was manifested in Pasternak’s poetry in the years of war against fascism (his book Early Trains, 1943) was not simply a tribute to the times. This poetry belonged to our world and none other, it was truly related to what we were accomplishing and what we were defending. The war simply awakened his patriotic feeling. To me Pasternak is not only a poet of general significance to all mankind for all time, but a talent that could only have developed in the soil of Soviet literature.

p In character, Pasternak’s lyrical self-expression is akin to our Soviet humanism. His poetry is much more human than that of T.S. Eliot whose world lies in ruins, or of the Italian hermetic poet Eugenio Montale who dwells in the labyrinths of his confused images.

p There are two really captivating things in Pasternak’s nightingale trills: unreserved courage and trust in people. Pasternak treats the universe as if it were his own private room. He tousles and runs his fingers through the images of the world as familiarly as he would play with the hair of his mistress. He takes as much delight in his phenomenal game of sounds, metaphors and rhythms, as a child splashing about in a stream. His intentions, implications and manner of speaking which poetry alone can justify must be understandable to all, he believes. Who else could have called our harsh life so trustingly “My Sister"? This in itself is poetry, it lives a life of its own, blissfully oblivious and delighting in this oblivion. But how can idyll make a place for itself in history?

p Pasternak’s element is not history but nature, and as a rule he reflects some phenomenon of nature rather than its essence. But this is his sphere, and in it he discerns what no one else can see. The discoveries made by him can be cited ad infimtum. His poetic penetration and microvision are staggering. He has seen “mountain springs hanging down in twisted threads”, a rose “dishevelled after a dress fitting in the night”, the dust “swallowing the raindrops”, and a heliotrope transmitting its “earthy smell to the saltiness of 114 sailors’ overalls hung up to dry”. He has sensed “the breath of a waterfall on freshly broiled Caucasian mutton”, and he has a gift for describing the forest behind the trees. Pasternak’s poetic phenomenology would be really wonderful to learn.

p He never lets us forget that apart from rhymed descriptions and a rhymed statement of ideas there must also be “magic”, the breath of poetry, or what Pushkin called the “magic crystal".

p Pasternak’s poetry is addressed to intuition. He is unequalled in his genius for creating a monophonic surge of sounds and words that carry thought, for inventing rhythmic patterns and variations, and combining all this with unexpected metaphors and comparisons.

p However, there was one danger he did not escape—mainly in his first books. This was the danger of reducing his art into meaningless word-weaving. After all, the soul of poetry is the thought and feeling invested in it by the author. This being so, poetry must have the sensitive precision of realism. Its soul cannot endure phenomenological formalism, and it will elude the fingers of the empiricist.

p Pasternak’s evolution was a complex process. A key to the understanding of this poetic evolution will be found, I think, in one of his articles on Paul Verlaine printed in the newspaper Literatura i Iskusstvo on April 2, 1944.

p This article may be regarded as a poetic expression of Pasternak’s character and feelings. He wrote that the new urban reality which Verlaine encountered was not the same as Pushkin’s, Merimee’s or Stendhal’s. “The 19th century with its whims, industrial arbitrariness, financial storms, and a society comprised of victims and favourites, was nearing its end when still in its heyday. The streets had just been asphalted and illumined with gaslight. Factories, which sprouted like mushrooms after the rain, closed in on them, and the daily newspapers grew as excessively. Railroads were stretched to the utmost limit, and they became part of every child’s life depending on whether it was his own childhood which flew past a sleeping town in the train, or whether it was a night train flying past his poor fringeland childhood.”

p There are two notable things in this passage. The first is that Pasternak condemned the system which we call the capitalist system under which people are divided into favourites and victims. He also speaks of industrial arbitrariness, financial storms, and so on.

p The second is that he seems to find a justification for his poetic experimenting and the confusion of his syntax in the changing world scene. Technical progress, he believes, brought confusion and impressionism into life, into the being of every child (and, consequently, every poet as well), and either his childhood flew past a sleeping 115 town in a train, or the night train (and planes, let us add) flew past his poor fringeland childhood.

p I beg leave to quote Pasternak once more, for his own words express with wonderful clarity his attitude to the most important thing in our life—our Great October Revolution: “Everything became displaced and mixed up,” he wrote. “Conventions were swept up in a maelstrom, and there was a distant premonition that the most important thing of the age was approaching—socialism, and its foremost event, the Russian revolution.”

p Some people forget that Pasternak thought socialism the most important thing of the age, and the Russian revolution its foremost event. This should be remembered by those who, for their own ends, wanted to make of Pasternak the only surviving open enemy of the Soviet system.

p The third and very essential thing about Pasternak’s creative evolution was his growing need to utilise the poet’s material- wordsnot as something to play with but as a means of confessing what he has experienced. This was most evident in his poem Waves (1931). His tendency towards simplicity and emotional authenticity grew steadily in the years that followed, and that is why we take what he has said about Verlaine in the same 1944 article to be a confession: “Like every great artist he demanded deeds not words even from poetry; that is, he wanted poetry to contain what has really been experienced, or at least the eye-witness truth of an observer.”

p Why then did Pasternak, who called socialism the most important thing to happen in our age, who wrote a poem about the Russian revolution of 1905 in which he extolled Lt. Shmidt, the wonderful hero of the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin; who had glorified the anniversary of the October Revolution in verse and created an amazing poetic portrait of Lenin on the speakers’ platform; who praised Blok for his realism and for his feeling of history, a quality inalienable from genius; why then did this singular poet, an intelligent man of profound feelings, and a truly brilliant translator (of Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra and Macbeth), why did this great poet who had attained such heights suddenly go and write Doctor Zbivago? The more so, considering that, like Blok, he was not a very good prose writer.

p In my opinion the main reason was that Pasternak came from that camp of pre-revolutionary Russian poets to whom any revolution, and more especially a socialist proletarian revolution, was an alien thing.

p Possibly, his need for historical associations found an outlet in his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe. But it was an 116 emergency exit. What he really sought was contact with Soviet reality.

p Am I a freak,
And does the good of millions
Mean not as much to me
As does the empty happiness
Of just a hundred odd?

p Pasternak addressed this question to his friend Boris Pilnyak in that decisive period when the first five-year plan was being completed and the second launched. That was the time when Ehrenburg wrote his novel On the Second Day and Valentin Katayev his Time, Forward!

p But, of course, Pasternak was not a freak and he understood that “stumbling blindly in the darkness, our ignorance would never see the light”. He understood everything, but his heart would not be reconciled to the application of force which is inevitable in any revolution, the more so a revolution that has triumphed and taken over the reins of state power. The state, as everyone knows, is an instrument of coercion which has been brilliantly shown by Lenin in his work The State and Revolution written shortly before the Revolution.

p Pasternak’s humanism was more of a feminine nature: passive and suffering. In this respect he was the exact opposite of Mayakovsky and Gorky. Thus he was never able to appreciate the humanism of revolution as such.

p He was ideologically unprepared to understand the principal aims of the revolution, and he wrote a novel permeated with the pathos of Christianity. It contains poetry too, whose authorship is attributed to the novel’s hero, Dr. Yuri Zhivago, who has suffered all the misadventures, political and personal, of the revolutionary years. The poetry is written mainly on New Testament themes.

p Lev Tolstoi’s “non-resistance to evil" idea also figures in Pasternak’s novel, but it is, alas, presented in a jumble with contrived scenes of “Bolshevik atrocities" in the manner of White emigre newspapers of forty years ago.

p We quote from his letter dated November 6, 1958, to the editors of Pravda: “When I saw the scale which the political campaign around my novel was assuming, I realised that awarding me the prize (the Nobel Prize—K.Z.) was a political step which resulted in these monstrous consequences, and I declined it of my own free will without pressure from anyone.

p “In my letter to N. S. Khrushchov I wrote that I was bound to Russia by ties of birth, life and work, and that it was unthinkable for me to leave it, and live in exile in a strange land.” Further on 117 he says: “...according to the conclusions drawn from the critical analysis of my novel it appears that I support the following erroneous views in my novel. Allegedly, I declare that any revolution is an historically unlawful thing, that the October Revolution was just such an unlawful event, that it brought grief to Russia and led the Russian successive intelligentsia to ruin.

p “It is obvious that I cannot endorse such declarations, exaggerated to the absurd. Still, my work which was awarded the Nobel Prize provided the pretext for such a regrettable interpretation, and this is the reason why I declined the prize.

p “If the publication of the book had been suspended, which I asked my publisher in Italy to do (in the other countries it was put out without my knowledge), I would probably have managed to amend it, at least in part. But the book has been printed and it is too late to talk about it now.”

p Pasternak had his novel published abroad, thereby evoking the indignation of the Soviet public.

p J. B. Priestley told me that many people in the West took it as an act of courage on Pasternak’s part. I do not agree. More likely, Pasternak did not quite realise what he was doing, because if he had really wanted to openly challenge Soviet public opinion he would not have declined the Nobel Prize or shown remorse, but would have left the Soviet Union.

p I have had to dwell on this story longer than it deserves. But what with the radio and the newspapers coming out in millions of copies, the political struggle between the two worlds may represent even a modest violet hiding in the shade of tall, forest grass as a sort of rocket shooting up into the sky.

p Pasternak himself deplored the consequences resulting from the publication of his novel. The pressure which allegedly was brought to bear on him had nothing to do with this: Pasternak was too big a man to be influenced in his opinions and actions by such a despicable thing as cowardice. I knew this remarkable man and poet too well to think so ill of him. His poetry and his life taken together make a wonderful chapter in the literature of our age.

Some of the pages in this chapter will perhaps be forgotten and the generations to come will neither understand nor appreciate them. But the fragrance of Pasternak’s poetry, his genius will be remembered for a long time to come.