PASTERNAK, Boris (Leonidovich)

Nationality: Russian. Born: Moscow, 29 January 1890. Education: Moscow Fifth Gymnasium, 1901-08; University of Moscow, 1909-13; also studied at University of Marburg, 1912. Family: Married 1) Evgeniia Vladimirovna Lourie in 1922, one son; 2) Zinaida Nikolaevna Neuhaus in 1934, one son. Career: Tutor; worked in management in chemical factories in the Urals, 1915-17; librarian, Soviet Ministry of Education, 1918; official duties for Union of Writers from 1932, but expelled, 1958. Awards: Medal for Valiant Labor, 1946; Nobel prize for literature (refused), 1958. Died: 30 May 1960.

Publications

Collections

Sochineniia, edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov. 3 vols., 1961.

Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, edited by L. A. Ozerov. 1965.

Stikhi, edited by Z. and E. Pasternak. 1966.

Collected Short Prose, edited by Christopher Barnes. 1977.

The Voice of Prose, edited by Christopher Barnes. 1986; 2nd vol., as People and Propositions, edited by Barnes, 1990.

Short Stories

Detstvo Liuvers. 1922; as Childhood, 1941; as The Childhood of Luvers, in Collected Prose Works, 1945.

Rasskazy [Stories]. 1925; as Vozdushnye puti [Aerial Ways], 1933.

Povest' [A Tale]. 1934; as The Last Summer, 1959.

Zhenia's Childhood and Other Stories. 1982.

Novel

Doktor Zhivago. 1957; as Doctor Zhivago, 1958.

Play

Slepaia krasavitsa. 1969; as The Blind Beauty, 1969.

Poetry

Bliznets v tuchakh [Twin in the Clouds]. 1914.

Poverkh bar'erov [Above the Barriers]. 1917.

Sestra moia zhizn': Leto 1917 goda. 1922; as Sister My Life: Summer, 1917, 1967; complete version, as My Sister—Life, 1983.

Temy i variatsii [Themes and Variations]. 1923.

Deviat'sot piati god [Nineteen Five]. 1927.

Spektorskii. 1931.

Vtoroe rozhdenie [Second Birth]. 1932.

Stikhotvoreniia [Verse]. 1933; revised edition, 1935-1936.

Poemy [Poems]. 1933.

Na rannikh poezdakh [On Early Trains]. 1943.

Zemnoi prostor [Earth's Vastness]. 1945.

Selected Poems. 1946.

Poems. 1959.

The Poetry. 1959.

In the Interlude: Poems 1945-1960. 1962.

Fifty Poems. 1963.

The Poems of Doctor Zhivago. 1965.

Selected Poems. 1983.

Other

Karusel [The Carousel] (for children). 1925.

Zverinets [The Menagerie] (for children). 1929.

Okhrannaia gramota. 1931; as The Safe Conduct, in Collected Prose Works, 1945.

Knizhka dlia detei [Little Book for Children]. 1933.

Izbrannie perevody [Selected Translations]. 1940.

Collected Prose Works, edited by Stefan Schimanski. 1945.

Selected Writings. 1949.

Safe Conduct: An Early Autobiography, and Other Works. 1959.

Prose and Poems, edited by Stefan Schimanski. 1959.

An Essay in Autobiography. 1959; as I Remember, 1959; partialRussian text, as Liudi i polozheniia, in Novy Mir, January 1967.

Letters to Georgian Friends, edited by David Magarshack. 1968.

Marina Cvetaeva, Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke: Lettere 1926. 1980.

Perepiska s Olga Freidenberg, edited by Elliott Mossman. 1981; asCorrespondence with Olga Freydenberg, 1982.

Translator, Gamlet prints datskii, by Shakespeare. 1941.

Translator, Romeo i Dzhuletta, by Shakespeare. 1943.

Translator, Antonii i Kleopatra, by Shakespeare. 1944.

Translator, Otello, venetsy ansky maur, by Shakespeare. 1945.

Translator, Genrikh chetverty [Henry IV, parts I and II], by Shakespeare. 1948.

Translator, Korol' Lir [King Lear], by Shakespeare. 1949.

Translator, Faust (part 1), by Goethe. 1950; complete version, 1953.

Translator, Vitiaz ianoshch, by Sándor Petofi. 1950.

Translator, Makbet, in Tragedii, by Shakespeare. 1951.

Translator, Mariia Stiuart, by Schiller. 1958.

Editor and translator, with Nikolai Tikhonov, Gruzinskie liriki. 1935.

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Bibliography:

Boris Pasternak: A Reference Guide by Munir Sendich, 1994.

Critical Studies:

Pasternak's Lyric: A Study of Sound and Imagery by Dale L. Plank, 1966; Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago by Mary F. and Paul Rowland, 1967; Pasternak: Modern Judgements edited by Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone, 1969; Pasternak by J. W. Dyck, 1972; The Poetic World of Pasternak by Olga R. Hughes, 1974; Themes and Variations in Pasternak's Poetics by Krystyna Pomarska, 1975; Pasternak: A Critical Study by Henry Gifford, 1977; Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Victor Erlich, 1978; Pasternak: His Life and Art by Guy de Mallac, 1982; Pasternak: A Biography by Ronald Hingley, 1983; Pasternak: A Literary Biography by Christopher Barnes, 1989; The Ode and the Odic: Essays on Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky by Ilia Kutik, 1994; Pasternak's Short Fiction and the Cultural Vanguard by Larissa Rudova, 1994; Boris Pasternak and the Tradition of German Romanticism by Karen Evans-Romaine, 1997; Understanding Boris Pasternak by Larissa Rudova, 1997.

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To Russian readers Boris Pasternak is best known as a lyric poet and verse translator (Shakespeare, Goethe's Faust, and lyrics by various European poets). To a world readership he is known mainly for the novel Doktor Zhivago (Doctor Zhivago). But he also produced a dozen or so masterly and idiosyncratic works of short prose that occupy a unique place in his output and in the history of the genre in Russia. In addition to the examples written and published between the mid-1910s and 1930s, a score or more (sometimes lengthy) early prose fragments still await publication and translation.

Surprisingly, all but one of the published short fiction works are "fragmentary." Though usually complete in themselves, they are usually part of a larger novelistic conception. Pasternak's composition and publication of short prose diminished in the late 1930s, after which he worked with more successful persistence on the novel Doctor Zhivago. In the words of Nikolai Vilmont, Pasternak's short prose thus has the status, perhaps, of Leonardo's cartoons. Characters, events, and situations also often migrate between this prose fiction and Pasternak's lyric verse and autobiographies, as well as the completed novel.

Almost throughout his career Pasternak worked simultaneously on poetry and prose, regarding them as "two polarities, indivisible one from the other." But his first successes were as a poet, and his earlier prose style—up to about 1930—has characteristic "poetic" qualities: convoluted style, high incidence of metaphor and impressionistic imagery, mercurial changes of voice and narrative point of view, and a penchant for description and "atmosphere" rather than character-drawing and storytelling. The central characters are also usually authorial self-projections—as poets or musicians; and settings are also often identifiable with Pasternak's own familiar Muscovite intelligentsia milieu.

Although "The Mark of Apelles" and "Aerial Ways" reach pointed conclusions, the plotline of most of Pasternak's stories is open-ended. Structural coherence is usually derived by use of situational rhyme, such as a situation or motif followed by its own repetition in varied form.

Pasternak's three earliest stories reflect the author's attempt to escape the allurement of romantic fantasizing or spectacular self-dramatization that typified much contemporary art. In "The Mark of Apelles" (1915) the posturing poet Relinquimini is rendered stupid by a rival, who answers his challenge to a literary contest by transferring it to the realm of real life and by seducing Relinquimini's mistress and muse. In "Suboctave Story" (1917) the organist Knauer is ruled by romantic inspiration as he improvises, and he unwittingly causes the death of his son, trapped in the organ's internal mechanism; the crime of serving only art causes Knauer's final ignominious dismissal by outraged German provincial Burgers. "Letters from Tula" (1918) introduces a young poet who battles unsuccessfully with the vulgarity of his own verbal excesses, while a more seasoned elderly actor achieves a complete "silence within the soul," not by self-projection but by self-sacrifice to the demands of a theatrical role.

"Aerial Ways" (1924) is Pasternak's most consciously modernistic prose, and until the appearance of Doctor Zhivago it was his only work dealing with postrevolutionary Russia. Stylistically, and in theme, it has some common ground with Zamiatin's contemporary "A Story about the Most Important Thing," particularly in its macabre imagery, leitmotif usage, rapid switches of voice between Tolstoiian omniscience, mystification and explicit tantalizing of the reader, and its unequivocal picture of dehumanization by the forces of a Marxist-inspired revolution.

Apart from the novel fragments of the 1930s, Pasternak's last important short story, or novella, appeared in 1929. Its material is closely bound up with the earlier published "Chapters from a Tale" (1922) and the narrative poem Spektorskii. Its Russian title, Povest'—meaning "the tale" or "the story" (usually known in English in George Reavey's none too accurate rendering as "The Last Summer")—not only describes the genre of the work but also refers to the central character's major undertaking: the writing of a story. The hero, Sergei, is another self-embodiment of the author, and the story takes place in the pre-World War I Muscovite setting familiar to Pasternak. He is a budding author and plans to write a work of prose, part of which is actually presented—a story within a story (see the later verses of Doctor Zhivago contained in the novel). He intends to use the fictional author's artistic earnings in a charitable bid to rescue all the suffering and exploited women of Moscow.

The new element of self-sacrifice and moral commitment by the artist, first registered in "The Story," became a constant feature of all Pasternak's subsequent writings, and it laid the first obvious basis for the strong religious strain in his later work. Another feature of "The Story" was the clearer texture of its prose. Less vigorously metaphoric and not so consciously virtuosic, Pasternak's style was approaching what he himself later designated as a form of "realism" whose best fulfillment came, however, in the novel Doctor Zhivago.

—Christopher Barnes

See the essay on "Zhenia Luvers' Childhood."