A Deluge of Images and Feelings

Boris Pasternak, born January 29, 1890

Boris Pasternak was the son of an artist and a pianist, and in his youth he aspired to be a musician. Instead, he wound up writing poetry that painted stunning images while being exceptionally musical.

Fellow poet Osip Mandelstam, wrote of Pasternak:

“This burning salt of certain language, this whistling, clicking, rustling, sparkling, splash, the fullness of sound, the fullness of life, the deluge of images and feelings spring to life with unprecedented force in Pasternak’s poetry… Reading Pasternak’s poetry is like rinsing your throat, invigorating your breathing, renewing your lungs: poetry like that must be effective against tuberculosis.”

Almost all of Pasternak’s relatives left Russia in the 1920s, but he remained. Amazingly, he was officially recognized and allowed to publish, although he never made it into the top ranks of Soviet writers. He was a delegate to the first Soviet writers congress, and in 1935, by which time foreign travel was banned for virtually all Soviet citizens, he traveled to Paris for the anti-fascist International Congress for the Defense of Culture. Most surprising of all, Stalin telephoned Pasternak at one point to ask him what he thought of Mandelstam, who had just been arrested. For the rest of his life Pasternak was tormented by the thought that, utterly stunned by the call, he had not done a good job of arguing the brilliant poet’s case.

Somehow Pasternak, a man not quite “of this world,” whose thoughts tended to reside on some higher plane, far away from immediate and practical reality, managed to survive the brutal Stalin era. He did write a few rapturous poems in praise of Stalin (most likely sincerely, like everything else he did), but such poems were no guarantee of survival, as many learned the hard way. Furthermore, Pasternak took the risk of interceding on behalf of the persecuted and helping some deemed personae non grata by the authorities. Try as she might, his conformist wife could not persuade him to behave otherwise.

Beginning in the late 1930s, Pasternak was subjected to increasing criticism and it became harder for him to publish, but he was allowed to live in peace in the cottage he had been given by the state in the suburban writers community, Peredelkino, where he primarily worked on translations (including Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare). Stalinist oppression raged around him but left him untouched. The same could not be said of his lover, Olga Ivinskaya, who was arrested in 1949 while pregnant with Pasternak’s child. She miscarried while in the Gulag.

Anna Akhmatova on Pasternak:

Endowed with something like eternal childhood,
As generous and keen-eyed as the stars,
Heir to the earth, he did all that he could
To share its wonders so they would be ours.

Он награжден каким-то вечным детством,
Той щедростью и зоркостью светил,
И вся земля была его наследством,
А он ее со всеми разделил.

It was as if this man, inept in matters of ordinary life and short of the skills needed for survival, for the quotidian, occupied some faraway, mysterious world of poetry and music. Although he seemed to understand nothing of politics and history, he wrote a novel that captured Russia’s world, Russia’s revolution, and Russia’s fate with amazing clarity. He saw history not as a historian would, but as a philosopher, as a poet.

In the end it wasn’t Stalinism, but the much milder regime of Nikita Khrushchev that caused him the greatest suffering. When the novel he labored over for ten torturous years was rejected by Soviet journals, the text made its way to Europe (with Pasternak’s foreknowledge and assent). After being published first in Italy, Doctor Zhivago sent shockwaves around the globe as it came out in one language after another (including a European edition published in Russian with CIA backing), bringing its author great acclaim – and turning his life topsy-turvy. Not only was he forced to turn down the Nobel Prize awarded him in 1958, a year after the novel was first published, but he was subjected to a hateful smear campaign in the press that gave rise to the cliché, “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I will say…” Many respected writers soiled what had been sterling reputations by giving in to pressure to denounce him at compulsory meetings.

Aleksandr Galich, reflecting back on the 1958 vote by the Union of Soviet Writers to expel Pasternak after the poet’s death:

No, it wasn’t a candle.
An array of bright lights!
The executioner’s glasses
Sparked with delight.
They yawned in their seats,
They were bored in their seats
Goodness, what’s the big deal?
Did he die in a prison?
Did he die in Suchan?*
Was he sent to be shot?
There was no crown of thorns,
Was he stretched on the rack?
Just a smack in the face
By a fair show of hands!
And the tipsy, slurred words:
“What for?” “Who’s it now?”
And the smacking of snacking
And the low roar of laughing.
Let’s remember that laugh,
The bored yawns! Every name!
Let us never forget
Every hand that was raised!

Нет, никакая не свеча
– Горела люстра!
Очки на морде палача
Сверкали шустро!
А зал зевал, а зал скучал
– Мели, Емеля!
Ведь не в тюрьму и не в Сучан,
Не к высшей мере!
И не к терновому венцу
Колесованьем,
А как поленом по лицу
– Голосованьем!
И кто-то, спьяну, вопрошал:
– За что? Кого там?
И кто-то жрал, и кто-то ржал
Над анекдотом...
Мы не забудем этот смех
И эту скуку!
Мы – поименно! – вспомним всех,
Кто поднял руку!..

The vicious baiting to which Pasternak was subjected late in life undoubtedly hastened its end, but his death did not put a stop to the persecution. Two and half months later, Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter Irina Yemelyanova were sent to a camp for “currency speculation.” Another 30 years would pass before the international bestseller Doctor Zhivago would be published in Pasternak’s native land (not counting homemade samizdat editions).

In the Soviet Union, Pasternak’s books of poetry were treasured rarities that fetched a high price on the black market. Lovers of his verse made pilgrimages to his grave in Peredelkino.

From an interview with poet Andrei Voznesensky:

Who, in your view, has come out of Pasternak’s overcoat?*

“He didn’t have an overcoat, but there isn’t a single poet who wouldn’t fall right out of the sleeve of his raincoat.”

Joseph Brodsky on Pasternak’s influence:

Nothing shaped us – me at least – like Frost, Tsvetayeva, Cavafy, Rilke, Akhmatova, and Pasternak. Until we kick the bucket, they will always be our contemporaries. So long as we’re alive. I think the poet’s influence – this emanation or radiation – extends over a generation or two.

* A reference to the famous quote attributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, about Gogol’s influence on Russian writers: “We all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.”