This is a contribution from the Masterpiece Theater. It gives more information about Mr. Boris L. Pasternak
and I’m ELHarris, an interest party of some things “Pasternak,” why? What could the connection be? I don’t know, perhaps it’s this print that we found in our warehouse. Of course the name, for me, brought my memories of another time in history in our country of turmoil, or war, or indecision. Reading was my escape to the another revolution in a far away land.

Then I saw the movie with Mr. Omar Sharif and crew and what a spectacular extravaganza that was, even if it did not stay true to the book. Of course not, there was no film that would out real my imaginative youthful mind. The film, if you have the opportunity — and your not a reader, is more than entertaining. The costumes and vastness of Russia will swallow you whole..

Do you think that because we were in revolt here in America would be another reason that I was so glued to that book, probably. Could it be the romance set in violent times or the media hype? Perhaps. I just know that is has resurface in the South America and the resurgence is just as thrilling.

While he drew well, Pasternak’s first love was botany and his second, music. Inspired by Scriabin, Pasternak studied composition for six years, from which three of his finished piano pieces have survived. Pasternak entered the Moscow Conservatory, but dropped out in 1910 because he lacked confidence in his technical skill. He entered the Law Faculty at Moscow University and later studied philosophy at Marburg University in Germany. Ultimately he gave up his academic career, returning to Russia in 1913 to pursue his poetry. He would not find success for another ten years.

Unable to serve in the army because of a fall from a horse that left him with one leg shorter than the other, Pasternak spent World War I working as a clerk at a chemical works to the far east of Moscow. Pasternak’s poetic debut was Twin in the Stormclouds (1913), published by Lirika, a cooperative publishing enterprise he formed with a group of seven fellow poets. When Lirikia disbanded, Pasternak briefly joined the Futurist group Tsentrifuga, which jettisoned tradition in favor of innovation in style and subject with poets Sergei Bobrov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Though influenced by topical urban, symbolist, and futurist elements, Pasternak’s early poetry was distinguished by its alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, and use of metaphor.

He wrote two books in 1917, My Sister Life and Themes and Variations. The Bolshevik Revolution and World War I would delay their appearance for five years, during which he translated plays by Heinrich von Kleist and Ben Johnson and poems by the German expressionists. When it was finally published in 1922, My Sister Life secured his place among the leading writers of the time. Its lush imagery and idiomatic language contrasted with its disciplined quatrain form. That same year Pasternak married Art Institute student Evgeniya Lurye and brought her to Berlin to stay with his family, who would relocate there permanently. This was the last time Pasternak would ever see them, as his repeated applications for permission to visit were denied. In 1923, the couple began their own family with a son, Evgenii. Pasternak finally published Themes and Variations that same year.
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Although Pasternak initially welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, the brutality of new government came to horrify him, a reversal acknowledged in his collection Aerial Ways (1924), which showed his growing disregard of politics as a primary human and artistic concern. Vladimir Lenin’s new Soviet government maintained that art should motivate political change while Pasternak insisted that art focus on eternal truths rather than historical or societal concerns. For his stance, he became a silent hero among Russian intellectuals. Living in an overcrowded communal flat in Moscow, he continued to write short poems, but came to believe that poets and artists had no assured place in society and could only live as outsiders. During the 1920s his poetry turned from the lyric to narrative and epic forms, addressing the 1905 Russian Revolution in Sublime Malady (1924), Lieutenant Schmidt (1927), and The Year 1905 (1927).

In 1924 Lenin died and the struggle for succession ensued. In 1928, Stalin emerged victorious; Trotsky was driven into exile and one by one Stalin’s other rivals were eliminated. While the most sweeping changes in Russia occurred in agriculture, which was collectivized, a clampdown occurred in all fields, including that of literature. By 1932, the doctrine of Socialist Realism, the principle that the arts should glorify the ideals of Communism, was established. Independent artistic groups were disbanded in 1932 and the new Union of Soviet Writers assumed control of literary affairs, imposing adherence to socialist realism.

Pasternak’s first foray into prose, Spektorsky (1931), showed scenes from the life of a young poet, who shared the author’s own historical passivity and fatalism in the face of the Revolution. While many writers and artists became despondent and felt the temptation to commit suicide, Pasternak believed that poets must continue working when art and even spiritualism were no longer secure. He expressed this theory through the metaphor of “second birth,” the title of his 1932 poetry collection. Pasternak has been criticized for self-centeredness, a sentiment embodied in the popular saying, “Everything changes under our zodiac, only Pasternak remains Pasternak.” While he was not oblivious to the terror going on around him, he was resistant to its impact on his work, hoping to create something transcendent.