Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak [Борис Леонидович Пастернак] (10 February 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet and writer famous for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. His first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988.

Quotes

Не спи, не спи, художник,
Не предавайся сну.
Ты – вечности заложник
У времени в плену.
- Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist,
  Don't give in to sleep.
  You are eternity's hostage
  A captive of time.
- Poem "Night" (Ночь), from When the Weather Clears (Kogda razgulyaetsya, 1957) — as quoted in One Less Hope: Essays on Twentieth-century Russian Poets (2006) by Constantin V. Ponomareff, p. 130

They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
- On Soviet bureaucrats, in LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.
- LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
- Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963) edited by George Plimpton.

Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one’s stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.
- As quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978)

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
- As quoted in Bridges to Infinity : The Human Side of Mathematics (1983) by Michael Guillen

Doctor Zhivago (1957)

*A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ...* he whispered to himself — the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Solovyov or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth.

Ch. 1, part 5

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

Ch. 1, part 5, said by Ivan Ivanovich

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats — any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death — then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don’t you see, this is just the point — what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.
- Book One, Ch. 2 : A Girl from a Different World, § 10, as translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958)
- Variant translations:
- I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the preacher who sacrifices himself. But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for me the main thing is that Christ speaks in parables from daily life, clarifying the truth with the light of everyday things. At the basis of this lies the thought that communion among mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.
  - Book One, Part 2 : A Girl from a Different World, § 10, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2010)
- I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
  - Paraphrase of the 1958 translation, as quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978)

A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ... he whispered to himself — the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.
- Ch. 3 section 10

Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.
- As translated by Richard McKane (1985)

И вот оказалось, что только жизнь, похожая на жизнь окружающих и среди нее бесследно тонущая, есть жизнь настоящая, что счастье обособленное не есть счастье...
- And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness...
- As quoted in The Reporter, Volume 19, 1958

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our souls exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in the mouth. It can't forever be violated with impunity.
- As quoted in "Boris Pasternak" in I.F. Stone's Weekly (3 November 1958), § "Words Which Apply to Us As Well As Russia"; later in The Best of I.F. Stone (2006), p. 43

The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.
- As quoted in "Boris Pasternak" in I.F. Stone's Weekly (3 November 1958), § "Words Which Apply to Us As Well As Russia"; later in The Best of I.F. Stone (2006), p. 43

Мое собственное сердце скрыло бы это от меня, потому что нелюбовь почти как убийство, и я никому не в силах была бы нанести этого удара.
- My own heart would have concealed it from me, for failure to love is almost like murder and I would have been incapable of inflicting such a blow on anyone.

I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

"How wonderful to be alive," he thought. "But why does it always hurt?"

If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.

Selected Poems (1983)

Nobel Prize

Like a beast in a pen, I’m cut off
From my friends, freedom, the Sun.
But the hunters are gaining ground;
I’ve nowhere else to run.

Am I a gangster or a murderer?
Of what crime do I stand
Condemned? I made the whole world weep
At the beauty of my land.

Even so, one step from my grave,
I believe that cruelty, spite,
The powers of darkness will in time
Be crushed by the spirit of light.

Quotes about Pasternak

I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came upon myself, was Russian literature. I've always felt very much enthralled to writers like Dostoevsky, especially, and Chekhov. In later years, modern Russian poets like Pasternak and Mandelstam and Akhmatova have meant a great deal to me. Poetry more than prose.
- Anita Desai In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock (1992)

To me encountering Cordwainer Smith's works was like a door opening. There is one story of his called "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" that was as important to me as reading Pasternak for the first time and realizing that one could write a novel the way he wrote Dr. Zhivago. There are these moments in most writers' careers when you discover that someone else has actually written down some of these things that have been going on in your own head; you realize that this isn't just a private experience.
- 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin

But I hope you know I go on about these things not simply to extol the virtues of my own country but to speak to the true greatness of the heart and soul of your land. Who, after all, needs to tell the land of Dostoyevsky about the quest for truth, the home of Kandinsky and Scriabin about imagination, the rich and noble culture of the Uzbek man of letters Alisher Navoi about beauty and heart? The great culture of your diverse land speaks with a glowing passion to all humanity. Let me cite one of the most eloquent contemporary passages on human freedom. It comes, not from the literature of America, but from this country, from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak, in the novel "Dr. Zhivago." He writes: "I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats -- any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death -- then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But this is just the point -- what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel, but an inward music -- the irresistible power of unarmed truth." The irresistible power of unarmed truth. Today the world looks expectantly to signs of change, steps toward greater freedom in the Soviet Union. We watch and we hope as we see positive changes taking place.
- Ronald Reagan, Moscow State University address, delivered 31 May 1988

The glass in the official picture was also being shattered by literary writers. Two Soviet accounts in particular captivated Western opinion. The poet Boris Pasternak wrote a novel, Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in Moscow but appeared abroad in translations from 1957. Its panoramic viewpoint on the civil war cast a shadow over the motives and practices of the early communists. This plunged Pasternak into political hot water and he had to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1958. His role as a leading critic of the Soviet regime was picked up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose later works were published in the West from the end of the 1960s. His documentary account of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, was a bestseller in 1974. It pulled no punches. Solzhenitsyn had talked to survivors of the camps and assembled such documentation as was available despite the censorship. The gruesome techniques of arrest, interrogation, ‘confession’ and forced labour were traced from the October Revolution. When he was deported from the USSR in 1974, Solzhenitsyn continued his campaign against the iniquities of communist repression. Every year, too, novels and poems by other writers were smuggled out of eastern Europe and China with searing messages about the behaviour of communist regimes.
All of us who are more or less heretical in our society are forced to live on its margin, grateful that we are able to speak (at the cost of abnormal exertions) to a small audience.
- Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (2009)
Pasternak has universal meaning, for he embodies the fight the artist and the seeker after truth must wage everywhere against official dogma and conformist pressures.
- I. F. Stone, in "Boris Pasternak" in I.F. Stone's Weekly (3 November 1958), § "Words Which Apply to Us As Well As Russia"; later in The Best of I.F. Stone (2006), p. 43

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