Boris Pasternak: “The unexpected, the greatest gift that life can give us”

“The immediate language of feelings is pictorial”

Letters from Vienna #90

Boris Pasternak: “The unexpected, the greatest gift that life can give us”

“The immediate language of feelings is pictorial”

From Boris Pasternak’s point of view there was nothing particularly extraordinary about him becoming a poet or about his own poetry. His father was a painter, his mother a pianist, one of his earliest childhood memories was of Leo Tolstoy, and, in 1959, shortly before his death, he confessed to being nothing other than an epigone of Rilke[1]. Of the difference between himself and the great Austrian poet he wrote: “The diversity of languages increases the apparent similarity between the works, ideas and tendencies expressed in one language and another. The fuzziness inherent in the spiritual is increased by the imprecise distance between languages...making comparison difficult...”[2]

At the age of thirteen he experienced a calling to become a composer (it was for him a dark, irrational and unsettling force[3]) and was subsequently encouraged in his efforts by no lesser than Scriabin himself. After years of intensive study, he switched to philosophy and, after a dramatic, emotional crisis, abandoned that in turn for poetry.[4]

Not long after he began to write he got caught up in the excitement of Futurism: “It was the young art of Scriabin, Blok, Komissárshevskaja, Bélyis – avant-garde, touching, original art. And it was so impressive that…you wanted to redo it from scratch, just more nimbly, more fervidly, and more forcefully. You wanted to shout it out again in one go, which was unthinkable without passion, but the passion galloped and something new was born. But the new didn’t come about to replace the old, as one is usually inclined to assume, but quite the opposite, through enthusiastic imitation of the model.”[5]

Of all Russian Futurist poets, the one who fascinated him the most was Vladimir Mayakovsky: “The time and the common influences brought me closer to Mayakovsky. We had some things in common. I noticed that…Without being able to name it, I decided to give up what drew me close to him; I renounced the romantic manner. This is how the unromantic poetics of “Over the Barriers” (1916) came about.”[6]

Within a year he’d gone his own way: “When “My Sister, Life” (1917) was written…I became completely indifferent to the name of the force that had created the book, because it was immeasurably much greater than I and the poetic concepts around me.”[7]

In contrast to many of his contemporaries he wasn’t merely interested in clever word play:

“I was always of the opinion that the music of the word isn’t an acoustic phenomenon and doesn’t consist in the euphony of absolute vowels and consonants, but in the relation between meaning and sound value of a statement…I was constantly concerned about the content, my dream was that the poem itself contained something, a new thought or a new image.”[8]

For Pasternak: “The immediate language of feelings is pictorial and nothing can replace it.

We stop seeing reality. It appears to us under a new category. In our eyes, this category represents a state of nature and not the state in which we find ourselves. Except for this state, there is nothing in the world that is unnamed. It alone has no name. It alone is new. We try to name it; the result is art. Once the characteristics of this state are put on paper, the characteristics of life become characteristics of art. And these can be seen much more clearly than those. There are appropriate terms for naming them. These procedures are called artifices.”[9]

The Bolshevik putsch of 1917 further widened the gap between Pasternak and Mayakovky: “I didn’t understand his propagandistic zeal,” Pasternak confessed, “I didn’t understand the violent way in which he forced himself and his companions into public consciousness, the spirit of camaraderie and brotherhood, the subordination to the voice of topicality.”[10]

The fact that Mayakovky subordinated his art to politics was undoubtedly one of the reasons he committed suicide in April 1930, leaving Pasternak Russia’s pre-eminent poet, a position which allowed him some leeway in a period of totalitarian dictatorship, repression, and mass murder. Unlike many of his contemporaries he wasn’t killed, forced into exile or sent to a concentration camp.

“In the course of the 1930s” Ronald Hingley tells us “literature was subjected to increasing regimentation as part of the general tightening of totalitarian controls… Pasternak’s reaction to this development was typical: at a literary conference of 1931 he strongly protested against those who kept shouting that poets must “do this, do that!” As for Socialist Realism, he largely ignored the concept as beneath contempt, though he once described it as masking “everything that is pompous, pretentious, rhetorical, without substance, useless in human terms and morally suspect.””[11]

Pasternak lamented: “One constantly shouts at the poet: you should do this, you must not do that. But one must first speak of what the poet needs. The epoch is there for the people, not the people for the epoch... You can’t demand anything from a writer, neither in terms of form nor content. One cannot say to an expectant mother: give birth to a girl and not a boy...”[12]

Pasternak hated nothing more than the idea of the “functional man” or “functional poet”: “Poetry is being spoken of…as if it were the work of some constantly functioning apparatus, the production of which would be directly proportional to the work expended. I have to think of a water pump, which despite all efforts still doesn’t satisfy the general needs.”[13]

Art was for him: “the unexpected, the greatest gift that life can give us...”[14]

At the time the horrors of Soviet Russia, especially the genocide in the Ukraine, weighed heavily: “In April 1935 Pasternak fell seriously ill with a form of nervous breakdown of which the main symptom was insomnia. “For a whole year I couldn’t sleep.” He told Ivinskaya (his mistress) that the affliction was caused by a tour of the collective farms which he had undertaken, like so many other writers of the period, on the assumption that it would lead to a book proclaiming the triumphs of Stalin’s agricultural policies…In any case what he witnessed was misery beyond description, “a calamity so terrible that…the mind simply couldn’t take it in.”[15]

Crime piled up on crime and he couldn’t help but react to it. Nevertheless: “Disillusion with the new society came over him suddenly, according to his own account. “Everything snapped inside me in 1936 when all those terrible trials began, instead of the cruelty season ending, as I had expected in 1935. My identification of myself with the period turned into opposition which I did not conceal. I took refuge in translation. My creative work stopped.”[16]

“In April 1937 he moved further towards open defiance of the political control system by withholding his endorsement from the era’s latest heresy hunt. Its target was a recent book published in Paris, “Retour de l’U.R.S.S.”, in which the French author André Gide had expressed disillusion with the Soviet Union. Pasternak was expected to append his signature to a collective statement denouncing Gide, but refused on the ground that he had not read the offending work…His next act of defiance was to refuse his signature to a collective letter reviling Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals whose execution for treason had been announced in the press on 11 June 1937…His indiscretions were piling up, and it seemed astonishing that he did not disappear forever in the archipelago of Stalin’s labor camps of the late 1930s, as happened to so many other authors. Mandelstam, Babel and Pilnyak were the most prominent among those writing in Russian. Other casualties of the period included Pasternak’s Georgian friends Tabidze and Yashvili, who both came to grief in August 1937.”[17]

“As the year 1937 rolled on, so too did Pasternak’s indiscretions. In the autumn he denounced the arrests and executions of the period in private conversation with a friend on the Gogol Boulevard in Moscow. He also wrote to commiserate with his cousin Olga over the arrest of a close relative, regretting his inability to help.”[18]

It is hardly surprising that in 1939 “he came within a hair’s breadth of arrest”.[19]

“Only in 1946 did Pasternak assume a stable political standpoint, one of resolute opposition to the system created and bequeathed by Stalin. He was to devote himself, during his fourteen remaining years, to mocking and discrediting that system through which such seemingly limited means open to him…His posture was that of…an exceptionally small sovereign state which has quietly withdrawn diplomatic recognition from an exceptionally large one…”[20]

Perhaps this is the only sensible position a writer can take in the present era. There is little point in engaging directly in politics on account of the fact that the vast majority of long-established parties are horribly and irredeemably corrupt. All one can say is: “Yes, my time is dominated by lies but not through me.”

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[1] p. 29 Boris Pasternak In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Michel Aucouturier

[2] pp. 29-30 Ibid

[3] p.17 Ibid

[4] p.36 Ibid

[5] p.39 Ibid

[6] p.47 Ibid

[7] p.53 Ibid

[8] p.65 Ibid

[9] p.68 Ibid

[10] p.81 Ibid

[11] pp.118-119 Pasternak, Ronald Hingley

[12] pp.105-107 Boris Pasternak In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Michel Aucouturier

[13] p. 107 Ibid

[14] p. 107 Ibid

[15] p.121 Pasternak, Ronald Hingley

[16] p.131 Ibid

[17] p.132 Ibid

[18] p.133 Ibid

[19] p.136 Ibid

[20] p. 155 Ibid