Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (????? ?????????? ?????????) (February 10, 1890 – May 30, 1960) was a Russian poet and writer best known in the West for his monumental tragic novel on Soviet Russia, Doctor Zhivago (1957). It is as a poet, however, that he is most celebrated in Russia. My Sister Life, written by Pasternak in 1917, is arguably the most influential collection of poetry published in Russian in the 20th century.

"Second Birth"

By 1932, Pasternak strikingly reshaped his style to make it acceptable to Soviet public and printed the new collection of poems aptly entitled The Second Birth. Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book alienated the core of Pasternak's refined audience abroad. He simplified his style even further for the next collection of patriotic verse, Early Trains (1943), which prompted Nabokov to describe Pasternak as a "weeping Bolshevik" and "Emily Dickinson in trousers".

Related Topics:
1932 - Emily Dickinson

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During the great purges of the later 1930s, Pasternak became progressively disillusioned with the Communist ideals. Reluctant to publish his own poetry, he turned to translating Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear), Goethe (Faust), Rilke (Requiem fur eine Freundin), Paul Verlaine, and Georgian poets favoured by Stalin. Pasternak's translations of Shakespeare have proved popular with Russian public on account of their colloquial, modernised dialogues, but the critics accused him of "pasternakizing" the English poet. Although he was widely panned for excessive subjectivism, they say that Stalin crossed Pasternak's name off an arrest list during the purges, quoted as saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller".

Related Topics:
Shakespeare - Hamlet - Macbeth - King Lear - Goethe - Faust - Rilke - Paul Verlaine - Georgia - Stalin - Purges

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