By Boris Pasternak

Translated by Don Mager

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) achieved international celebrity status in 1957 with the Italian publication of the novel Doctor Zhivago that Soviet publishers has approved then rejected for publication.  Ostensibly the manuscript reached Italy without Pasternak’s approval but his desire to see it in print masked complicity in the complex events that led to the publication.  The novel was an overnight bestseller and the Soviet authorities were outraged.   He was awarded the Nobel Prize the next year but was pressured by the government to decline it.  British and American press reaction fueled this incident of Cold War propaganda.  He died two years later partly as a result of stress.  Click here for a PDF file of my selection of translations.

But Pasternak had been a leading Soviet writer for almost 40 years.  He’d been on the Nobel nomination list several times going back to the 1940s.  His various roles in developing Soviet policies towards literature and in opposing them shape a moving narrative of artistic engagement with political realities.  His personal life was passionate and sometimes impulsive with dramatic twists in friendships, loyalists, perceived betrayals, moments of great personal risk and courage, moments of apparent cowardice and timidity, marriages and mistresses—throughout which he constantly strove to write with integrity, originality and relevance. 

Landmarks in his writing career are:

In 1921 after a long gestation and intense revision process, My Sister—Life was published.  It has been described as the most “perfect” volume of poems in Russian literature and  revolutionized Russian poetry. It made Pasternak the model for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva and others.

1923 saw publication of Themes and Variations, less consistently accomplished but including many remarkable and often anthologized poems.

In 1931 and 1932 two prose autobiographical works presented evocative portrayals of his artistic and intellectual development Safe Conduct (1931) and Second Birth (1932).      Although he had written three long narrative poems (novels in verse) about historical events related to the Revolutionary Russia (Nineteen Fifteen (1925-6), Lieutenant Schmidt (1926), Spectorsky (1931)), Doctor Zhivago (1957) was his only prose novel.  It was an international best seller and has had a number of screen adaptations.  First was a 1959 Brazilian television series.  Then, the 1965 film adaptation by David Lean, featuring Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara was commercially successful and won five Oscars, but was a critical failure. Though faithful to the novel's plot, depictions of several characters were changed. A British televison serial was broadcast by ITV in the UK in November 2002 and on Masterpeice Theatre in the US in November 2003.  A 2006 Russian mini-series produced by Mosfilm runs 8 hours and 26 minutes and is by far the most faithful film version of the novel.

When the Weather Clears (1959) brought together poems from his final years.

Fluent in German, French, Georgian and English, Pasternak was an indefatigable translator.  His versions of Sando Petöfi, Johann Wolfgan von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Taras Shevenko, Nikoloz Bararashvili and Rabindranat Tagoe are highly admired.  His translations of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Henry IV Parts I and II, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear) remain deeply popular with Russian audiences because of their colloquial, modernized dialogues.  His translation of Goethe’s Faust (1950), although controversial at the time, has established itself as the standard performance version in Russia.

These selections:

            The 16 poems that I’ve translated come from various periods in his career but do not attempt to offer a representative survey.  My choices are more or less random; however, I believe each poem has its own astonishing qualities. Click here for a PDF file of my selection of translations.

            Pasternak never affiliated himself strongly with any of the modernist schools in Russia.  His close friendship with Maiakovskii and the Moscow Futurists and his willingness early in his career to perform at some of their events is congruent with his interest in imagery from machines and urban reality and his distinctive vitalism.  However his way of animating nature and weather marks one of the trademarks of his uniqueness from his earliest to his late work.  Early poems from My Sister—Life and Theme and Variations exemplify these traits: “In Remembrance of the Demon,” “There Was,” Margarete,” “Mephistopheles,” “Snowstorm” and others.

            Several of my choices show Pasternak’s deep personal regard for other poets, whether the occasion was their fraught relations with the Soviet state “Maiakovskii” and “To Anna Akhmatova” or their shocking deaths “Death of a Poet” and “In Memory of Marina Tsvetaeva.”  “Wind (Four Fragment about Blok),” written late in Pasternak’s            career, is an affirmation of the poet’s role as transcendent of political dogma.

            Also two late poems from the volume As the Weather Clears reflect on his celebrity in the minefield of international Cold War ideological jockeying and propaganda.

            My hope is that some readers will be afforded a strong whiff of this poet’s towering achievement through this selection of translations.