I Remember

by Boris Pasternak

Book by Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich

Genres: Russia, Memoir, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow to talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy's works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Though his parents were both Jewish, they became Christianized, first as Russian Orthodox and later as Tolstoyan Christians. Pasternak's education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer Scriabin, Pasternak took up the study of musical composition for six years from 1904 to 1910. By 1912 he had renounced music as his calling in life and went to the University of Marburg, Germany, to study philosophy. After four months there and a trip to Italy, he returned to Russia and decided to dedicate himself to literature.

Pasternak's first books of verse went unnoticed. With My Sister Life, 1922, and Themes and Variations, 1923, the latter marked by an extreme, though sober style, Pasternak first gained a place as a leading poet among his Russian contemporaries. In 1924 he published Sublime Malady, which portrayed the 1905 revolt as he saw it, and The Childhood of Luvers, a lyrical and psychological depiction of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood. A collection of four short stories was published the following year under the title Aerial Ways. In 1927 Pasternak again returned to the revolution of 1905 as a subject for two long works: "Lieutenant Schmidt", a poem expressing threnodic sorrow for the fate of the Lieutenant, the leader of the mutiny at Sevastopol, and "The Year 1905", a powerful but diffuse poem which concentrates on the events related to the revolution of 1905. Pasternak's reticent autobiography, Safe Conduct, appeared in 1931, and was followed the next year by a collection of lyrics, Second Birth, 1932. In 1935 he published translations of some Georgian poets and subsequently translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and Ben Jonson, and poems by Petöfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley, and others. In Early Trains, a collection of poems written since 1936, was published in 1943 and enlarged and reissued in 1945 as Wide Spaces of the Earth. In 1957 Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak's only novel - except for the earlier "novel in verse", Spektorsky (1926) - first appeared in an Italian translation and has been acclaimed by some critics as a successful attempt at combining lyrical-descriptive and epic-dramatic styles.

Pasternak lived in Peredelkino, near Moscow, until his death in 1960.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overwhelmingly know for Dr Z, most readers do not realize Pasternak was a leading Russian Symbolist poet in his youth. Or that for about 15 yrs he did not write anything at all, he just translated foreign works into Russian. Then Dr Z and this short "Sketch for an Autobiography" came out about 1957 and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is an intellectual memoir, and thankfully translator David Magarshack includes voluminous notes at the back on who the many artists he mentions are and their role in late 19th/early 20th C Russian arts. Also of interest is this is a "reload", Pasternak had written his autobiographical "Safe Passage" (next on my reading list) back in the '20's, a book he here tries to disown as filled w/ "certain mannerisms". Essentially the early years of the Soviet Experiment were filled w/ avant-garde art which was accepted and supported (just think of some of those early Soviet film makers like Eisenstein!). He is now writing in the age of "Social Realism" and Siberian "re-education" camps. At only about 100 pages this "sketch" ends at the Revolution. This is an excellent introduction to early 20th C Russian avant-garde art and intellectual history. And it gives those of us who have only read (or seen as a movie) Dr Z an idea about the author's early artistic roots, which were so different from that historical novel. From about 1932 Pasternak wrote very little, and other than his numerous poems and prose poems before that year he only wrote about 4 short stories. yet, based on one late in life novel he was awarded the Nobel in Lit (truly a political move by the West at that time, as he had to have it published outside of Russia). I did not read the essay on translating Shakespeare that also appears in this volume.

[David Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

"During the last years of Mayakovsky's life, when all poetry ceased to exist, either his or anybody else's, …when, to put it
more simply, literature had stopped…"


(Boris Pasternak)

There were a number of fine passages and considerations from this short book I'd like to reflect on here. Pasternak describes masterpieces of art, literature and music which transcend the more common, or become like the permanent mountains in a landscape of literature, masterpieces which W.H. Auden reserved for "high holy days" of the soul: "Just as Dostoevsky is not only a novelist and just as Blok is not only a poet, so Scriabin is not only a composer but an occasion for perpetual congratulations, a personified festival and triumph of Russian culture." ( pg. 44)

Pasternak wrote that a number of writers his age, including himself, went through the years of their youth with the poet Alexander Blok as their guide. "Blok had everything that goes to make a great poet: fire, tenderness, emotion, his own image of the world, his own special gift for transforming everything he touched, and his own restrained, hidden, self-absorbed destiny." Pasternak added that Blok's impetuosity, his roving intentness, and the rapidity of his observations were Blok's features that left the deepest impression on him.
When one glimpses through Pasternak's account what the Communist Revolution did to poets and literature as a whole, it is enough in itself to condemn it, it seems to me. On pages 88-90, he reflects on a number of the suicides of poets he had known, including his dear friend Marina Tsvetayeva.

Pasternak first became acquainted with Akhmatova's work reading her early book The Plantain.




I was struck by this sketch of Anna Akhmatova by G. Annenkov and I printed it out and have it on my desk at work. I am already acquainted with and am a great enthusiast for her poetry. Her ex-husband Grumylov was executed shortly after their divorce and so was the poet Osip Mandelstam who was close to them. I recall a poem by her about her husband's murder. In the portrait sketch, the hardships of life under Soviet totalitarianism seems to be reflected in her face, as well as her undying beauty.
Pasternak has an interesting detachment from his works. He writes, "In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies. One has to live without getting tired, one must look forward and feed on one's living reserves, which oblivion no less than memory produces." I think there is a grain of wisdom here. John Paul II often said that we must not conserve strength on this earth, because we will have eternity in which to rest. Pasternak then listed a long list of first drafts he lost. (p. 81) I recall the catastrophic losses that the great teacher Comenius endured when his library was burned by soldiers but he carried on with remarkable resilience and productivity.

The case of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky seems especially illuminating.

(Vladimir Mayakovsky)

Pasternak quoted some striking lines from Mayakovsky:

Time, I beseech you; though you be
A blind ikon painter, my image paint
In the shrine of this century's abortion!
I am solitary like the one-eyed
Man who goes to lead the blind.

Also:

Not for you to understand why, calm
Amid the storm of gibes,
My soul I carry on a plate
For the feast of the coming years…

It seemed like he was semi-consciously willing to sacrifice himself for the Revolution. Vain idol.
Pasternak remarks regarding the later Mayakovsky, "With the exception of the immortal document At the Top of the Voice, written on the eve of his death, the later Mayakovsky, beginning with Mystery Buffo, is inaccessible to me. I remain indifferent to those clumsily rhymed sermons, that cultivated insipidity, those commonplaces and platitudes, set forth so artificially, so confusedly, and so devoid of humor. This Mayakovsky is in my view worthless, that is, nonexistent. And the remarkable thing about it is that this worthless, nonexistent Mayakovsky has come to be accepted as revolutionary." p.98-99
Czeslaw Milosz, in The Witness of Poetry: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1981-82), has a complementary take on Mayakovsky and the poets of Pasternak's generation. The poets, he wrote, were a more reliable witness than journalism in this period. He asks where the optimism is in socialist countries sixty-six years after the Russian revolution and then observes that Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the poet of the revolution, wrote "rhetoric amazing in its giantism" but the truth dwelt with Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, who saw in postrevolutionary Russia Dostoevsky's most pressing forebodings confirmed. Milosz remarks, "The suicide of [the Russian revolution's] bard, Mayakovsky, had more than personal significance. Both Mayakovsky's oeuvre and his death are marked by contradictions characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia of the preceding century, which were brought to cruel light by the revolution." Milosz is saying that the best poets in postrevolutionary Russia were the truth tellers, the passionate pursuers of the Real, rather than the Party pleasers of whom Mayakovsky was emblematic. Pasternak wrote, "It seems to me that Mayakovsky shot himself out of pride because he had condemned something in himself or around himself which his self-respect could not be reconciled." (p. 89)
I think one of the obvious lessons to draw from Pasternak's sketch of the lives of poets under Soviet Communism is that Communism doesn't fit the human person, especially insofar as poets are special representatives of mankind. Instead, it plagued the human person, driving its brightest and most sensitive to suicide, or outright executing them. Some Communists, like Tretyakov, even argued that there was no place for art in a young socialist state, or at least not at the moment of birth, and acknowledge that what was being produced in literature by the Revolution was drivel. Pasternak says in the last years of Mayakovsky's life, "all poetry had ceased to exist, either his or anyone else's." (I am reminded of the song "American Pie" where the music dies and the Trinity catch the last train for the Coast, but also of the Islamic fundamentalist revolutions which ban music and the sounds of women's voices in public. In Communist China, songbirds were actively eradicated).



(Marina Tsvetayeva)

Pasternak has high praise for the work of his friend, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, who, as mentioned above, became one of the songbird casualties of the Revolution. He remarks on his own spiritual and intellectual growth and how at first he did not have an ear for Tsvetayeva's poetry, his ear having been "perverted by the pretentious extravagances and the break from everything natural that were in vogue in those days." Later, however, the traditional Marina Tsvetayeva would come to prevail over him. "One had to read oneself into her. When I had done so, I was amazed to discover such an abyss of purity and power. Nothing at all comparable existed anywhere else…The early Marina Tsvetayeva was what all the rest of the symbolists taken together wanted to be but were not."
That Pasternak, despite the duress of the Revolution and the oppression, murder and suicide it induced on so many, is able to write a reflection like the following, not to mention his novel Doctor Zhivago, is a sign of his triumph in life over a culture of death:
"Compared to other feelings, love is an elemental cosmic force wearing a disguise of meekness. In itself it is as simple and unconditional as consciousness and as death, as oxygen or uranium. It is not a state of mind, it is the foundation of the universe. Being thus basic and primordial, it is the equal of artistic creation. Its dignity is no less, and its expression has no need of art to polish it. The most that the artist can dream of is to overhear its voice, to catch its ever new, ever unprecedented language. Love has no need of euphony. Truth, not sound, dwells in its heart."
Where I differ sharply with this book is not with what Pasternak wrote, but with the notes by David Magarshack at the end of the book. Magarshack is the translator of this book. I recognize his name from books I have with his translations of Dostoevsky. In particular, his treatment of Anna Akhmatova seems to me belittling and a failure to recognize her stature among the poets. If one just read this summary of her work, there would be little inducement to actually read her poetry. He says her range of matter is small, concerned chiefly with themes of love and death, and her works show no marked development of style or ideas. Psshaw! I am much more of the school of Milosz who prizes her poetry as one of the remarkable truth tellers in a fog of mendacity. Magarshack's valuation of Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov is similarly belittling. He remarks that he "appears to have believed literally in the coming of Antichrist." You can hear the scorn dripping. He notes, I imagine with glee, Chekhov's satirizing of his idea of the World Soul in The Seagull. It seems to me another wholly inadequate rendering of a great man.

Addendum



(Baby smock for a boy in 1800s)

Boris Pasternak described one of his youthful follies:
"I suspected all sorts of mysteries and deceptions around me. There was no absurdity in which I did not believe. At the dawn of life, when such idiocies are conceivable, perhaps because of the memories of the baby smocks in which I was arrayed still
earlier, I imagined that at some time before I was born I had been a little girl and that I had to bring back that fascinating and delightful actuality by tightening my belt till I felt like fainting. And sometimes I imagined that I was not the son of my parents, but an adopted foundling."( p. 41)
I recall a class in which a person argued from such kinds of baby smocks that gendered clothing is relative, but here Pasternak thinks the custom suggested to him when he was a child, in his youthful susceptibilities of the imagination, that he might have been a girl before he was born. How frightening is the myth that turns such harmless childish fancies into a project for parents to engender and entrench, leading eventually to the castration and mutilation of their own flesh and blood! They engender the myth of genderlessness with deviant scrupulosity, or the splitting of gender and sex as decisively twain as Descartes' mind and body.

[Chris Gleck]

This book is copyrighted 1959 and my paperback was printed in 1960. I purchased this used because of Pasternak's fame, although I have not read any of his other work. He primarily was a poet, with Doctor Zhivago his only novel, which I saw as a movie. This was the work of which he was most proud. This book is subtitled "Sketch for an Autobiography" which is an apt description since it really didn't address most of his personal life. He was born in 1890 with a reknowned father artist and mother pianist. As a result, they traveled in circles of noted artistic people - Scriabin the composer and Leo Tolstoy. His father illustrated Tolstoy's novels. He writes about his artistic influences and his interactions with and assessments of fellow poets, which wasn't compelling to me. What was interesting is that he lived through the Russian Revolution and remained in the Soviet Union and what it was like being an artist during that regime. He purposely didn't go into detail about this life because it was too painful and he was too restricted by the regime. He mostly made his living as a translator. The most interesting part of the book for me was an appendix containing a long essay about translating Shakespeare. In it were his insights about Shakespeare stemming from his translation process, an author whose works I do not appreciate, so I appreciated gaining from his insights.I will be recycling this book.

[Rhea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this one. It started off well - he chronicles his early interests, memories and aspirations. His recollection of Tolstoy's death was very moving. Unfortunately that is the highpoint. From there he devolves into "I knew this famous poet/writer/composer and here is why they weren't all that great." He mentions his friends and his sorrow over what befell them, but he never actually follows it up with any specifics. There is very little about the realities of his life, how these friends were important to him, etc. And then, that's it. He signs off and the rest of the book is about his translations of Shakespeare. Just a little random. His notes on the plays turned out to be pretty interesting but I'm still unclear on why they were included.

[Dianne Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found parts of this scant autobiography fascinating, and especially appreciated his summary of Tolstoy's life and impact-- a beautifully said homage. Sadly, he leaves a lot of the interesting stuff untold. He states that what happens to his dear friends is the sorrow of his life, and does not let us in on their tragic story- a pity. The second part of the book is his interpretation of Shakespeare's works, which he spent many years translating.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phoned-in autobiographical rehash by an amazing author who owed us better. I'm going back to Safe Conduct.

[Paula Vergara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terminé de leer "Yo recuerdo" de Boris Pasternak con una profunda tristeza que me obligó a tomarme un tiempo para decantar mis sensaciones. Como si presenciara a una magnífica ave tropical de plumaje multicolor, encerrada en una jaula diminuta. Esta obra autobiográfica relata algunos momentos de la vida del autor, aquellos que él considera relevantes, pero donde el foco no está puesto en sus emociones ni en sus experiencias personales.A diferencia de otras obras del género, donde las memorias se convierten en un vehículo para la introspección y el autodescubrimiento, en "Yo recuerdo" Pasternak mantiene una distancia emocional del lector. Su discurso carece de rebeldía y parece provenir de un lugar limitado, incluso en la parte de la infancia, donde se explaya con mayor detalle.Esta sensación de distancia se asemeja a la que experimenté con "Memorias del Ayer" de Stefan Zweig, donde el autor también retrata una época convulsa con una mirada muy contenida.Si bien "Yo recuerdo" ofrece una valiosa crónica de la Rusia de principios del siglo XX, lo que no puede o quiere decir durante el relato deja un sabor agridulce porque parece una obra que ha pasado por un censor muy estricto.

[Bay Long · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather dull and irrelevant.