Pasternak's 'I Remember'

...It will appear this week, in an English translation, as I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography (Pantheon, $3.50...

...Pasternak was at the time employed as a tutor in the family of a rich businessman of foreign origin, and although as a rule the property of the employes was not touched and his clothes and things were left intact, his books and manuscripts perished in the pogrom...

...In those words we can hear the accents of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, and they help us understand the theme of renunciation and self-sacrifice which permeates Pasternak's novel...

...and the translation of one of Swinburne's dramas about Mary Queen of Scots...

...Speaking of his own period of intensive verse writing during the summer of 1913, which he spent in a picturesque spot not very far from Moscow...

...In narrating the events of his life Pasternak stops at 1917, just as in Safe Conduct, but he goes beyond this date, as he did in Safe Conduct, when he discusses his relations with some of his fellow poets, and more especially with those who ended their lives by committing suicide: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergey Esenin, Marina Tsvetaeva and the Georgian poet...

...Of the world of previously unknown aims and aspirations, tasks and exploits, of the new restraint, the new sternness, and the new ordeals with which this world confronted the individual, the honor and the pride, the industry and the endurance of man...

...S.] in a personal letter, for due to it I was spared the undue inflation of my own importance, of which I had become the object toward the mid-'30s, at the time of the Writers' Congress...

...it was apparently meant to serve as a biographical introduction to a volume of his selected poems...

...a book of poems coming in between Above the Barriers and My Sister, Life...

...These words are themselves a comment to Doctor Zhivago as a picture of Russia's "terrible years...

...To Pasternak these quests seemed futile...

...The result was a book bearing a pretentious, "cosmological" title, of the kind popularized by the Symbolists (A Twin in the Clouds...

...Mayakovsky came to be introduced compulsorily, just as potatoes were under Catherine [the Great...

...At the time, he was indignant about the stylistic corrections made by the editors (later they turned out to have been made by Maxim Gorky...

...But then, as I have said...

...He speaks of Mayakovsky's "clumsily rhymed copybook maxims, his "commonplaces and hackneyed truths, formulated so artificially, so confusedly and unwittily...

...He maintains that his "proximity" to Mayakovsky was greatly exaggerated by their contemporaries, and he tells how at a moment when their disagreement had become acute, Mayakovsky, "with his usual sense of humor...

...A rather unsatisfactory English translation of it was recently re-issued by New Directions as a paperback, unfortunately in unrevised form...

...reflects his own attitude...

...Pasternak says that he wrote the poems of his first book while sitting in the tangled branches of an old birch tree overhanging a little stream, and that he enjoyed the process of writing enormously...

...The new autobiography provides no clue to the mystery of his survival during the years when so many of his fellow-writers were to disappear...

...Pasternak admits that he could never understand Mayakovsky's propagandist zeal or his addiction to topical themes...

...One must write about it in a way to make hearts sink and hair Stand on end...

...Vladimir Mayakovsky, and that is all that Soviet readers have heard about it...

...his articles of the Futurist period...

...Pasternak does not mention that soon after this (in 1936-37) a violent campaign was unleashed against him in Soviet literature for his "subjective idealism," his "individualism," his "aloofness" from the revolution and contemporary life, and his "chamber poetry...

...Soon thereafter, the original Russian version began to circulate in typescript in Paris and New York and was serialized in the New York Russian-language daily...

...I do not need any additional gilding of it...

...Nor had he any sympathy with Mayakovsky's magazine LEF which aimed at a marriage between extreme avant garde art and Communism, and it was over LEF that he finally broke with Mayakovsky...

...To write about it in the usual, hackneyed way, to write other than stunningly, to write more palely than the way in which Gogol and Dostoyevsky depicted Petersburg, is not only senseless and pointless—to write so is mean and shameful...

...In retrospect, however, he views his work as "immature and uninteresting" and says that he should have bowed low before the editors and thanked them for the unknown hand which had touched up his manuscript...

...Thus, he adds, Chopin said so many stunningly new things in music in the old Mozartian idiom that he appears to us as a second beginning in music...

...It is this passage which aroused the ire of the Soviet Literary Gazette...

...defined the difference between them: "You like the lightning in the sky, and I like it in an electric iron...

...a style so restrained, so unpretentious, that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it...

...At the beginning of it Pasternak says that Safe Conduct "was spoiled by needless affectation, a common sin in those days...

...I love my own life and am content with it...

...To be consistent, one would have to speak now of the years, circumstances, men and destinies encased in the framework of the Revolution...

...In 1915, anti-German riots took place in Moscow, and the houses and offices of many businessmen with foreign names (not all of them Germans) were sacked and pillaged...

...all his life he had struggled for GLEB STRUVE, who teaches at the University of California, is author of Soviet Russian Literature: 1917-1950...

...With the same modesty, bordering on Christian humility, Pasternak speaks about the loss of his manuscripts...

...Two years later, Bukharin was to pay with his life for his opposition to Stalin's policies...

...In I Remember he adds a few touches to the earlier picture and at times speaks with greater frankness...

...a fairy tale in prose for children...

...Essai d'autobiographie...

...he thought that "the most amazing discoveries were made when the content that filled the artist gave him no time to think, and in haste he uttered his new word in the old language, without realizing whether it was old or new...

...The new autobiography covers, in the main, the prerevolutionary period of Pasternak's life, as did his earlier autobiographical story, Safe Conduct, published in 1931...

...Paolo Yashvili...

...Novoye Russkoye Slovo...

...Of his relations with Mayakovsky, of the impact of the latter's early poetry on him, of their similarities and divergences, and of the effect of Mayakovsky's suicide, Pasternak had already written in some detail in the earlier work...

...The fact of Pasternak's letter to Stalin is revealed here for the first time...

...This was his second death, for which he was not to blame...

...It is highly characteristic of Pasternak that he welcomed Stalin's phrase, which sealed once and for all Mayakovsky's undisputed supremacy in Soviet poetry and put an end to all talk about Pasternak's superiority over Mayakovsky...

...It has now receded into the distance of memories, this unique and unexampled world, and it rises on the horizon like mountains seen from the field or like a distant great city, smoking in the nocturnal glow...

...But this would have been against the spirit of the times: ". . . The sense of truth, modesty and gratitude was not fashionable among the young left-wing artists and was regarded as a sign of sentimentality and sloppiness...

...And didn't Pasternak himself speak much earlier (in a poem published in 1932) of "unheard-of simplicity," with which the poet is destined to end...

...The latter—for easily understandable reasons—did not materialize, and I Remember has now become the second work by Pasternak to be published first in a foreign language and outside Russia...

...Incidentally, in this connection we learn, en passant, that at various times and for a variety of reasons...

...The seed will not sprout unless it die...

...At the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, Nikolai Bukharin, in a report on poetry, spoke of him as the foremost living Soviet poet and made some strictures on Mayakovsky, implying that the time of pure propaganda poetry was over...

...Thereby Bukharin aroused the loud protests of some of the Party faithfuls among the writers...

...Yet even in those poems, says Pasternak, his main concern was with the contents: "My constant dream was that the poem contain something, that it contain a new idea or a new picture...

...We are still far from that ideal...

...In passing, Pasternak remarks that in the last years of Mayakovsky's life poetry ceased to exist altogether in Soviet Russia...

...This is how he reflects upon this episode: "To lose in life is more necessary than to acquire...

...It was customary to perk and strut and be impudent, and much as this was repugnant to me, I willy-nilly followed the others in order not to be left behind...

...One must live untiringly, look forward, and nourish oneself on living supplies provided by oblivion alongside of memory...

...The wife of Yuris Baltrushaitis, a well-known Symbolist poet, told Pasternak that one day he would regret having published so immature a book, and Pasternak admits that he more than once regretted it...

...The new account thus supplements and, to some extent, duplicates the earlier one...

...This remark reflects his generally changed attitude toward his early work, a view which not all of his admirers will share...

...Except for the poem called "At the Top of My Voice," which Mayakovsky wrote not long before his death and which Pasternak calls "immortal," all of Mayakovsky's work after Mystery-Bouffe (1918) was beyond him, says Pasternak: It just did not get across...

...the draft of a novel, the beginning of which was published as "The Childhood of Luverse...

...I cannot conceive of a life outside mystery and obscurity, of a life in the mirror-like glitter of a display window...

...It is indeed in the mid-'30s that Pasternak's poetic reputation in the Soviet Union reached its climax...

...With the same modesty he speaks of his translation of Heinrich von Kleist's Der zerbrochene Krug, which he made for the Kamerny Theater and which was accepted for publication by the monthly magazine Sovremennik...

...Pasternak does not recount his life after 1917: the book ends with the following significant words: "Here ends my biographical sketch...

...Pasternak lost the manuscripts of the following works: his early paper on "Symbolism and Immortality...

...In connection with the campaign of vituperation launched against him in the Soviet Union after the award to him of the Nobel Prize, this sketch was briefly mentioned in Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazelle, October 25, 1958), which indignantly quoted one of Pasternak's sentences about the poet...

...What Pasternak has to say now about poetry, his own and other poets', confirms the impression that what he says of Yuri Zhivago's poetic ideal...

...It is amazing, in his opinion, that this "non-existent" Mayakovsky, this Mayakovsky who was "no Mayakovsky at all," should have been regarded as a revolutionary poet...

...To continue it further would be exceedingly difficult...

...For the second of these phrases I thanked the author [Stalin—G...

...This "sketch" is said to have been written in 1956, when Pasternak had already completed his great novel, Doctor Zhivago...

...The section on Mayakovsky ends with the following: "There were two famous phrases about our time: that life had become easier and gayer, and that Mayakovsky was the best and most talented poet of the epoch...

...He says that he no longer likes his style prior to 1940, and this throws some light on certain aspects of Doctor Zhivago which to many admirers of Pasternak's poetry of the 1920s and 1930s seem strangely "old-fashioned" or "traditional...

...Pasternak also says now that he could never understand those poets who, like Andrey Bely, Velemir Khlebnikov and some others, kept looking for new means of expression, dreamed of a new language and "groped and fumbled for its syllables, its vowels and consonants...