Volume 26, Number 16 · October 25, 1979
Pasternak in Private
By Peter France
My Sister, Life and Other Poems
by Boris Pasternak, edited and with texts by Olga Andreyev Carlisle, Color photographs by Inge Morath
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 119 pp., $14.95
Pasternak, A Collection of Critical Essays
edited by Victor Erlich
Prentice-Hall, 208 pp., $3.45 (paper)
Boris Pasternak's Translations of Shakespeare
by Anna Kay France
University of California Press, 277 pp., $15.00
Pasternak's one-time brother in Futurism, Vladimir Mayakovsky, had projected a huge image of himself in his writing. His career was stormy, public, and short. When in 1930 he put a violent end to it, Pasternak wrote a farewell poem, 'Death of a Poet,' setting the strength and courage of the poet who 'with one bound' had taken his place in the 'category of young legends' against the hypocrisy and cowardice of those who were left. The feeling for Mayakovsky which he shows here and in his autobiographical writings is echoed, I think, in the figure of Pasha Antipov (later Strelnikov) in Doctor Zhivago. Antipov is the 'antipode' for Pasternak, he is the lost child who makes a violent myth of himself, bringing pain and destruction, ending in baffled suicide. For him, as for Mayakovsky—and indeed for many of the young actors in the early revolutionary drama—Pasternak seems to feel admiration and love. Their headlong daring, like the skater's élan, was an inspiring sight, a public parallel to the verbal and emotional giving of self of the young poet of My Sister, Life.
Review, 2662 words
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