Volume 37, Number 9 · May 31, 1990
Indomitable Pasternak
By Henry Gifford
Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography Volume I, 1890–1928
by Christopher Barnes
Cambridge University Press, 507 pp., $69.50
Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics
by Lazar Fleishman
Harvard University Press, 359 pp., $37.50
Boris Pasternak
by Peter Levi
Hutchinson, 310 pp., £17.95
Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930–60
by Evgeny Pasternak, translated by Michael Duncan, the poetry of Pasternak translated by Anne Pasternak Slater, by Craig Raine
Collins Harvill, 278 pp., £15.00
In 1945 Boris Pasternak wrote an essay on Chopin in which he repeated the somewhat paradoxical view of the composer that he had expressed more than once in his poetry. 'Chopin,' he contended, 'is a realist in just the same sense as Lev Tolstoy.' He also associated Chopin with Bach. 'Their music abounds in details and gives the impression of being a chronicle of their lives.' A great realist, one who attains 'the highest degree of an author's exactitude,' is what Pasternak himself aspired to be in his novel Doctor Zhivago, on which he would begin intensive work a year later. The realist for him is always autobiographical, because only through attention to his own story can the artist understand human experience common to all.
Review, 5714 words
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