In the Interlude: Poems, Nineteen Forty-Five-Nineteen Sixty

by Boris Pasternak

Genres: Poetry

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

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

[Illiterate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like Pasternak’s simpler late style. It suits his emphasis on how the entwined rhythms of life, love, nature, and faith can bring a dissolution of self.

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder how accurate the translation is, seeing as it's all in strict rhyme and meter.

Some lines I liked:

"The tumult stills. I stand upon the stage
Against a door-post, dimly reckoning
From traces of a distantly-heard echo
What my unfinished lifetime may yet bring."

"For life is but a moment,
Is only a dissolving
Of ourselves into others,
Life is simply a giving,

A wedding feast that bursts
Through windows from the light,
Merely a song, a dream,
A grey-blue pigeon's flight."

"But, in strange visions of the flow of time,
All future ages rose up distantly,
The thoughts, hopes, worlds, of every century,
The life of museums, art galleries,
All magic deeds, and every fairy whim,
Each childhood dream, and all the bright fir trees..."

"My desire is to be among people,
And in crowds, in their bustle and ease:
I could shatter all things into fragments,
I could bring them all down to their knees."

"Just as though I were under their skin
I can feel all their thoughts as my own,
And I melt with the melting of snow,
Like the morning my brows wear a frown.

"For with me remain those without names,
The homely, and children, and trees..."

"Out of the night the centuries will come!"

"Oh grist you gather like a mill
And crush it to a heap:

But grind, oh, keep on grinding
All that composed my past,
Like these scarce forty years gone by,
Into the grave's compost."

"But this word 'love', you're right, is trivial too:
I shall invent some name much better still;
For you I shall re-name the world, for you
All words that are, if such should be your will."

"There, in the twilight avenues,
The thickset lindens warily
Conceal their heads behind each other
And hold their bicentenary."

"He droops his head and hides behind a door
For fear of complications with the night
Whom he would rather now conciliate
To end their disagreements and their fight

But garden fences rise up in their way;
They quarrel and they cannot make their peace:
Behind the frenzy of their argument
Crowds down the road an audience of trees."

"Then autumn's here -an ancient nook
Of books, clothes, guns, forgotten pleasures
With which the cold goes browsing through
Its happy catalogue of treasures."

"The future is not long enough,
The old and new are niggardly:
We need Eternity to stand
Among us like a Christmas tree."

[Mark Nenadov · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are Pasternak's poems from 1945 up until his death, translated by Henry Kamen. I really like the poetry represented here. It is a very simple and earthy collection, and it has a lot of great Fall and Winter themed poems. The downside is, as good as this translation may be, I'm sure that like all translated poetry--a significant amount of the effect is lost in translation! But not knowing Russian at this point, this will have to do!