Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and translator, born in Moscow on February 10, 1890.
He studied at Imperial Moscow University and later at the University of Marburg, and his education spanned both Russian and German-language environments. Alongside his work as a writer, Pasternak trained as a pianist and also worked as a composer, screenwriter, librettist, and playwright, making his creative output unusually wide-ranging. Early in his career he was associated with the Futurism movement, which placed him among the more experimental literary currents of his time.
Pasternak worked primarily in Russian, though he also used German, and he produced translations of works by William Shakespeare. During the years of the Second World War he received the Medal "For the Defence of Moscow" and the Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945," recognitions that tied him to the wartime experience of his city and country. His novel Doctor Zhivago became his most noted prose work, and it brought him the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as the Italian Bancarella Literary Prize. The Nobel Prize, awarded during his lifetime, was a complicated distinction given the political pressures he faced in the Soviet Union, though the facts of those pressures fall outside what can be confirmed here.
Pasternak died on May 30, 1960, in Peredelkino, the writers' settlement outside Moscow where he had spent much of his later life. His body of work spans poetry, prose fiction, drama, and translation, with Doctor Zhivago standing as the single title most closely attached to his name.
Quotes by Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak's insights on:
You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease. And boldness is the root of beauty. Which draws us together.
Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration.
Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.
No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.
The trains either don’t run at all or come so full that it is impossible to get on them.
Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.
I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one’s speciality seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.
You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.
As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.
