Biography

BORIS PASTERNAK was born in Moscow on January 29, 1890, the son of a major Russian painter and a talented pianist. At first he thought he might be a composer (Scriabin encouraged him) and then a philosopher, but while studying with Hermann Cohen in Marburg and, by his own account, while responding to a vision of his open books as a great fern — a paporotnik — decided to pursue philosophy by writing poetry and fiction.

He was Tsvetaeva’s epistolary lover in the 1920s, a self-avowed admirer of Akhmatova, who believed that he had never actually read her poetry, and a protector of Mandelshtam’s in the 1930s. A master translator of Shakespeare and Goethe, he struggled to survive Stalin in order to write an account of his generation (Doctor Zhivago) — to be its Horatio as well as another Hamlet — and died on May 30, 1960, under vigorous attack from Stalin’s heirs, but with his life’s work complete. “My Sister — Life” is the title poem of the 1922 volume that established his reputation as a poet so distinctive that he could not be claimed by any movement. In retrospect Pasternak thought Tsvetaeva must have been the muse for the volume. In 1924, he wrote to her: “You are so beautiful, such a sister, my sister life, you came straight down to me out of the sky; you came in support at a time of spiritual extremity. You are mine and always were mine and all my life is because of you.”

As much as any poet of the last Century, Pasternak seems, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “to see into the life of things.” Or, as Joseph Brodsky writes, Pasternak gives you “the world in the multi-faceted eye of the honey-bee.”

TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002).