Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [159]
“But as soon as the young man, after his imitations of Ossian or Parny or the ‘Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,’ hit upon the short lines of ‘The Little Town’ or ‘Epistle to My Sister,’ or ‘To My Inkstand’ from the later Kishinev period, or upon the rhythms of the ‘Letter to Yudin,’ the whole future Pushkin awakened in the adolescent.4
“Light and air, the noise of life, things, essences burst from outside into the poem as into a room through an open window. Objects from the external world, everyday objects, nouns, thronging and pressing, took over the lines, ousting the less definite parts of speech. Objects, objects, objects lined up in a rhymed column along the edge of the poem.
“As if this later celebrated Pushkinian tetrameter was a sort of metrical unit of Russian life, its yardstick, as if it was a measure taken from the whole of Russian existence, as when the form of a foot is outlined to make the pattern for a shoe, or when you give the size so as to find a glove to fit your hand.
“So later the rhythms of talking Russia, the chant of her colloquial speech, were expressed metrically in Nekrasov’s trimeters and dactylic rhymes.”5
7
“How I would like, along with having a job, working the earth, or practicing medicine, to nurture something lasting, fundamental, to write some scholarly work or something artistic.
“Everyone is born a Faust, to embrace everything, experience everything, express everything. The fact that Faust was a scientist was seen to by the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. A step forward in science is made by the law of repulsion, with the refutation of reigning errors and false theories.
“That Faust was an artist was seen to by the infectious example of his teachers. A step forward in art is made by the law of attraction, with the imitation, following, and veneration of beloved predecessors.
“What then prevents me from working, treating, and writing? I think it is not privations and wanderings, not instability and frequent change, but the reigning spirit of bombastic phrases so widespread in our day—such as: the dawn of the future, the building of the new world, the lights of mankind. You hear that and at first you think—what breadth of imagination, what wealth! But in reality it is pompous precisely in its lack of talent.
“Only the ordinary is fantastic, once the hand of genius touches it. The best lesson in this respect is Pushkin. What a glorification of honest labor, duty, habitual everyday things! With us ‘bourgeois’ and ‘philistine’ have now come to sound reproachful. That reproof was forestalled by lines from ‘Genealogy’:
I am a bourgeois, a bourgeois.
“And from ‘Onegin’s Journey’:
My ideal now is a housewife,
My desire is for peace,
A pot of soup, and my fine self.6
“Of all things Russian I now love most the Russian childlikeness of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such resounding things as the ultimate goals of mankind and their own salvation. They, too, understood all these things, but such immodesties were far from them—not their business, not on their level! Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky prepared for death, were anxious, sought meaning, summed things up, but these two till the end were distracted by the current particulars of their artistic calling, and in their succession lived their lives inconspicuously, as one such particular, personal, of no concern to anyone, and now that particular has become common property and, like still unripe apples picked from the tree, is ripening in posterity, filling more and more with sweetness and meaning.”
8
“The first heralds of spring, a thaw. The air smells of pancakes and vodka, as during the week before Lent, when nature herself seems to rhyme with the calendar. Somnolent, the sun in the forest narrows its buttery eyes; somnolent, the forest squints through its needles like eyelashes; the puddles at noontime have a buttery