Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [4]
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Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890. His father, Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, was a painter and illustrator; his mother, Rozalia Isidorovna Kaufman, was a concert pianist. They belonged to the cultivated Jewish milieu of Odessa, and moved to Moscow only a few months before Boris, the eldest of their four children, was born. Leonid Pasternak had considerable success as an artist, taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and became an outstanding portraitist, which led to a close acquaintance with Leo Tolstoy, whose works he illustrated and of whom he painted several portraits, the last just after the writer’s death in November 1910 at the railway station in Astapovo. The twenty-year-old Boris accompanied his father to Astapovo on that occasion.
The young Pasternak showed considerable talent for drawing and might have become an artist himself, but in the summer of 1903, while the family was staying in the country, he chanced to meet the composer Alexander Scriabin, whom he overheard composing his Third Symphony at the piano in a neighboring house, and decided that his real calling was music. For the next six years, he devoted himself to a serious study of composition. But at a key moment in 1909, after playing some of his compositions for Scriabin, who encouraged him and gave him his blessing, he abandoned music. Meanwhile, he had discovered the poetry of Rilke and had joined a group of young admirers of the Symbolists that called itself Serdarda—“a name,” as he wrote later, “whose meaning no one knew.” And he had begun to write verse himself.
It was a member of Serdarda who persuaded Pasternak to give up music in favor of literature, but it was Scriabin himself who suggested that he switch his field at Moscow University from law to philosophy. He graduated in 1913, after six years of study, including a semester at the University of Marburg under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, but by then he had decided to abandon philosophy. In the summer after his final examinations, he stayed with his parents in the country, and there, as he recalled, “I read Tyutchev and for the first time in my life wrote poetry not as a rare exception, but often and continuously, as one paints or writes music.” His first book, A Twin in the Clouds, was published in December of that year.
Pasternak described these metamorphoses in his two autobiographical essays, Safe Conduct, written between 1927 and 1931, and People and Situations (published in English under the titles I Remember and An Essay in Autobiography), written in 1956. Different as the two books are in style and vision, they both give a good sense of the extraordinary artistic and philosophical ferment in Russia in the years before the First World War. The older generation of Symbolists had begun to publish in the 1890s, the second generation, which included Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, in the early years of the twentieth century. Then came the new anti-Symbolist movements: the Futurists (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, among many other poets and painters), whose manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, was published in 1912; and the Acmeists (Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova), who favored Apollonian clarity over Symbolist vagueness. In his essay “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam wrote banteringly:
For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as splendid a form as music is for the Symbolists.
And if, among the Futurists, the word as such is still creeping on all fours, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a more dignified vertical position and entered upon the stone age of its existence.
Which gives at least a small idea of the lively polemics that went on in those years.
Pasternak