Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [5]
My paper was based on the idea that our perceptions are subjective, on the fact that the sounds and colors we perceive in nature correspond to something else, namely, to the objective vibrations of sound and light waves. I argued that this subjectivity was not the attribute of an individual human being, but was a generic and suprapersonal quality, that it was the subjectivity of the human world and of all mankind. I suggested in my paper that every person leaves behind him a part of that undying, generic subjectivity which he possessed during his lifetime and with which he participated in the history of mankind’s existence. The main object of my paper was to advance the theory that this utterly subjective and universally human corner or portion of the world was perhaps the eternal sphere of action and the main content of art. That, besides, though the artist was of course mortal, like everyone else, the happiness of existence he experienced was immortal, and that other people centuries after him might experience, through his works, something approaching the personal and innermost form of his original sensations.
These thoughts, or intuitions, were to reach their full realization decades later in Doctor Zhivago.
In January 1914, Pasternak and some of his young friends shifted their allegiance from the Symbolists to the Futurists, forming a new group that called itself Centrifuge. There were other groups as well—the Ego-futurists and the Cubo-futurists, the latter including Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Pasternak met at that time. These groups were all somewhat fluid and loosely defined, and their members kept forming new alliances and creating new antagonisms.
On August 1, 1914, the First World War broke out, which somewhat curtailed the skirmishing among literary movements. Pasternak was exempted from military service because of an old injury caused by a fall from a horse in 1903, which had left him with one leg slightly shorter than the other. He supported himself by working as a private tutor and later as a clerk in the office of a chemical factory. In connection with this work he spent the winters of 1915 and 1916 in the region of the Urals, which forms the setting for most of Book Two of Doctor Zhivago. During that time he wrote the poems of his second book, Above the Barriers, published in 1917. When news of the February revolution of 1917 reached him in the Urals, he immediately set out for Moscow.
In the summer of 1917, between the February and October revolutions, Pasternak found his true voice as a poet, composing poems that would go into his third book, My Sister, Life, one of the major works of twentieth-century Russian poetry. He knew that something extraordinary had come over him in the writing of this book. In Safe Conduct, he says:
When My Sister, Life appeared, and was found to contain expressions not in the least contemporary as regards poetry, which were revealed to me during the summer of the revolution, I became entirely indifferent as to the identity of the power which had brought the book into being, because it was immeasurably greater than myself and than the poetical conceptions surrounding me.
Between that summer and the eventual publication of the book in 1922 came the Bolshevik revolution and the harsh years of War Communism, years of hunger, confusion, and civil war. In 1921, Pasternak’s parents and sisters immigrated to Berlin. (After Hitler’s accession to power they immigrated again, this time to England, where they remained.) Pasternak visited them in Berlin in 1922, after his first marriage, and never saw them again. He himself, like so many of his fellow poets and artists, was not opposed to the spirit of the revolution and chose to stay in Russia.
My Sister, Life was followed in 1923 by Themes and Variations, which