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“As a Giftl …” Zhivago, The Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Rosette C. Lamont*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing 67, New York

Extract

An art critic in defining recently the special quality of an artist built up on Aristotle when he said, “The difference between an animal and a plant is that the animal throws off its young while the plant simply grows new buds upon the same stalk. The artist is an animal, not a plant.” One of the central themes of Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, is the peculiar need of the artist to eject the product of his creation. The act is life-giving, intimate, and personal, yet at the same time free and objective.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 5 , December 1960 , pp. 621 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 “Legend and Symbol in Dr. Zhivago,” The Nation, 25 April 1959, 364–373.

2 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (Univ. of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1959). The Russian text. All translations of the poems are my own.

3 Doctor Zhivago (Pantheon: New York, 1958), p. 10.

4 Nicola Chiaromonte, “Pasternak's Novel,” The Partisan Review, xxv (Winter, 1958), 130.

5 Paul Eluard, Choix de Poèmes (Gallimard, Paris, 1941), p. 98.

6 Claude Vigée, “Contemporary French Poetry,” The Partisan Review, xxv (Winter, 1958), 64.

7 Luke ix. 44.