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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
“You have a book in you,” said Charents, listening to M.'s poems about Armenia. (This was in Tiflis—in Erivan he would not have dared to come see us.) M. was very pleased by these words: “Perhaps he's right—I may really have a book in me.” A few years later, at M.'s request, I took a sheaf of his Voronezh poems to Pasternak, who, after looking at them, suddenly spoke of the “miracle of a book in the making.” With him, he said, it had happened only once in his life, when he wrote “My Sister Life.” I told M. about this conversation and asked: “So a collection of verse doesn't always make a book?” M. just laughed.“
1. Nadezhda, Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope (New York: Atheneum, 1970, p. 190 Google Scholar.
2. Iurii Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929) ; translated as “Pasternak's Mission,” in Pasternak: Modern Judgements, ed. Donald Davies (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 126-34.
3. See L. A. Ozerov's notes to the text of “Sestra moia—zhizn',” which appear in Boris Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Biblioteka poeta, Bol'shaia seriia, 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1965), p. 630. Unless otherwise noted, this is the edition of the text to which I will refer throughout this article.
4. Fedor, Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol'ia, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1973), 5: 101 Google Scholar.
5. This article has, in fact, been written in conjunction with my work on a book about My Sister—Life, which is based on Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, “Boris Pasternak's ‘Sestra moia—zhizn1': An Explication” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1972).
6. Nils Ake Nilsson, “Life as Ecstasy and Sacrifice: Two Poems by Pasternak,” Scando-Slavica, 5 (1959): 180-98.
7. In the original 1922 edition of My Sister—Life Pasternak appended a note to “Our Thunderstorm,” the poem that precedes “The Replacement,” which reads as follows: “These diversions were cut short, when, departing, she ceded her mission to a replacement.”
8. Although twenty-eight poems (including “The Replacement” ) are contained in the first half of the book and twenty-two in the second, the second half is slightly longer than the first (twenty-five pages of text as opposed to twenty-two).
9. The chapter's title is a line taken from its penultimate poem, “You are in the wind, …” The poet's and the garden's mutual desire for the night to end and the day to begin is expressed in the question, “Isn't It Time for the Birds to Sing?” The line assumes a broader significance, however, when iitt iiss jujssee44∼saias tthhee title of the book's opening chapter.
10. The title poem is, in fact, a microcosm of the entire book, since it contains allusions which are significant but cannot be fully appreciated until the end of the book. For example, there is a reference to the Kamyshin railroad line, and Kamyshin, Balashov, and Tambov are three stops along a railway line that will figure very prominently in the poems that follow.
11. In the 1922 and 1923 editions, the second chapter of the book was entitled “The First Chapter.” This further dramatized the resemblance of the book's opening chapter to an introduction. “Book of the Steppe” was the general name given to all the chapters, except the opening one, “Isn't It Time for the Birds to Sing?”
12. It is interesting that both Pasternak and Mayakovsky use the pronoun “eto” to refer to a love affair that they are celebrating in their verses. Pasternak, of course, does it here in “Before All This There Was Winter” ( “Do vsego etogo byla zima” ), and Mayakovsky does it in “About That” ( “Pro eto” ) ; italics added.
13. See Nilsson, “Life as Ecstasy and Sacrifice.”
14. The fact that the “storm” (buria) described in the preceding poem, “Definition of the Soul,” was a metaphoric allusion to the revolution suggests, by implication, that the “storm” of revolution is now being further metaphorized as one of the “diseases” infecting the earth.
15. This is reminiscent of another discussion of the creative act found in Pasternak's autobiography, Safe Conduct: “Art concerns itself with life as the ray of power [luch silovoi] passes through it … I would make it clear that within the framework of selfconsciousness power is called feeling” ( Boris, Pasternak, Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings [New York: New Directions, 1958], p. 71 Google Scholar).
16. There is an excellent article on this poem by Iurii Lotman: “Analiz dvukh stikhotvorenii,” in Teksty sovetskogo literaturovedcheskogo strukturalisma (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971), pp. 209-24.
17. Ibid., p. 223.
18. The text of “In Memory of the Demon” suggests that Pasternak is recalling the famous studies of the Demon done by the Russian painter Vrubel'. It is noteworthy that Alexander Blok, who also paid poetic tribute to Lermontov's “Demon,” delivered a eulogy at Vrubel “s funeral (1910) that paid particular attention to his studies of the Demon. The eulogy was entitled ” In Memory of Vrubel'. “
19. According to the Biblioteka poeta edition (1965) of Pasternak's poetry, “Raspad” is the name of a railroad stop, presumably on the same Balashov-Tambov line referred to in the poems that follow. A search of available maps and railway schedules, however, fails to locate such a stop, although this may be due to the fact that the name has been changed. “Raspad” is, of course, used in a twofold sense: it designates a railroad stop (or so we are informed) and its lexical meaning is “collapse” or “disintegration.” In its latter meaning it evokes the destruction and chaos of the revolution that pervades the air as the poet enters the Balashov region by train.
20. Reference to a “horrible, talking garden” echoes the earlier poem, “The Weeping Garden” (italics added), but now the garden's animation takes on a kind of conspiratorial air which seems to intimidate the poet and cause him anxiety.
21. The noun “railroad stop” (polustanok) appeared first in My Sister—Life in its title poem where the poet was seen traveling on the Kamyshin branch line (between Kamyshin and Balashov), presumably in order to visit his beloved. There the poet gave vent to his disappointment when the train pulled into “the wrong railroad stop” (ne tot polustanok), that is, not that special one that he was awaiting with impatience. Here in “A Thunderstorm, Instantaneous Forever” that special “railroad stop” has become a memory to be recalled rather than a delight to be anticipated.
22. Thus the photo of a special railroad stop takes its- place alongside that of a special woman, whose photograph is displayed in “The Replacement.”
23. The epigraph to “Let's shed words” is taken from the earlier poem “Balashov.” There the poet had expressed his exasperation with the heat and sultriness of summer by asking who it was that made everything “burn.” He then answered his own question by saying quite simply that “it was in the nature of summer to burn.” Here the poet responds to the same question in a slightly different way: he says that the “omnipotent god of details and love,” the artist of nature made it so.