Boris Pasternak

He's always intrigued me. Stumbling through some of his later poetry (I discovered "Sister" years ago in a secondhand bookstore years ago in Ann Arbor: it bowled me over). Thinking about rereading Doctor Zhivago (I know: Nabokov didn't like it). A couple "clips" from the intro by Richard Pevear:

A quote by Pasternak (in a letter to Stephen Spender):

I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by a something of an immaterial unknown and unknowable wind. 

—BORIS PASTERNAK Letter (in English) to Stephen Spender, August 22, 1959


***


Pevear speaking:

Pasternak always had a double view of the revolution. He saw it, on the one hand, as a justified expression of the need of the people, and, on the other, as a program imposed by “professional revolutionaries” that was leading to a deadly uniformity and mediocrity. His doubts began as early as 1918 and increased as time went on.





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