ON PASTERNAK SOBERLY

Czeslaw Milosz

FOR THOSE WHO WERE FAMILIAR with the poetry of Boris Pasternak long before he acquired international fame, the Nobel Prize given to him in 1958 had something ironic in it. A poet whose equal in Russia was only Akhmatova, and a congenial translator of Shakespeare, had to write a big novel and that novel had to become a sensation and a best seller before poets of the Slavic countries were honored for the first time in his person by the jury of Stockholm. Had the prize been awarded to Pasternak a few years earlier, no misgivings would have been possible. As it was, the honor had a bitter taste and could hardly be considered as proof of genuine interest in Eastern European literatures on the part of the Western reading public-this quite apart from the good intentions of the Swedish academy.
After Doctor Zhivago Pasternak found himself entangled in the kind of ambiguity that would be a nightmare for any author. While he always stressed the unity of his work, that unity was broken by circumstances. Abuse was heaped on him in Russia for a novel nobody had ever read. Praise was lavished on him in the West for a novel isolated from his lifelong labors: his poetry is nearly untranslatable. No man wishes to be changed into a symbol, whether the symbolic features lent him are those of a valiant knight or of a bugaboo: in such cases he is not judged by what he cherishes as his achievement but becomes a focal point of forces largely external to his will. In the last years of his life Pasternak lost, so to speak, the right to his personality, and his name served to designate a cause. I am far from intending to reduce that cause to momentary political games. Pasternak stood for the individual against whom the huge state apparatus turns in hatred with all its police, armies, and rockets. The emotional response to such a predicament was rooted in deep-seated fears, so justified in our time. The ignominious behavior of Pasternak's Russian colleagues, writers who took the side of power against a man armed only with his pen, created a Shakespearian situation; no wonder if in the West sympathies went to Hamlet and not to the courtiers of Elsinore.

The attention the critics centered on Doctor Zhivago delayed, however, an assessment of Pasternak's work as a whole. We are possibly now witnessing only the first gropings in that direction. My attempt here is not so much to make a nearly balanced appraisal as to stress a few aspects of his writings.

I became acquainted with his poetry in the thirties, when he was highly regarded in Polish literary circles. This was the Pasternak of The Second Birth (1932); the rhythm of certain "ballads" printed in that volume has been haunting me ever since. Yet Pasternak did not appear to his Polish readers as an exxotic animal; it was precisely what was familiar in his poems that created some obstacles to unqualified approval. In spite of the considerable differences between Polish and Russian poetry, those poets who had been shaped by "modernistic" trends victorious at the beginning of the century showed striking similarities due to their cosmopolitan formation. Pasternak, through his very treatment of verse, could be placed within a spiritual family somewhere between Boleslaw Lesmian, who achieved maturity when