About Doctor Zhivago's Author - About Doctor Zhivago

The young Pasternak showed considerable talent for drawing and might have become an artist himself, but in the summer of 1903, while the family was staying in the country, he chanced to meet the composer Alexander Scriabin, whom he overheard composing his Third Symphony at the piano in a neighboring house, and decided that his real calling was music.  For the next six years, he devoted himself to a serious study of composition.  But at a key moment in 1909, after playing some of his compositions for Scriabin, who encouraged him and gave him his blessing, he abandoned music.  Meanwhile, he had discovered the poetry of Rilke and had joined a group of young admirers of the Symbolists that called itself Serdarda--"a name," as he wrote later, "whose meaning no one knew."  And he had begun to write verse himself. [1, introduction p. vii).

The neighbors make the neighborhood and the neighborhood the culture.

Boris Pasternak was Jewish, the son of an artist employed as a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and a mother embarked on a career as a concert pianist [2].  Alexander Scriabin's formation seems rooted in the experience of aristocracy, a home abandoned by his father who would go on to make him many half-brothers and sisters, and interests in Nietzsche and theosophy.  However else informed, and whoever else may have been in the neighborhood, both had time for living with and within their chosen arts and that within the competitive but genteel strata of an intelligentsia sustained beneath the Romanov umbrella.

Keeping that bit of biography in mind, here in part is Pasternak's introduction of Yuri Zhivago as a boy:

Separately, all the movements of the world were calculatedly sober, but as a sum total they were unconsciously drunk with the general current of life that united them.  People toiled and bustled, set in motion by the mechanism of their own cares.  But the mechanisms would not have worked if their chief regulator had not been a sense of supreme and fundamental carefreeness.  This carefreeness came from a sense of the cohesion of human existences, a confidence in their passing from one into another, a sense of happiness owing to the fact that everything that happens takes place not only on earth, in which the dead are buried, but somewhere else, in what some call the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others something else again.

To this rule the boy was a bitter and painful exception.  His mainspring remained a sense of care, and no feeling of unconcern lightened or ennobled it.  He knew he had this inherited trait and with self-conscious alertness caught signs of it in himself.  It upset him.  Its presence humiliated him.

For as long as he could remember, he had never ceased to marvel at how, with the same arms and legs and a common language and habits, one could be not like everyone else, and besides that, be someone who was liked by few, someone who was not loved.  He could not understand a situation in which, if you were worse than others, you could not make an effort to correct yourself and become better.  What did it mean to be a Jew?  Why was there such a thing?  What could reward or justify this unarmed challenge that brought nothing but grief? [1, pp. 11-12]

Of course much has been written about Boris Pasternak who in Russia has been regarded as among the language's greatest poets.  Geoff Saddler's write-up [3] on the web contains sufficient bibliography for curiosity (he notes too that Pasternak as a boy met also Rachmaninov, Rilke, and Tolstoi) and ends with what I've taken as a surprise:

A Jewish artist who rejected separation in favour of a Christ-based gospel of integrity and sacrifice, Pasternak became an icon for many Russians. Lines from “When the Weather Clears” sum up his attitude to life and art. “In everything I want to reach/The very essence:/In work, in seeking a way,/In passion’s turbulence…// “Always catching the thread/Of actions, histories,/To live, to think, to feel, to love,/To make discoveries”. [3]

There's plenty above that coda to delight and inform the reader interested in Boris Pasternak.

Along the lines of the Jewish theme introduced here, one of Scriabin's daughters, Ariane, born in Italy, converted to Judaism, and became a key figure in the French Resistance of WWII [4].  I am uncertain of the lineage (such may the shortcomings of the Internet's perpetual second row seat to history, which I should like to correct for myself this year), but Scriabin's great great grandson is reputed to be the Israeli concert pianist Elisha Abas [5].

Cited Reference

1. Pasternak, Boris.  Doctor Zhivago.  Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Translators; introduction by Richard Pevear.  New York: Pantheon Books, 2010 (first published in Italian by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, 1957).

2. Wikipedia: "Boris Pasternak".

3. Saddler, Geoff.  "Boris, Pasternak."  In Book Rags: Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century.

4. Cohen, Laurent.  "Twofold Revelation."  Books, Erez Acheret, September 17, 2009.

5. Elisha Abas.

Other Reference

Wikipedia: "House of Romanov."

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Comments

[tammy swofford]

Jim,
Love this post. And absolutely love the film and the musical score. smile

Tammy