An Essay in Autobiography (1959) - now called I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography - is Pasternak’s brief reflection of fifty years of his life to the 1930s—his poetic years. The six short chapters are an account of his “preparatory steps” that lead to his famous 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago (and stunning 1965 film).
Born in 1890 in Moscow to father Leonid, a gifted artist,
and mother Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist, music was his destiny since the age
of 12 when composer Alexander Scriabin lived next door to the country house his
parents rented one summer holiday. For the next six years, it consumed him, but
no one knew of his inner torment: “I played wretchedly” and “I lacked perfect
pitch.” He made a clean and total break with music to pursue poetry.
Pasternak’s earliest memory of poetry was at 15 when he was read Alexander Blok. Each of Blok’s poems contained “a piece of news” with the quickness of observations, as well as “adjectives without a noun, predicates without a subject, alarm, excitement, hide-and-seeks, abruptness” and perceptiveness. After a school trip to Berlin at the age of 16, where it was unusual, different from Moscow, and without restrictions, he soon turned to the German poet, Rainer Rilke. A year later, after an increase in publishers in Moscow, he formed a kinship circle of poets called “Serdarda” (“none of us knew what this meant”).
At university he began to write poetry every day. Exempt
from military duty due to a childhood riding accident which left him with one
leg shorter than the other, he tutored, translated texts, and continued to
write. When he wrote for a local magazine, The Contemporary, one of his pieces
was subjected to an unknown editor. Pasternak complained to the Board of the
magazine, dramatist Maxim Gorky. Years later he discovered he had complained to
Gorky about Gorky’s edits!
He writes predominantly of his poet friends, their early
deaths and suicides, the funeral of Leo Tolstoy, of artists he admired, and of
heated clashes of ideologies and writing styles with contemporary poets. The
chapter, Three Shadows, tells of the death of three close friendships: two of
them Georgian poets who died in their 30s. Paolo Yashvili, whom Pasternak
regarded as “brilliant, polished, cultured, an amusing talker, European and
good-looking” radiated talent. His poetry was “supremely creative … airy,
spacious, and full of breadth and movement.” In contrast Titsian Tabidze was rich
in intuition, but withdrawn and “a reserved and complicated soul.” In 1937 Tabidze
was expelled from the Union of Georgian Writers, arrested, allegedly tortured
in prison, and executed two months later. Yashvili, devastated, shot himself
with a hunting gun in the Writers’ Union. Pasternak was clearly disturbed by
the death of his close friend, who he spent time with in Tbilisi, Georgia, for
this is his last chapter.
Pasternak stops short. He does not mention the death of
Joseph Stalin, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, in 1953. He does
not mention his prose work, except to discredit his work before the age of 50: “I
dislike my style before 1940 … the disintegrating forms, the impoverished
thought and the littered and uneven language of those days.” He does not mention
his 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago, except in one sentence: “I have just finished
my chief and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and
for which I take full responsibility, a novel in prose with a section in verse,
Doctor Zhivago.” Nor does he mention receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1958 which he renounced due to national criticism (his choice at the time was to accept
the prize in exile, or renounce and remain in Moscow).
An Essay in Autobiography is true to its title: it is a
lengthy essay, a brief reflection of his life, an insight into his place in a
poet’s circle, his poetic influences and his love of expression to find meaning
in his world. He died of lung cancer in 1960, a year after its publication.
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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