Poems
Boris Pasternak is one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. His lyrics take their place next to names like Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam. Marina Tsvetaeva says of him, "Pasternak is a great poet. Now he is the greatest among all".
Pasternak does not belong to any school. But neither is he the progenitor of a school; he can have only epigones, but not followers. He cannot be a teacher because he professes the idea that the artist learns himself from everything around him - cultural layers, nature, human relationships, his own mistakes and preoccupations.
Pasternak is a poet for true connoisseurs because the moral issues that concern him, the soul-searchings and torments he shares, are meant to uplift the reader, to rejuvenate him. And thus Pasternak is in tune with the famous maxim that "the poet must go before the crowd!"
The misunderstandings are long past, the bitternesses the poet has carried to the grave, what is left is the lyric, which proves to us for the seventh time that for the true poet all times are good, as long as he has the courage to look things in the eye and listen to his own voice.
From the afterword by Kiril Kadiiski
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) was a Russian poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator.
Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular. Pasternak is the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel whose plot takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War.
Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and was first published there in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize. In 1989, Pasternak's son Yevgeny finally accepted the award on his father's behalf. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.
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