THE ENERGY OF PASTERNAK
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renaissance of Russian poetry which began in the nineties and ended
with the death of Yessenin. By 1919 Pasternak's poetry began to be
read beyond the literary coteries of Moscow and Petrograd and today,
at the age of 60, he is recognized as a poet of genius upon the quality
of which no serious critic has ventured to cast any doubt. Although
attention was drawn to his work by D. S. Mirsky, who admired his
gifts and wrote about him with great understanding (in English) in the
twenties, it was not until recent events stimulated a new wave of
interest in Russia that any systematic translation of his work into
English was attempted. Verse translations by Professor C. M. Bowra and
by Miss Babette Deutsch (which form the last section of this book) ,-in
particular the former-convey something of the heavily charged and
twisting rhythms, the tormented yet luminous vision of the original; in
particular, of the depth and unity of his world in which men, things,
relationships, emotions, ideas, sensations, situations are conceived within
a kind of universal biological category. Within this orbit the force of
nature flows with a violent almost self-conscious energy, at many inter–
penetrating levels; sometimes it flows in rich, enormous overwhelming
waves of feeling moving freely and in many dimensions. Sometimes the
stream is arrested or compressed into narrow defiles, in which it forms
knots and gathers into violently condensed globules of extreme in–
tensity; Pasternak's verse is in the first place a vehicle of metaphysical
emotion which melts the barriers between personal experience and
"brute" creation.
The poet himself remarked somewhere that poetry or art is the
natural object informed by, or seen under, the aspect of energy-the
all pervasive
vis vivida
whose flow, at times broken and intermittent,
is the world of things and persons, forces and states, acts and sensations.
To attempt to give more precise significance to this kind of vision may
be perilous and foolish, save by discrimination from what it is not:
it is neither a pathetic fallacy whereby human experience is projected
into inanimate objects, nor yet is it the inversion of this, to be found, for
example, in the novels of Virginia Woolf, where the fixed structure of
human beings and material objects is dissolved into the life and the
properties of the shifting patterns of the data of the inner and the
outer senses, sounds, smells, colors, real, imagined, and recollected. There
is, on the contrary, a sense of unity induced by the sense of the pervasive–
ness of cosmic categories, (perhaps derived from the poet's neo-Kantian
days in Marburg) which integrate all the orders of creation into a
single, biologically and physiologically, emotionally and intellectually,
interrelated universe; this world in which clouds and flowers, the earth
