750
PARTISAN REVIEW
and the sky, the actively burning rays of the sun and the cold moun–
tain water and the shape of a sound or a human limb or a continent, or
a half articulated movement-physical or mental-and the stresses and
pressures of inanimate objects and of human sensations, emotions, per–
ceptions, images, and passions, all penetrate one another and strain
against one another, both act and suffer; the words communicate this by
means of a kind of violent and unexpected modulation to which Pas–
ternak is as prone as Donne or Hopkins. Nor is this a consciously bold
device or technical method of juxtaposing opposites to secure a spark
or an explosion; it conveys a directly experienced vision, of a single
world-wide, world-long system of tensions and stresses, a perpetual ebb
and flow of energy, rising to a climax in the painful frustration, but,
in the end, triumphant agony of individual centers of consciousness-–
the life of personalities, solid men and women, vis-a-vis solid material
objects. Both persons and things are related to each other by real and
not symbolic relationships, heightened and transfigured by an extreme
concentration of vision which reveals the inner outline-the permanent
bony structure-and does not transmute them into elements of an other
worldly language, or become attenuated into a succession of vaguely
relevant emotions of verbal patterns. As always with great poetry, these
systems of tensions resolve themselves at their greatest height into
passages of noble simplicity and repose, moments of serenity and harmony
towards which the discords inevitably tend, and in terms of which alone
they acquire their significance and purpose.
Pasternak grew up during the symbolist phase of Russian poetry,
when problems of philosophy and theology dominated the thoughts of
some among his most gifted contemporaries. He originally set out to be
a composer, was a pupil of Scriabin, but became a poet profoundly in–
fluenced by Andrey Byely and the other writers of the Moscow circle.
Betweer:! 1915 and 1924 he composed half a dozen short stories, and
in 1930 his autobiography appeared. The stories, to be properly as–
sessed, must be understood in the historical context of his life. His
prose is of that painfully over-elaborated and euphuistic kind in which
the maximum and sometimes more is squeezed out of every word; and
owes much to the precious, sometimes unsuccessful, at other times
dazzlingly brilliant technical method of Byely, a great innovator of
language, who before Joyce invented new methods of using words, and
generated a world of his own, filled with the fitful memories of half
understood German metaphysics, choc a bloc with treasured mysteries
drawn from Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wagner, French and Belgian sym–
bolist poets, the anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner-a queer amalgam
