542
PARTISAN REVIEW
perceptible influence not only on the younger but also on the more
CI–
tablished writers, was afterwards collected in
Two Books
(1927).
Mter a long interval, Pasternak returned to lyric poetry with
the
book
Second Birth
(1933),
which was followed in the same
year
by
Poems,
the first full collection of his verse.
It was in this period that the poet's ordeal began. He remained
loyal to his calling in a social order admitting no other loyalty
than
to itself. He had to fight singlehandedly a sustained rear-guard action
in order to avoid surrendering unconditionally to the political
prct–
sure of the regime, augmented by the vicious attacks of sycophantic
critics, the whispering campaigns and the outright calumnies of
his
enemies and rivals. The main accusations leveled against him
wert
that he had committed the unspeakable crimes of individualism
and
formalism, and that he had shown indifference, even hostility,
to
Marxist ideology. His stubborn refusal to obey the party's "general
line," and to change his poetry into an instrument of propaganda,
was branded as a betrayal. The literary press treated
him
as an out–
law; the writers' association, as an ou\cast.
Yet, in a spirit not of compromise but of humility, Pasternak
tried to give poetic form to his desire to connect himself with
the
will of the Russian people. He did so by trying to understand
the
Russian present through the perspective of history, and in 1926
he
published his poem
Spektorsky,
in which, following similar experi–
ments by Bely and Blok, he used the protagonist's character, whaIC
name gives its title to this work, as an autobiographical mirror,
~
flecting not only the poet's personality but also the age out of which
he had come. In the same years Pasternak wrote and published
(1927)
a cycle of lyrical fragments, re-evoking, under the title
1905,
that "little revolution" which Lenin had labeled a "general
~
hearsal" for the upheaval of
1917.
That rhapsody was followed
by
a long, simple episode,
Lieutenant Schmidt,
more epic in tone and
content, retelling the story of the mutiny of the battleship
Potemkia
in the Black Sea with a naked power reminiscent of Eisenstein's film.
It was in the same period that Pasternak composed his praJC
tales, which he collected twice, under the titles
Stories
and
Airways,
in
1925
and
1933.
The most important of them is the opening piece,
"The Childhood of Liiwers," written in a tone and style that We!t.–
ern critics have compared to Proust, although it reminds one more
