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PARTISAN REVIEW
psychic terms. His metaphors tend to express the shock and wonder
of
being
in abridged and concentrated form.
In
his recent
Notes on
Translating Shakespearean Tragedies
(1954), the poet defines meta–
phor as "the shorthand of the spirit." Thus Pasternak views metaphor
not as an emblem or symbol, which suggests and conceals, but as a
graphic scheme or a sketchy outline of the experienced thing. This
may well be the reason why this artist has never indulged, like so
many modern poets, in the false mystique of his own calling and
craft. Poetry is for him not the revelation of a higher harmony, but
simply the direct expression of "the dissonance of this world."
A poetry so understood gives the immediate sense of a reality
endowed with no other glamor than that of being reality itself: "a
suburb, not a refrain." One could say that Pasternak has always
followed the principle stated by the fictional protagonist of his last
book: "Art never seemed to me an object or aspect of form, but
rather a mysterious and hidden component of content."
It
was in April 1954 that Pasternak announced in the journal
The Banner
the imminent completion of a work in progress, entitled
Doctor Zhivago.
The author defined it as "a novel in prose," an
obvious play on the subtitle "novel in verse" of Pushkin's
Eugene
Onegin.
The announcement was followed by a series of poems, sup–
posedly written by the novel's protagonist or Doctor Zhivago
him–
self. These poems, predominantly religious in theme, often literally
Christian in tone, were destined, as Pasternak then declared, to close
the novel as a fictitious appendix of posthumous papers or documents,
through which the reader would understand better the personage to
whom the writer attributed their authorship. Both within and with–
out Russia, however, those pieces were generally read as
if
their real
author had supposedly written them in an autobiographical vein
rather than in a fictional key. Later on, when the "thaw" which fol–
lowed Stalin's death was coming to an end, Pasternak made a few
semi-public readings of the completed work, and the harshness of
the quasi-official criticism of his colleagues made him realize that
his novel could never appear in Soviet Russia without changes so
radical as to disfigure it. The manuscript was subsequently smuggled
abroad, so that it could be published in its original form. Despite an
official Soviet protest, a Milan publisher managed to issue an Italian
