408
BORIS PASTERNACK
Chopin would slip unnoticed into the hall to some mirror, disarrange
his tie and hair and return transformed to the salon to begin acting out
humorous impersonations of his own devising: a famous English travel–
er, a gushing Parisienne, a poor old Jew. Clearly a great tragic gift is
unthinkable without feelings of objectivity, and a feeling of objectivity
IS
not found without mimetic ability.
It is remarkable that wherever Chopin leads us and whatever he
shows us, we always give ourselves up to his imaginings without straining
our sense of appropriateness, without intellectual awkwardness. All his
storms and dramas closely concern us, they easily take place in an age
of railroads and the telegraph. Even when a legendary world intrudes,
in the Fantasie, the Ballades and parts of the Polonaises-in terms of
subject partly connected with Mickiewicz and Slowacki--even here the
threads of some kind of plausibility reach out to contemporary man.
Especially deep is the impress of this seriousness in the most Chopinesque
of Chopin-in his Etudes.
The Etudes of Chopin, intended as technical manuals, are rather
whole disciplines than textbooks. They are musical researches into a
theory of childhood; separate chapters, for the piano, of an introduction
to death (it is staggering to think that half of them were written by a
man of twenty), and they rather teach history, the
structure
of the uni–
verse, or whatsoever more remote and more general, than how to play
the piano. The significance of Chopin is wider than music. His work
seems to us a second invention of that art.
Boris Pasternak
(Translated by Paul Schmidt)
