PASTERNAK’S EARLY PROSE

Abstract

ALTHOUGH it is not altogether clear why Pasternak sought so thoroughly to simplify his style after about 1932, nor with what feelings he later said he would not raise a finger to save from oblivion more than a quarter of what he had written before 1940, yet it is clear that after that date his idea of simplicity and naturalness is an unproblematic one. A style of such 'transparent neutrality' that the reader will not notice it but will seem to see the thoughts it expresses arise in his mind of themselves-this notion is comprehensible enough. Not much in Pasternak's own prose quite exemplifies it, but one readily thinks of Tolstoy's, for instance, as doing so. Again, when he accuses his previous work of 'unnecessary mannerisms, the common sin of those days', though we may disagree that it is so sinful in his case, we know what he means. Anyone can see that his youthful style is mannered, dense with accumulations of imagery, often obscure through the absence of general explanations. To be simple means to write in a language that is immediately understandable, to keep metaphor to a minimum, to avoid syntactical or other intricacies. What Pasternak wishes to convey is not always easy-in Doctor Zhivago it is certainly not. No less than in his youth he sets out to present, not characters or events, but the 'sense of reality as such'; and if 'reality' is much more extensive, less private, than before, if it is to be found through a contemplation of history and of a wide range of human lives, rather than through the heightening and elaborating of those sharp visionary intuitions of the young Pasternak, yet his purpose in Doctor Zhivago is as metaphysicaL his essential subject as hard for the rarely inspired imagination of the reader to focus on, as ever. Nevertheless, when he now writes of mysteries he tries to be as clear as possible about them, and at least puts them in plain-sounding sentences, such as: 'Life is symbolical. because it is meaningful', and rather than invent strange images to convey their strangeness, he now associates them with the imagery of already familiar mysteries-to wit: the Christian imagery of the novel. But simplicity, naturalness, laconicism-these were always Pasternak's declared ideal, and, in away, his most basic theme, and in his earlier period these concepts are far from unproblematic. He says of the composer Scriabin that of course it was clear what he meant when