The Legend of the Poet and the Image of the Actor in the Short Stories of Pasternak (1966)

Abstract

Written and published between 1915 and 1929, Pasternak’s short stories have remained the least known and least studied part of his work.1 At the time of their publication they suffered from the proximity of a highly esteemed poetic output which eclipsed them in the eyes of the Russian public and critics; whereas, on the other hand, the non-Russian reader, by his ignorance of the poetry, has long been deprived of the source of light illuminating their unity. Very different in aim, form, and content, these five stories do not, in fact, appear as a homogeneous and independent whole, but as so many isolated incursions of a poet into the domain of prose. It is mainly from this formal angle that they have been considered till now, the fiction being treated most often as merely an accessory and secondary element, as compared with an original language showing the indisputable freshness of vision of a great poet. It is therefore understandable that critical attention should have been focussed chiefly on The Childhood of Luvers which, in fact, is an unfinished novel, where the development of the subject, arbitrarily broken off, counts less than the originality of the means of investigation and description Pasternak employs to follow the paths a child’s consciousness takes.