Where Russia is concerned, I often think of this text by Boris Pasternak, written by him in German. I have only ever seen it in Gerd Ruge’s illustrated biography of Pasternak (Hachette, 1959), where it is described as ‘une dédicace’. For whom this dedicatory inscription was written, I have never been able to discover, but since Ruge was a German correspondent in Moscow and knew Pasternak at the time of the Zhivago affair, I presume it was presented to him and he still has the original.
This would be my translation (improvements invited):
Ages will pass. Many long ages. I shall no longer exist. There will be no return to the time of our fathers or forefathers, which is surely not necessary or desirable. But the Noble, the Creative and Great will finally, after a long absence, reappear. That will be an age of true achievement. Your life then will be the richest and most fertile imaginable. Remember me then.
Peredelkino B. Pasternak
I hope for Russia, of course, but I wish I shared Pasternak’s certainty. My friend the Chekhov scholar Mikhail Gromov said to me in 1981 that where Russia was concerned ‘it is always impossible to think in terms of individuals, only generations’. But even that good old Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (1938-2010) exclaimed in desperation: ‘Whatever we do in Russia, nothing ever changes!’
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
It rather sounds like ‘the coming of the Kingdom’!
Dear Chris and Damian,
Many thanks for both your Comments!
To take Chris’s Comment first, Pasternak’s fragment does indeed sound like the coming of the Kingdom. I doubt, however, whether he meant it that way. When he says ‘I shall not exist [dasein]’, he means ‘there, where you will be’, whereas being a believer he would be ‘there’ if he were talking about the Kingdom on Earth..? I strongly suspect his ‘I shall not exist [be there]’ implies ‘I shall be somewhere else’ — awaiting, presumably, the general resurrection.
I know the Hardy, Damian — great poem! — but the continuity Hardy is speaking of doesn’t seem to me quite to chime with the Pasternak piece, because Pasternak appears to imply that the continuity of life before the golden age of creativity (presumably the continuity of ‘the Communist Dark Age’) is merely infertile and necrotic. But I may be wrong, because Pasternak certainly saw virtue, supreme virtue, in the basic forces of life, presumably embodied for Hardy in ‘thin smoke without flame’ and ‘a maid and her wight’. He would surely have agreed with Hardy about sex, for instance.
Harvey Pitcher has pointed out to me the resemblance between the Pasternak passage and the millenarianism of THREE SISTERS and other late works of Chekhov. I think it quite possible that Pasternak was influenced by Chekhov here, as he had only recently ‘discovered’ Chekhov (on whom he partly based Zhivago) and might well have been struck by the resemblance between the inspissate gloom of Chekhov’s time and his.
On the other hand, since the present is always awful, Russians have a tendency to live in the past or the future. There has always been a strong utopian streak to their culture; call it a comforting romanticism, if you like. Perhaps even Pasternak wasn’t immune from that.
I find it very interesting, though, that Pasternak says that it’s neither necessary nor desirable to ‘return to the time of our fathers or forefathers’. Writing from a Nazi prison in 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought differently: ‘To be deeply rooted in the soil of the past makes life harder, but it also enriches it and gives it vigour. There are certain fundamental truths about human life to which men will always return sooner or later’. Perhaps this brings him closer to Hardy’s vision than Pasternak’s. Whichever way you look at it, of course, all three men had hope.
Patrick: thank you for this moving passage from Pasternak. I couldn’t read your translation without thinking of Hardy’s poem about how the simple certitudes and natural recurrences underlie and survive gross historical events (he was thinking evidently of the war):
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Came whispering by;
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
I can’t really imagine an ‘imaginary conversation’ between Hardy and Pasternak (don’t know enough about either of them to invent convincingly), but just from this evidence they would have certain simple things in common.
I guess the release of the journalist in Russia yesterday, after the concerted outcry in the media, will not alter much your pessimistic outlook…nor perhaps should it. But at least it shows that the centre is not stone deaf. What about the Chinese reaction to protests in Hong Kong?
Stick to the point, Grant!