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In 1903 Papa Pasternak rented a dacha outside Moscow, next to the home of the composer Scriabin. The day the Pasternaks moved, the future poet fled the bustle and ran into the surrounding woods. He recalls in an autobiographical sketch: "Oh Lord! That forest was full of everything that morning! The sun was piercing it in all directions . . . And like the light and shadows shimmering in the forest, like the singing birds flitting from branch to branch, sections of Scriabin's Third Symphony or Divine Poem, which was being composed at the piano in the neighboring house, spread and echoed under the foliage." The adolescent Pasternak decided that he was "destined for music." But crestfallen that he lacked absolute pitch and that he could not even properly play what he had composed. Pasternak abandoned music after six years of study. He retains one of Scriabin's mystic ideas: that art, religion and life are one, an eternal and infrangible entity.
Once, during the abortive 1905 revolution, almost as a prank, young Boris rushed out to display "my tuppeny-ha'penny revolutionism which went no further than bravado in the face of a Cossack whip and its blow on the back of a padded coat." He studied law briefly at Moscow, then enrolled as a philosophy major in Germany's University of Marburg under a pudgy intellectual martinet, Professor Hermann Cohen, a disciple of Hegel and Kant. In the Gothic-fairy-tale mountain town of Marburg, with its steeply sloping streets and medieval gables, his first serious love came to 18-year-old Boris Pasternak. When the girl turned down his offer of marriage, "[I found] my face was twitching and my eyes constantly filled with tears."
After traveling in Italy, Pasternak returned to Moscow without his philosophy degree and began whooping it up as a bohemian versifier. Pasternak, with his liquid, steel-grey eyes, sensuous lips and proud and pensive look, became famed as a ladies' man. He looked, recalls one acquaintance, "like an Arabian stallion."
In poetry he vaulted over the neat, syntactical fences and conventional forms of the past. He, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin became Russia's three musketeers of modernity. Mayakovsky's poetry was like a shot in the streets. He became the Bolshevik poet laureate; but Big Brother's embrace was crushing, and in the end he killed himself. In his book Safe Conduct, Pasternak conjures up "our State" as the "stone guest" at the funeral. Esenin (who was married for a time to Dancer Isadora Duncan) was an untutored rustic songbird, who pined away in the Soviet cage and also died by his own hand.
Themes & Variations. In the four slim volumes that Boris Pasternak published between 1914 and 1923 (two chief ones: My Sister Life, Themes and Variations), he developed a telegraphic style, sound effects that are almost totally lost in translation and a unique imagery that made the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Pasternak's Definition of Poetry is actually easier to understand than most of his poems:
It is a steeply rising whistle.
It is the cracking of squeezed icicles.
It is frozen leaves through the night.
It is two nightingales singing a duel.
It is the stifled sweetpea plant.
It is the tears of the world on a shoulder.