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Poet Pasternak stressed imagery because he believed that "only the image can keep pace with the successes of nature." A frosty night is "like a blind puppy lapping its milk." The Caucasus is like "crumpled bedding." The dark night of the soul is "blacker than monks, more stifling than clergy." The evening is empty "like an interrupted story." What Pasternak has tried to do in his poetry is not to recollect emotion in tranquillity, but to arrest emotion like a motion picture stopped with all the characters in mid-action.
Intriguingly enough, Pasternak had no trouble writing spirited revolutionary poetry when the period dealt with by the poem (1905, 1917) was one in which he could regard the Revolution as a kind of unspoiled force of nature. Sample stanza:
We're few, perhaps not more than three,
Flaming, infernal, from the Don,
Beneath a sky racing and gray
Of rain, clouds, soldiers bent upon
Soviets, verses and long talk
Of transport and the artist's work.
From the years before 1925 date four of Pasternak's five short stories. Another story, The Last Summer, written in 1934, is an autobiographical reverie evoking the summer of 1914, "that last summer when life still appeared to pay heed to individuals, and when it was easier and more natural to love than to hate." Of the earlier tales, only The Childhood of Luvers, a sensitively wrought, Proustian account of a girl at puberty accepting her womanhood, is memorable.
"Sixty-Six! Sixty-Six!" Pasternak escaped service in World War I because of an old leg injury, but worked in a chemical factory in the Urals. While the '20s brought him success, the late '30s imposed silence. During the Stalinist purges, Pasternak turned to translating Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley—the only work of his by which he is known to a wide Russian public. Save for two wartime books of poetry, no volume of Pasternak's has been published in Russia for a quarter-century, although handwritten copies are privately circulated.
As late as the winter of '41-'42, Pasternak slept on a shakedown bed under the stairway of an unheated Moscow tenement house. There he received anonymous gifts of food, rather like a Hindu holy man before whose hovel little dishes are placed by unseen hands. During the Terror of '36-'37, he lost his "living space" and food-ration privileges. When Red Army Marshal Tukhachevsky et al. were executed, Pasternak was asked to sign a resolution of approval, and refused: "My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn't ... I abhorred all this blood ... It was, I was told later, my colleagues who saved me indirectly. No one dared to report to the hierarchy that I hadn't signed."