Doctor Zhivago Read Free

with his parents in the country, and there, as he recalled, “I read Tyutchev and for the first time in my life wrote poetry not as a rare exception, but often and continuously, as one paints or writes music.” His first book,
A Twin in the Clouds
, was published in December of that year.
    Pasternak described these metamorphoses in his two autobiographical essays,
Safe Conduct
, written between 1927 and 1931, and
People and Situations
(published in English under the titles
I Remember
and
An Essay in Autobiography
), written in 1956. Different as the two books are in style and vision, they both give a good sense of the extraordinary artistic and philosophical ferment in Russia in the years before the First World War. The older generation of Symbolists had begun to publish in the 1890s, the second generation, which included Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, in the early years of the twentieth century. Then came the new anti-Symbolist movements: the Futurists (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, among many other poets and painters), whose manifesto,
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste
, was published in 1912; and the Acmeists (Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova), who favored Apollonian clarity over Symbolist vagueness. In his essay “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam wrote banteringly:
    For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as splendid a form as music is for the Symbolists.
    And if, among the Futurists, the word as such is still creeping on all fours, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a more dignified vertical position and entered upon the stone age of its existence.
    Which gives at least a small idea of the lively polemics that went on in those years.
    Pasternak first associated with the younger Symbolists around the journal
Musaget
and its publishing house. To a gathering of this group, in 1913, he read a paper entitled “Symbolism and Immortality.” The text was later lost, but in
People and Situations
, he summarized its main points:
    My paper was based on the idea that our perceptions are subjective, on the fact that the sounds and colors we perceive in nature correspond to something else, namely, to the objective vibrations of sound and light waves. I argued that this subjectivity was not the attribute of an individual human being, but was a generic and suprapersonal quality,that it was the subjectivity of the human world and of all mankind. I suggested in my paper that every person leaves behind him a part of that undying, generic subjectivity which he possessed during his lifetime and with which he participated in the history of mankind’s existence. The main object of my paper was to advance the theory that this utterly subjective and universally human corner or portion of the world was perhaps the eternal sphere of action and the main content of art. That, besides, though the artist was of course mortal, like everyone else, the happiness of existence he experienced was immortal, and that other people centuries after him might experience, through his works, something approaching the personal and innermost form of his original sensations.
    These thoughts, or intuitions, were to reach their full realization decades later in
Doctor Zhivago.
    In January 1914, Pasternak and some of his young friends shifted their allegiance from the Symbolists to the Futurists, forming a new group that called itself Centrifuge. There were other groups as well—the Ego-futurists and the Cubo-futurists, the latter including Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Pasternak met at that time. These groups were all somewhat fluid and loosely defined, and their members kept forming new alliances and creating new antagonisms.
    On August 1, 1914, the First World War broke out, which somewhat curtailed the skirmishing among literary movements. Pasternak was exempted from military service because of an old injury caused by a fall from a horse in 1903, which had left him with one leg slightly