SOURCE: "Pasternak's Short Fiction," in Russian Literature Triquarterly, Vol. 3, May, 1972, pp. 279-302.

The period in Soviet literature stretching from the Revolution through the 1920s represents a prolonged coming of age, both for the literature itself and for many of the writers taken in the context of their literary biographies. Following the culminai poetic tradition of Symbolism, writers sought their voice in prose. In alarm the poetic world took notice of the shift toward prose. The magnitude of historical events seemed to draw the artist away from poetry toward a regenerated tradition of prose realism.

Boris Pasternak's poetry of the 1910s, formally accomplished and innovative, seldom escapes a certain prankishness, the obscurance of contemporary theme in deference to tongue-tripping verbal artistry. The hermit poet of My Sister Life who troubles some children with the question, "What millennium is it outdoors?" is eccentric, but not to Pasternak's insulated poetic world. His drinking partners, Lermontov and Poe, seem as far removed from the pressing literary reality of 1917 as their drink, vermouth, from the Russian national beverage. In My Sister Life the hermit poet emerged, but did not set off down the road. The path to the literary reality of the day led Pasternak away from poetry toward prose. In 1917 Pasternak wrote, "I'll say goodbye to verses, my mania; / I've set a rendezvous with you in a novel" ("Autumn"). In Pasternak's long poems of the 1920s the poet made a serious effort to adapt his essentially lyrical talent to the narrative and epic modes: "The age demands the epic, and therefore I am making the transition from lyrical reflection to the epic, although this is very difficult" ["D sebe," Stikhi 1936-1959]. This statement of intention made light of the difficulties which Pasternak encountered along the way.

As the poetic persona faltered during the period of Soviet literature's coming of age, Pasternak came of age in his short prose. His stylized distinction between poetry and prose in "The Childhood of Luvers" presents the process of transition concisely:

Having ceased to be poetic nonsense, life now fermented like a thick black fable insofar as it became prose and turned into fact. Dully, rheumatically and dimly, as if in a state of eternal sobering, elements of everyday existence dropped into her knitting soul. They sank down to the bottom, real, hardened and cold, like drowsy pewter spoons. There, on the bottom, this pewter began to run, merging into lumps, dripping with fixed ideas.

[Proza 1915-1958]

Pasternak's short prose rehearses the poet's difficulties as he comes to struggle with the lessons of "fact" and as the "fixed ideas" of a mature literary personality take shape. His short prose recounts, as his poetry does not, the writer's coming of age.

The view that Pasternak's short prose is just the small change of his verse is not creditable. Prose was an alternative to, but not diversion from verse. As early as 1917 Pasternak thought of himself as a prose writer primarily. On March 15, 1919, he gave the following responses to a questionnaire circulated by the Union of Poets of the Moscow Professional Union of Writers:

Q. In addition to verse, are you writing any artistic prose?

A. Yes; and for the last two years, mainly prose. A novel in manuscript around fifteen signatures [i.e., approximately 250 pages], free for publication. The central work of the undersigned is tales, three in number, each from one-half to one signature in length.

The novel mentioned, we learn from Pasternak's second autobiography, People and Attitudes, was lost; Its beginning survived and was published as "The Childhood of Luvers," a self-contained work with the structure of a tale. The fragment "Uninhabitedness," published in 1918, in all likelihood is part of this lost novel as well. Of the three tales mentioned in Pasternak's response, one is surely 'Ìl tratto di Apelle," which is dated 1915 in Pasternak's collected prose. A second is "Letters from Tula," dated 1918. The third tale mentioned is either the unpublished "The History of a Contraoctave," written in 1913 and somewhat longer than one signature, or a tale which has not survived, with the exception of the recently discovered fragment, "Three Chapters from a Tale."

Beyond these works, Pasternak's short fiction includes the short tale "Aerial Ways" (1924) and the long tale The Tale (1929). The semi-philosophical, semi-autobiographical piece "Safe Conduct" (1931), like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist, is a special case of the imagination coming to roost in the man. Its presentation is artistic, while its content is selectively autobiographical. Worthy of mention but scarcely worthy of inclusion in the opus of Pasternak's short prose are the few wartime dispatches which Pasternak wrote in the 1940s. The several snatches of artistic prose which Pasternak published between 1937 and 1939 are properly regarded as first drafts of the novel Doctor Zhivago rather than part of his efforts at short prose fiction.

The unpublished tale "The History of a Contraoctave" was written in the summer of 1913, three years after Pasternak's return from its setting, one of those small German towns which Pasternak knew well from his experience of a summer semester's study at Marburg. "The History" begins in 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars, and concludes in 1820. The plot is purposely subdued: what action there is reaches us through rumor, gossip, conversation overheard, effect isolated from cause, and public consequences of private events. The town organist Knauer, improvising on the massive church organ, in a fit of ecstasy inadvertently crushes his little son in the organ's inner workings. Knauer suddenly leaves town only to return ten years later, in the capacity of tutor to a nobleman, in order to play the same organ and apply for reinstatement as organist. His application refused, he is ignominiously ushered out of town.

The most disquieting theme in nineteenth-century art (and particularly in that art touched by romantic anti-rationalism) was that of the unique destructive power which the artist wields, and of this power's utter indifference to human destinies. The power of art rendered a nearly beatific insanity in Heinrich von Kleist's "Saint Cecilia, or The Power of Music," a more mundane insanity in Gogol's "The Portrait," rivalry culminating in death in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri" and Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata." In the phantasmagoria of Shakespeare and Beethoven Tolstoy viewed as amoral and ultimately despoiling art's indifference to human destinies. He castigated himself for having yielded to such amoralism. Art's revenge on the artist's life pervaded the thematics of the Symbolists. The living link with the nineteenth-century romantic heritage was close to Pasternak as he composed "The History of a Contraoctave," an account of the terror of art over the artist, the indifference of art to human life, and the pain inflicted in the name of art on those close to the artist. This theme pursued Pasternak throughout his life, finally appearing in the novel Doctor Zhivago, and conditioning his portrayal of art as an illness, a dangerous delirium.

The plot of "The History," while it reports the central theme of art's terrible force, does not yield a sense of the prose craftsmanship displayed in the tale. "The History" is a touchstone for Pasternak's prose artistry. In concert with the periphrastic presentation of the central action, Pasternak puts strict limits on the narrator's field of vision: as Knauer walks the darkened streets of Ansbach, where his son died ten years earlier, his sight and the narrator's are limited by the swath of light from a hand lantern. His excitement:

. . . tore on ahead and expected something from the right side of the street, opposite from the side which they were walking on; it couldn't manage to stay within that swath which fell from the lantern and led the way, and when into this fully-lit swath suddenly and without warning crept the huge, bulky and solid pedestal of a Gothic church, it crossed the swath, like a little yellow river, not dislodging a single stone along its whole length, swimming across the yellow flagstone and halfway up the church, wrapped breast and stone in the night. . . .

The narrator plays off his pretended unfamiliarity with the town of Ansbach against his central character's all too particular memory of its topography. A painful psychological value is made to injure in the location of an occurrence by the narrator's suspension of foreshadowing.

The frequency of extended metonymy makes "The History" unmistakably Pasternak's prose. In a public room at the town inn the slightest sounds are prominent amidst the hushed silence of the late hour. The travelers' weariness inheres in the fixtures of the hotel itself: ". . . a wall clock ticks; a pendulum behind glass; swinging, it sows the room with ticking, frequent and shallow, like millet; but it brandishes about so lifelessly and tiresomely, as if it were the limp, aching arm of the sower toward evening of planting day." Metonymy extended to the point where anthropomorphized simile is discovered—such is the stamp of Pasternak in his early prose. The pendulum measuring the late hour comes, via the sower's aching arm, to measure the traveler's weariness. The fixtures of the hotel stand in for its patrons' claims upon it.

The reach of Pasternak's imagery is a specific feature of his prose. Pasternak's was a painterly eye which balanced the broad canvas against the demands of detail:

In the ill-lit parts of the city, like words pronounced in an even voice amidst absolute silence, short, succinct lines crowded together to the point of blackness, broke loose from the gleaming sky, lines of ridge-poles, lancet cornices, soffits, trimming and further wonders of the architecture of the Middle Ages, smoke-blackened by dusk and antiquity. They were feverish from the touch of the skyey lake in which swam two hunks of cloven ice, melting and feeding the depths with a dark, chilly breeze; two large, slowly melting stars, overflowing the brim of the sky, full already of tremulous brightness. The black edges of hammerbeams and eaves came down with a slight fit of shivering all the more keen and quick for the lack of any curvatures and fluting in the structure of the roofs, to which, groping and feeling them out, the surging alluvion of this wan, unsettled night could not have made its way.

In this paragraph from "The History" Pasternak imposes the eye of a painter on the description of the town's skyline. In the foreground particularity of line, enhanced by the enumeration of architectural details, is balanced against the backdrop of puddled stars in a vast sky. The sharply limned foreground against the expansive background sets the picture trembling at the interstices, and the metonymy of the skyey lake results from that observation of the picture's dynamics.

In so many other ways dissimilar, here Pasternak resembles Turgenev in descriptive technique. Both writers take steps to ensure that the narrative moves through a real landscape of concrete detail ordered graphically. In the case of both writers the success of the setting is in large measure due to the accuracy of the wording. Pasternak's architectural assemblage brings to mind Turgenev's letter to Borisov in April 1870, asking for the precise Russian word for "ridge-pole." In a passage from "The History," in which the child's mother founders in grief, Pasternak finds the one word which expressed her longing for release from the feeling of unfathomable loss: "If these dumb and hysterical outcries of a mother's soul had been thoughts, outcries which had wrinkled and disfigured her breasts like the creases of a soiled blouse, if her brain were able to cope with them, the thought of suicide would have come to her like the viaticum sent down from on high." The wafer of extreme unction comes to represent the sole absolution and release from her grief.

The fabric of detail in "The History" could not be mistaken for the plethora of details characteristic of prose in nineteenth-century Russian "naturalism" (insofar as that term can be used to apply to a literary method practiced sporadically from the 1840s through Gorky); nor is it only the accrual of details, stylistically occasioned, characteristic of ornamental prose in the 1920s. In a sketch for an article on Heinrich von Kleist, to be called "On the Ascetic in Culture," and discovered in his university notebook for 1911-1912, Pasternak maintains that the twentieth century is ready for a new concept of realism, surpassing naturalism. This new concept he termed "realism as tonality." Pasternak's technique of prose composition, "tonal realism," was an amalgam of artistic, musical and poetic techniques, as one would expect from Pasternak, his father's son, pupil of Scriabin, and poet.

In Kleist's life Pasternak saw the universalized life of the artist and the key to his creative method:

No doubt he was a poet in the sense that he was constantly departing, In this cult of constant breaks with the natural, in this particular asceticism, bereft of a definite, singular aim and therefore representing the asceticism of creativity, in this constant self-sacrifice he discovered the essential thread of lyricism: beauty. It led him to his death.

As a result of the ascetic's "estrangement and renunciation of the natural," the artist's creation emerges. It arises at the expense of the artist himself.

Tonal realism is evident in Pasternak's prose in the context both of the visual arts and of music. The use of color in his prose is frequently tonal in quality. Pasternak was particularly consistent in his use of the color purple and its tones throughout his prose. Building upon these tones, he developed the theme of life's regenerative powers, first in the context of the natural world observed in the florists' quarter of Moscow, and later in the Christian context in Doctor Zhivago. The color tones vary in accord with variations on the theme of regeneration. . . .

In "The History of a Contraoctave" sound, rather than color, is the abstracted and then embodied vehicle of the themes. Sounds take on substance and texture. The late-night sounds of people playing bowls off the lobby of the inn become "scruples of noise tightly stoppered, monotonously weighed out on druggists' scales." At the beginning of "The History" the empty cathedral itself becomes the sound chamber of the organ which fills it with sound: ". . . it became cold and senselessly vacant under the vault: the interior of the soulless church came to resemble the glass bell of a huge air pump; chilled streams of white, sterile mid-day poured through the narrow vents of the long windows onto the backs of pews and onto the volutes of plaster decorations; they were sucked in here by the emptiness of the huge premises. . . . "

In the wake scene for young Gotlieb, Pasternak fashions a synesthetic, textured fabric of detail from the mourners' cries and sobs: a "catafalque, a baldaquin of muffled crying wavering over the room" fills the room in which the dead child lies with tangible sound, the wailing of a mother who, "once having fed him from her own breasts . . . now fed her own breasts, writhing from her famished convulsions, with copious sops from her generous sorrow." The synesthetic qualities of sounds are employed as variants on a scale central to the thematics of the tale, the scale of the organ music strung throughout the tale.

It is right to ask how deeply seated in his understanding of art and the artist was Pasternak's tonal compositional method. Was it merely a fanciful and inconsequential application of Scriabin's or the Impressionists' achievements to the sphere of artistic prose? Pasternak indicates that it was more than simply symbiosis in the arts. On August 6, 1913, ten years to the day after he broke his leg at age thirteen, he wrote of himself: "As if it were today he lies in his hardening plaster cast and through his delerium pass the trisyllabic syncopated rhythms of the gallop and fall. From this time forward rhythm will be an event for him, and in turn events will become rhythms; melody, tonality, and harmony will be the circumstance and reification of an event." The elements of art merged in the artist's psychology with the reified events of his existence.

This merging of art with life is at the core of "The History of a Contraoctave." What is lithesome and mellifluous as art there becomes clumsy and horrific in life. What is startling is that the artist cannot pay allegiance to both, without irreparable damage to one. The organist, alone in the room with his dead son, strokes the corpse absentmindedly. Distracted by the pain within him, his artistic practice overwhelms him: "But how he started when, through the dark mass of his oblivion, he noticed what his own left wrist was doing, unbeknownst to him, to the child's body. He hurriedly withdrew it. He tore it away from his son's body the way one would tear away a crawling viper or the way, burning oneself and blowing on one's fingers, one removes from the rug a firebrand from the hearth. The hand was caressing the son in octaves; it was picking out the octaves on him." This oblivious, unforgivable gesture provides the psychological motivation for the organist's flight from the town, from his family, and from art. The final proof that art and life are antithetical comes at the conclusion of the tale, when the reader learns that the much reduced Knauer is now tone deaf. No longer was he prone to "that feeling known to the artist alone . . . that property which existed at that instant between him and the cantilena, from the uneasy conjecture that it knows him equally well as he knows it. . . . "

Before the Revolution Pasternak was in the process of abandoning the romantic manner, as he later acknowledged in "Safe Conduct": "But a whole conception of life lay concealed under the romantic manner which I was to deny myself henceforth. This was the conception of life as the life of a poet. It had come down to us from the Symbolists and had been adapted by them from the romantics, principally the Germans." This essentially romantic manner proved exceptionally tenacious in Pasternak's experience, as it was in the experience of the post-symbolists throughout Europe. His understanding of romanticism was concise: "Romanticism is the liberation of creativity from accepted strictures in form and content." Pasternak's short prose seeks to find these strictures in form and content which the very nature of prose itself imposes, as distinct from the strictures imposed by tradition.

In "Il tratto di Apelle" Pasternak again approaches the theme of art and its relationship to life and the artist, now with the ironic scepticism of a renegade from the romantic tradition. Such a renegade and cynic was Heinrich Heine, who becomes the main character of Pasternak's tale. Set in Italy, 'Ìl tratto di Apelle" owes a debt to Heine's story "Florentine Nights." There the main character attempts to distract his consumptive beloved with stories from his personal experience. He tells of seeing Paganini perform, and of how Paganini related through his music the tragic events of his life. The experiences are not only auditory, but visual as well. Paganini's art is seen as "signatures." He tells of how a deaf painter composed a portrait of Paganini so accurately that the painting evoked both laughter and tears. "Why is that so astonishing? In the sure signature of his playing the deaf painter could see his tones. Are there not people for whom tones themselves are only the unsure signatures in which they hear colors and forms?" In 'Ìl tratto di Apelle" the poet's signature is worked out in his fanciful courtship of a rival's mistress.

The epigraph to "Il tratto di Apelle" recites a parable of art from ancient Greece. In Pasternak's version the painter Apelles, finding his rival Zeuxis absent from home, leaves a line drawn upon the wall from which Zeuxis can guess the identity of his guest. Zeuxis returns the call in Apelles' absence and leaves his inimitable sign. The more common version of the parable has Zeuxis, a master of fifth-century, B.C., Greek art, entering a contest with Parrhasius, who with Zeuxis led the Ionian school of painting. Zeuxis executed a painting of grapes so realistic that birds pecked at it. Parrhasius presented Zeuxis with a representation of a curtain, which Zeuxis asked his rival to draw aside, thinking the painting to be behind it. It seems clear that it is Parrhasius' painting to which Pasternak refers as a parable of art. The signature of the artist is that textured and tangible surface which he weaves in his art seemingly from nothing at all. The identity of the artist is not the stuff of art and its relation to the artist's life, as in the romantic tradition, but the lively hide-and-seek which goes on in the art itself. Art is not the forum for the artist's views but the curtain of abstraction and estrangement which parts the artist from life. Apelles' line is drawn at the threshold between art and life.

In the antics of the fictional Heine in Pasternak's tale the implications of Apelles' parable are worked out. Heine seduces away the mistress of the Italian poet Relinquimini through a mixture of sarcastic repartee and banal highjinks. He comments: "all our lives we are on stage, and far from everyone is capable of the naturalness which, like a role, is assigned each at birth." The view of artistic activity as a stage, a screen so real as to obscure reality itself, is further developed in Pasternak's The Tale, in which a writer composes a story along much the same lines as Pasternak's "Il tratto di Apelle."

Having renounced the anthropocentrizing world view of the romantic tradition, Pasternak nevertheless experienced repeated difficulty in abandoning the manner itself in his writings. In prose the difficulty arose with special urgency. In prose, between the words set on the page and the objective world portrayed lies a third person, the even-handed voice of third-person narration. Pasternak, in coming to grips with prose, attempted to deny this third person, as did Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Bridge: "And I ought to have known that this third person who never was, has no significance and must be disavowed . . . He is the noise at the threshold of the voiceless silence of a real conflict." "Letters from Tula," an etude in the epistolary mode which struggles to find the necessary narrative voice between first and third persons, the success of the story depends on the achievement of "a complete silence . . . not Ibsen's, but acoustical" The story concerns the observed conflict of a boisterous film crew doing a documentary on the historical Time of Troubles with an old, retired actor attempting to discover his own history through his art. The old man attains an imagined dialogue with his deceased wife, and through the medium of his art reaches the tranquil silence which eludes his rivals and transcends the significant pauses of Ibsenic dialogue. Implicit in Pasternak's story is a rejection of the artistic representation of history as objectively determined events, capable of documentary representation.

Rejection of the objective view of history does not necessarily entail migration to its opposite pole, the subjectivism which later in Soviet literature became anathema. Pasternak sought the middle ground. His Marburg training in neo-Kantian philosophy and psychology told him that what the positivist historians and ideologists condemned as the shadowy, subjective land of paradox and illogic was the fertile territory of new empirical discovery. In Pasternak's prose the objectifying descriptive function of the narrator is not abandoned but moved to the fore, as in "Letters from Tula," where it is the third-person narrative which characterizes that "acoustical silence" sought on the thematic level. That silence is achieved in a landscape made desolate and lifeless:

There was an unusual silence. The lifeless boilers and railroad cars lay on the flat earth, like heaps of low clouds on windless nights. . . . It was impossible to say where the grass was and where the cinder, and when the tired pair dragged the draught-bar in the turf, harrowing the path with the piece of iron, no dust was visible, and only the lantern at the stableyard gave a dim sense of this. The night gave a long throaty sound—and everything grew silent. This was very, very far off, beyond the horizon.

The physical silence attained is figuratively that of a lifeless world bereft of an observer, deaf and muted. In the context of the story we are led to believe that this is a silence under normal circumstances inaccessible.

We are initially puzzled to learn in "Letters from Tula" that the achievement of this "acoustical silence" is somehow to be associated with Tolstoy. The story encompasses "a night spent in the locale of Tolstoy's biography." The event of the story "is an occurrence on the territory of conscience. . . . " Pasternak's description of lifeless silence would not immediately seem to call into play Tolstoy's views on the moral function of art. Yet it is Tolstoy's view of art which Pasternak adopts and illustrates in his next prose work, "The Childhood of Luvers."

Pasternak had travelled to Astapovo soon after Tolstoy's death in November 1910, in the company of his father, Tolstoy's mouleur. Tolstoy played a central role not only in Pasternak's childhood, but throughout his life. Pasternak attributed to Tolstoy one enviable quality, "the ability to see phenomena in the abrupt finality of a separate moment." This ability, Pasternak asserts, is not the device of a writer (Pasternak evidently has in mind Viktor Shklovsky's application of the Formalist device of "estrangement" to Tolstoy's works), but rather a facility of vision peculiar to Tolstoy. Its exercise is an act of conscience. Later in Pasternak's life Tolstoy's ability is of paramount importance. In an unsent letter to the Futurist poet Sergei Durylin, Pasternak wrote:

. . . the central and most undying aspect of Tolstoy, that which is greater than the teaching on Good and broader than his immortal artistic individuality (perhaps that which makes up his true being), is a new kind of inspiration in the perception of the world and of human activity; that new aspect which Tolstoy brought to the world and by which he moved ahead in the history of Christianity became and remains to this day the foundation of my existence, of my whole manner of living and perceiving. I think that I am not alone in this regard, that people from the camp which we would consider non-Tolstoyan are in the same position, that is, I want to say that despite all the appearances the historical atmosphere of the first half of the twentieth century in the whole world is a Tolstoyan atmosphere.

[March 27, 1950]

Tolstoy fashioned the prose edifice in which Pasternak came to write.

By the time he began "The Childhood of Luvers," Pasternak's prose vision had matured substantially. This work demonstrates the vision which he was to describe in a letter to Stephen Spender in 1959. There, Pasternak added to the usual mechanics of the prose writer's profession ("characters, their development, situations, occurrences, the plot, the subject, the content . . .") one other element: "the characterization of reality as such." He continues: "For the characterization of reality of being, as a substratum, as a common background, the nineteenth century applied the incontestable doctrine of causality, the belief that the [sic. Pasternak was writing in English.] objectivity was determined and ruled by an iron chain of causes and effects, that all appearances of the moral and material world were subordinate to the law of sequels and retributions." By contrast, he says: "If I had to represent a broad, a large picture of living reality, I would not hope to heighten its sense of extant objectivity by accentuating the fixed statics of ananke [necessity], of natural laws, of settled moral regularity." Pasternak in "The Childhood of Luvers" does not set out from the mature, nineteenth-century doctrine of causality. The events which Zhenia the child observes are wholly accidental, seldom named, let alone "caused." Time relationships, like causal relationships, are distorted, as in the title of the first part, "Long Days." Words do not characterize events satisfactorily. The French "Menteuse!" has no relationship to the bloodstains on Zhenia's shaggy white bear rug and on her pillow and sheets. The strange name "Motovilikha" does nothing to explain the awesome phenomenon of a factory which she observes floating on the nighttime horizon.

At one point in the story, Zhenia is doing her homework, a division problem. The problem is one which, contrary to the settled rules, will not come out even, and her tutor Dikikh has been teaching her the concept of infinity. She keeps dividing the repeating decimal, runs out of margin on the paper, and begins again: "'But this is the point: 3773 repeats, so may it simply be rewritten, or rounded off?' Suddenly, she recalls that Dikikh had come right out and said recently that 'you don't have to divide them; just throw them away.'" The one and the many conflict in the girl's mind. The causal logic of an arithmetic problem is unthinkable for Zhenia, for it foresees no end but the settled universe yet incalculable ends embodied in Dikikh's rules of thumb.

Marina Tsvetaeva saw in "The Childhood of Luvers" the dominant theme of the artist's coming of age, and commented that Zhenia bore less resemblance to a fourteen year old girl than to Pasternak himself ["Epos i lirika sovremennoi Rossii," Novyigrad (Paris), Vol. 6, 1933]. One might add that she resembles the poet in Pasternak, and she comes into her own in the same way that Pasternak the poet sought to come into his own in the transition from "poetic nonsense" to the prose of everyday existence where "facts" and "fixed ideas" reign.

The key to this reading of "The Childhood of Luvers" is the role which Lermontov plays in the tale. We know that in 1917 Pasternak considered Lermontov a neglected writer who could play an important part in the regeneration of twentieth-century Russian literature. Pasternak spoke of him as the precursor of the modern movement of "biographical realism":

Beginning with Pushkin we have our Russian contemporaneity, the real and the true, our modern thinking and spiritual consciousness. Pushkin erected the house of our spiritual life, the edifice of Russia's historical awareness. Lermontov was its first tenant. In Lermontov we have the independent confessional note in the subsequent intellectual tradition of our century, in poetry and prose, later enriched by the magnificent concreteness of Leo Tolstoy, then Chekhov's sharpeyed absolute sensitiveness to reality. But whereas Pushkin is objective, tangible, and just, with generalizations of the widest meaning, Lermontov is passionate and personal, and therefore more limited; whereas Pushkin is realistic and exalted in creative activity, Lermontov is its living personal testament. . . . His operatic romanticism is apparent in part. The influence of Byron was unmistakable, because half of Europe had been under his spell. But what we wrongly take for romanticism in Lermontov seems to me to be in fact the unbalanced nature of his modern, personal biographical realism and the foreshadowing of our modern poetry and prose.

[Letter dated August 22, 1958, cited in Poems, trans. Eugene Kayden, 1959]

With Lermontov Pasternak's concerns for romanticism and realism coalesce in the hybrid concept of "biographical realism," a step away from the self-centered Byronic world view toward a realism which, nonetheless, does not deny the primacy and validity of "living personal testimony" to creative activity as a proper ingredient of art itself.

Zhenia Luvers, at the beginning of Part II, has taken her volume of Lermontov out into the yard. In the neighboring yard she sees retired General Spitsyn's orderly preparing to wash an ice-cream machine. As he disappears into the house after a bucket and rope, Zhenia's vivid imagination floods the scene which lies before her:

Meanwhile the Terek, prancing like a lioness with a shaggy mane on her back, continued to roar, as was her prerogative, and Zhenia was overcome with doubt only concerning whether it was precisely on her back, or rather on her neck, that all this took place. She was too lazy to do anything about the book, and the golden clouds from southern lands, from the distance, scarcely managing to see the outcast north, were already meeting at the threshold of the General's kitchen, with bucket and rope in hand.

Zhenia has merged the reality which she sees in the courtyard with the reality she imagines in Lermontov's "The Demon." Her reading of the following lines has merged with her vision:

And the Terek, prancing like a lioness,
With a shaggy mane on her back,
Roared. . . .
And the golden clouds
From southern lands, from a distance
Saw him north.

["The Demon," Part I, Chapter 3.]

Lermontov's Byronic poetic vision has colored the girl's perception. Her imagination evinces no interest in the separate facts of either reality. Lermontov's anomaly is widely known: it is the male, not the female, lion which is distinguished by a shaggy mane. Where an adult would insist upon the anomaly's correction, its inaccuracy passes unremarked in the child.

Next Zhenia climbs the woodpile, abandons her volume of Lermontov, and gazes across the neighboring garden into the back street beyond. There for the first time she sees the character referred to in the title of Part II, "The Outsider." He is Tsvetkov, a friend of Zhenia's tutor. He is described as a man with a prominent limp as soon as he is first seen, and he reappears frequently in the story, seemingly to no end. Just as accidentally as Zhenia has seen him the first time, he is struck down and killed one night before the theater by the Luvers' rearing horse. Zhenia thinks she has seen his silhouetted figure two weeks after the accident, on the morning of the day she discovers that the man killed by the horse is the man she has seen time and again. She concludes from all the facts at her disposal that she has caused his death:

Well she had introduced him into the life of the family on that day when, having noticed him on the other side of someone else's garden, and having noticed him unnecessarily, uselessly, senselessly, she thereafter began to meet him at every step of the way, constantly, directly and indirectly, and even, as it happened the last time, against all possibility.

As a result of her reasoned guilt, Zhenia renounces Lermontov, and implicitly her imaginative but careless use of Lermontov, refusing to answer to her tutor for the poet: "And without further words Lermontov was squeezed . . . back into the slightly slanting row of classics." So the work concludes.

In this scene, in the coming of age of Zhenia Luvers is portrayed the coming of age of Russian literature from romanticism to realism, from the romanticism of Byron, via Lermontov, to the realism of Tolstoy. The process encompasses the appearance and acknowledgement of a general moral relationship between the first and third persons in an integrated world. In the mature tradition of Russian prose, best exemplified by Tolstoy, indifference to life and to the consequences of individual actions has no place. The accidental interrelationships of human beings, formed by chance, are converted to moral relationships, giving rise to the conclusion, which is the Tolstoyan "lesson" of the story:

. . . its significance lay in the fact that, for the first time, another human being had entered her life, a third person, completely indifferent, without a name or with a random name, which neither called forth hatred nor inspired love, but such a person as the Commandments have in mind when, addressing themselves to names and consciences, they say: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and so on, "Thou, individual and alive, shalt not do to this, the unknown and general," they say, "that which thou dost not wish upon thyself."

In the absence of all real ground for causality Zhenia Luvers has come to draw a moral relationship between herself and a third person. This is not the "settled moral regularity" with which Pasternak takes issue in nineteenth-century prose. As he comments in "The Childhood of Luvers," this deep-seated feeling has no name. Rather, it is the consequence of applying Tolstoy's ability "to see phenomena in the abrupt finality of a separate moment."

Zhenia's childhood is the extended application of that ability. In Part I of "The Childhood of Luvers" Tolstoy's device of "estrangement" verges on the theme, so wholly is Zhenia's perception the content of the work. The narrative point of view tacitly identifies narrator and main character. As Zhenia's perception changes, the tale progresses. Characters are introduced solely at her behest. The plot follows the line of her sight, is as broad as her peripheral vision, hears the sounds which reach her ears. We sense this most keenly when the narrator moves to change the point of view, as in the following passage in which Zhenia wakes up in the railroad compartment to find that a stranger has come in while she was asleep. Zhenia, unseen, looks him over:

She looked him over, but he could not see her: the berth sloped back steeply to the wall. He did not see her because he too occasionally looked up from behind the news, slantwise, back, and when he raised his eyes to her bunk, their looks did not meet: he either saw only the mattress, or . . . but she quickly gathered them beneath her and stretched her slack stockings.

The ellipsis is more revealing than the words themselves. The narrator drifts away from Zhenia's point of view, utilizes the precious stylization of an unmentionable, and then returns to Zhenia's point of view, which we recognize as that of a child becoming aware of her own femininity. Later, when we are told that Zhenia has recognized the fact of her resemblance to her mother, we are put in mind of Kitty Shcherbatskaya looking at herself in the mirror at the ball: "This was the perception of a woman seeing her own exterior and charm from within herself or inwardly."

The sustained estrangement in "The Childhood of Luvers" is both the source of art in the work and the cause of the tale's culminating lesson. Pasternak succeeds in demonstrating that Tolstoy's artistic vision and his moral vision went hand in hand. One's obligation as an artist to the tangible reality of the world one describes carries with it certain moral strictures. The absence or presence and use of texture, sound, [and] color in art are determined by moral perception. Zhenia the child whiles away the time indoors by gazing out the window at the variegated world. Her imagination floods the world beyond her. She is pulled up short when made to realize that the sight which she has seen from the window is that of soldiers drilling on the field, and when she concludes that they merit her sympathy:

An efflorescence of lifelessness, a grave efflorescence of visibility withdrew from the picture of the white tents; the squads faded and became a collection of individual people in soldier's uniform, for whom she began to feel sorry at the very moment that the meaning which had been introduced into them brought them to life, ennobled them, made them friends, and deprived them of color.

Zhehia's sympathy for and involvement with the soldiers as individuals are invoked at the expense of the color which has made them artistically attractive initially. Zhenia's moral vision absents color from the canvas in the name of life, morally differentiated.

In "Aerial Ways" Pasternak gives succinct expression to his understanding that the ways of man, contrary to the objectivist premise, do not lie through a reified world. The objective world in the story thrives outside of all temporal sequence, while the human world is shackled to time. No matter how the artist may attempt to anthropomorphize the objective world—"the earth, as with hayricks, was covered with forms, stunned by silence. They were resting. The spaces between them grew larger in the face of the day; just as if the better to rest, the forms had dispersed and withdrawn."—that world does not conform to the living, human temporal sequence: "The fact is that [the forms] were being shaken from the past into the future, from the future into the past, like sand in an often-turned hourglass." By contrast, the characters in the story are alien to this world, "borne only out of the past into the future, and never brought back."

In "Aerial Ways" Pasternak seeks to locate the place of the individual in history. Two like moments, one in 1905 and one in 1920, comprise a paradigm for the elevation of isolated events in individuals' lives to the level of historical events with their own pressing inevitability. In the first a mother loses her child on a desolate, windswept field. The ensuing search is joined by her one-time lover, the naval officer Polivanov. In the second the mother has lost her son in the maelstrom of revolution and civil war; she comes to the same Polivanov, now a Bolshevik officer, only to learn that he cannot forestall the young White recruit's impending execution. The sky above this second isolated moment is "new," the sky of the Third International. It harbors the "aerial ways" to which the title refers: "These were the aerial ways along which, like trains, the rectilinear thoughts of Liebknecht, Lenin and a few other minds of their gauge set off daily." These ways transcend the reified world: while one can hold out some hope for the discovery of a boy lost in a maelstrom on a desolate field, there is no hope for a son lost in the maelstrom of the human world of history.

Pasternak points out that writers have recognized the dichotomy between the reified world and the human world before. Alluding to the opening of Anna Karenina, he comments: "There exists a law by which adventures which certainly ought to happen to others can never happen to us. This rule has been invoked more than once by writers." In "The Childhood of Luvers" Pasternak brought Zhenia to an awareness of this rule of art and its application in life. In "Aerial Ways" Pasternak goes on to demonstrate that man has built for himself a second world of necessity, made up of rectilinear thoughts and existing apart from the reified world, in which causation will operate with immutability and finality. This foreshadows one of the basic premises of Pasternak's later work, Doctor Zhivago. Simply stated, man lives in history, not in nature.

Pasternak's artistic understanding of historical events flies in the face of modern historiography: "The more self-contained the individuality from which life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its tale." In The Tale Pasternak places the self-contained individual at the center of historical events in an attempt to see history in nuance, timbre and tone. The work is one of a Proustian rummaging in the past, where scarcely articulable qualities give the pre-war, pre-revolutionary years a character subsequently lost to the impelling forces of history. "Thus people moved about during that last summer, according to the calendar, when life was still apparently oriented toward individuals. . . ."

It is in many ways illegitimate to treat The Tale alone: to do otherwise, however, would go beyond the scope of this survey of Pasternak's short prose. The Tale is part of a "novel in verse," titled Spektorsky, which Pasternak composed between 1924 and 1929. In 1929 Pasternak wrote: "I have rendered in prose a part of the plot in the novel, a part which concerns the war years and the Revolution, because the characteristics and formulizations, most obligatory and self-evident in this of all parts, are not within the power of verse." ["Pisateli o sebe," Na literaturnom postu, Vol. 16, 1929]. It seems most clear that what was not within the power of verse was the Proustian shifting in memory and mind from place to place and distinct present to time past which comprises the artistic technique of The Tale.

As the story opens the central character, Serezha, arrives in a Siberian salt town to visit his older sister, the wife of an engineer in this industrial town of factories geared to the production of war materials. While his sister speaks on the phone in another room, he stands gazing out the window at a stranger striding at a rolling gait toward a seemingly endless fence. As Serezha's mind wanders, the man disappears behind the fence. In the meantime, Serezha thinks, his sister has hung up the phone and is now giving instructions to a seamstress at work in the bedroom. But it turns out that the sister was actually talking to the telephone operator, a part-time seamstress, at the railroad station on the other side of town. Then, with no more causation than this misunderstanding, the narration shifts in place and time to the railroad station and the arrival of the train on which Serezha travelled earlier. A fellow passenger disembarks, Fardybasov, a sailor on leave. First, Fardybasov drops in on his relative, the telephone operator; then he sets off to find his friend Otryganiev, who works in one of the new factories. Fardybasov strides off at his sailor's gait past the warehouse fences toward the factories. It is at this point that Serezha sees a man walking toward the fence, Fardybasov, whose relative at the station is sewing a blouse for the sister. Fardybasov's trip across town, particularly described, and his salty exchanges with his friends, provide a thoroughly realistic picture of the industrial landscape as seen through the eyes of a native to the place, himself in turn seen through the mind's eye of Serezha.

Pasternak achieves an anaglyphic presentation of objective reality here. The narrator disappears, while secondary characters assume the narrator's function. For the space of two pages Serezha is left out of consideration and Fardybasov roams the town making the observations of detail usually left to the narrator in realistic fiction. The tour is replete with a map-like network of spatial relations formed of fences, telephone lines, juxtapositions of time and place, and colloquial speech characteristics. Reality as such is invoked beyond the pale of the narrator, at a remove from the central character. The device attempts to convince us of the independent existence of that reality. This portrayal of reality as such through the coincidences in the daily rounds of people, analogous to Bloomsday and Dublin seen in the peregrinations of Leopold Bloom and Stephan Daedalus, is a major innovation in narrative fiction of the twentieth century. It points ahead to the formidable array of coincidence, supporting a view of reality distinct from the causational, in Doctor Zhivago.

The major shift in time and space in The Tale is one captured in the inherent ambiguity of the non-specific title, Povest. This work is both "a tale" of Serezha's life and "the tale" which Serezha struggles to write. From his sister's house in Siberia in 1916, Serezha traces his way back in memory to Moscow in the summer of 1913. The turbulent politics of the recent several years have had their effect on Serezha and his family. They become intertwined with his love affairs (which take up a major portion of the narration) and finally with his art. The process by which Serezha composes the tale within this tale brings us back to the starting point of this survey, back to Pasternak's first attempt at prose in the summer of 1913. Prose realism is now presented as the artist's act of conscience in a world of Raskolnikovian dilemma.

Serezha finds himself in tight straits, in need of a large sum of money to ease the burden on his beloved, a governess, that on the prostitute Sashka, and in general the burden on womankind. He determines to write a tale in order to resolve his pressing financial need, and the theme of need crosses over into the tale itself. His rough draft deals with a poet and pianist (like himself and like Pasternak) whom he names algebraically, X3. X3 is the twice-removed object of autobiographical narration. His concern as an artist for the way in which "an idea is born out of experienced situations" is the concern of Pasternak as well.

X3 decides to auction his talents in return for money, which he will distribute to the masses. At the auction he displays the virtuosity of his piano playing and poetry, filled with the striking images which are to form his audience's "future mode of feeling and recollection." His art dictates "the directions in which their future moral sensitivity and inclination toward truth will travel." The attributes ascribed to X3's art are those which Pasternak saw in Kleist: ". . . he understood living beauty as the ultimate distinction between existence and non-existence. This was his innovation, that he held this distinction, intelligible no longer than an instant, and transformed it into a perpetual poetic emblem." The auction of the artist results in disaster. The money distributed causes riots and disorders, rather than the longed-for regeneration of human values. Once again Pasternak has focussed on the harm inherent in the artistic act, but now it is art as a commodity which wreaks havoc. This theme of art at the service of revolution, but to the detriment of the artist, is one Pasternak followed up in his portrayal of Mayakovsky in "Safe Conduct." It is a further adumbration of Pasternak's early recognition that the act of art is one fraught with consequences which, though the art transcend them, the artist may not.

The theme of art and the artist is ever-present in Pasternak's prose. The theme is not static however. As his short prose unfolds, Pasternak's aesthetic expands to embrace within the pale of the artist a responsibility to realistic portrayal, to moral sensitivity, and finally to history. What in "The History of a Contraoctave" are construed as the laws binding the artist to his art, in The Childhood of Luvers is seen as the law morally binding the human sensibility to its fellow creatures. All the more plausible then is the outcome of The Tale, positing an active role for the artist in the formation of the future's moral sensibility.

The tortuous path of this aesthetic through Pasternak's short prose left many of his admirers bewildered as to his stages of growth. In 1936 Anna Akhmatova still saw in Pasternak that childlike quality which those who had known him in the 1920s never failed to single out as his most prominent characteristic. In her poem "Boris Pasternak" she wrote: "He has been accorded an eternal childhood. . . ." Pasternak's childlike vision was a long time disappearing, because it was so much the source of his art. If traces of it remained in the 1930s, they were finally effaced by the events of that decade. Kornei Chukovsky was among the few to see Pasternak finally come into his own in the late 30s, when he began to write Doctor Zhivago:

. . . I well remember that every time I met him during the last, pre-war years my impression was clearer and clearer: the very same Pasternak, yet not the same. He no longer descended like a hurricane upon the person with whom he was speaking, no longer inundated him with hurried rushes of excited, explosive speech: he became quiet, slow, thoughtful and strangely soft in spirit. The long enduring childlike quality had at last left him.

["lz vospominanii," lunost', Vol. 8, 1965]

Pasternak came finally into his own in the thirties, after a slow and faltering coming of age stretching from before the Revolution through the twenties. His sometimes awkward maturing as a writer is evident in his prose. His heritage turned out to be that of Pushkin and Tolstoy, the two writers who shaped the broadest statement of an artist's purpose in the nineteenth century. Pasternak did not shrink from this broad statement in his later writings: "By an artist's aesthetics," he wrote in the late twenties, "I understand his conception of the nature of art, of the role of art in history, and of his own responsibility to history" ["Nashi sovremennye pisateli o klassikakh," Na literaturnom postu, Vol. 5-6, 1927].