"You played that role so well!

I forgot that I was the prompter. . . . "

—My Sister, Life (1917)

"Oh, had I known that's how it happens

when I made my stage debut. . . . "

—Second Birth (1932)

"All grows still. I go onstage. . . ."

—"Hamlet" (Poem from Dr. Zhivago, 1946-1953)

Written and published between 1915 and 1929, Pasternak's short stories have remained the least known and least studied part of his work. At the time of their publication they suffered from the proximity of a highly esteemed poetic output which eclipsed them in the eyes of the Russian public and critics; whereas, on the other hand, the non-Russian reader, by his ignorance of the poetry, has long been deprived of the source of light illuminating their unity. Very different in aim, form, and content, these five stories do not, in fact, appear as a homogeneous and independent whole, but as so many isolated incursions of a poet into the domain of prose. It is mainly from this formal angle that they have been considered till now, the fiction being treated most often as merely an accessory and secondary element, as compared with an original language showing the indisputable freshness of vision of a great poet. It is therefore understandable that critical attention should have been focussed chiefly on "The Childhood of Luvers" which, in fact, is an unfinished novel, where the development of the subject, arbitrarily broken off, counts less than the originality of the means of investigation and description Pasternak employs to follow the paths a child's consciousness takes.

Doctor Zhivago, however, has modified this point of view by showing that these prose experiments are also, and above all, works of imagination whose subjects, situations, and characters already reveal Pasternak's fundamental and permanent novelistic motifs. Alongside Doctor Zhivago, "The Childhood of Luvers" thus appears as a sketch for that "novel of feminine destiny" later incarnated in the person of Lara Antipova. Similarly, in "Aerial Ways," written in 1924, one already sees a first sketch for the character who, under the name of Pavel Antipov, will soon portray the drama of the revolutionist. But these two themes, however important, are subordinated to the life story of Yury Zhivago, the legendary transposition of the poet's biography, and the symbolic portrayal of his destiny. It is this "legend of the poet," constantly associated with the image of the actor, that we wish to follow through the three stories in which it takes shape, trying to show that it is not one theme among others, but the initial ferment of all the prose work of Pasternak, that which dictates and justifies his recourse to fiction and brings out its profound necessity.

With Pasternak's first story, written in 1915, we enter at once the domain of legend. He presents "Il Tratto di Apelle," in fact, as a kind of apocryphal anecdote: the hero is named Heinrich Heine, but the reader quickly understands that he has to do with an imaginary character, a modern namesake, or rather, legendary double of the historical Heine. The adventure takes place in Italy, but the descriptions of Pisa or of Ferrara—Pasternak had recently visited Italy—are drawn in order to take the imagination out of its familiar element rather than to situate the action; the plot itself rests upon rather implausible psychological data; and the narrative, conducted now along the lines of a fairy tale, now along those of a play in dialogue, never seeks to create the illusion of reality. Here anecdote—and the allegory it contains—alone matters: Heine, passing through Pisa, learns that a stranger has come to his hotel and left him as a calling card a simple white card bearing the imprint of a bloody thumb. By this signature he recognizes the Italian poet Emilio Relinquimini, author of a love poem entitled "Il Sangue." The latter has previously given him notice of his visit, summoning him to reply by a message expressing in equally laconic fashion the essence of love, a message which must be at the same time his signature as a poet (whence the title of the narrative, an allusion to the famous exchange of signatures between the painters Zeuxis and Apelles). Taking up the challenge, Heine goes to Ferrara, where he hopes to find the feminine inspirer of Relinquimini. He traces her by a ruse (inserting an advertisement in the local paper, giving out that he is in possession of a bundle of the Italian poet's manuscripts); no sooner is he in her presence than he seduces her and lets himself be seduced, a brilliant improvisation on the theme furnished him by chance. Such is the signature of Heine, his "mark of Apelles."

A critique of poetry? But Heine, too, is a poet; and the favors of Camilla Ardenze are those of the Muse: their love affair thus illustrates the triumph of true poetry over an attitude in which true poetry refuses to be found. It must be recalled here that "Il Tratto di Apelle" belongs to the period when Pasternak, with his second collection of poems, Above the Barriers, was breaking with the "romantic manner" that still betrayed, in A Twin in the Clouds, the influence of symbolism. The name Relinquimini, precisely, makes one think of a cast-off skin, whereas the namesake "Heine" evokes that ironic splitting in two, with its sting of cynicism, by which the poet catches himself red-handed and confronts himself with the spectacle of his own naïveté in order to exorcise it. The romantic naïveté that Heine's reply denounces is that of wanting to tell love, to reach its essence by a symbol, a double illusion, about love and poetry at the same time. For the essence of love is its immediate, lived-through reality, in other words, that by which it escapes speech, rejects symbol. "Love," Pasternak was to write much later,

. . . is as simple and absolute as consciousness and death, nitrogen and uranium. It is not a state of the soul, but the first foundation of the universe. The fundamental and primordial principle, love is thus the equivalent of creation. It is not inferior to it, and its testimony has no use for the manipulations of art. Art can conceive nothing higher than to lend its ear to the voice of love itself, that voice forever new and unprecedented.

["Translating Shakespeare," I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography, 1959]

To be equal to love, poetry must be something other and more than a word about love: it must be, like love, a "second birth," an immediate experience of life in its creative principle. In love, poetry thus discovers that "alter ego" which, as in a mirror, reveals to it its own stuff: that which Pasternak was to christen, in 1917, My Sister, Life.

Love, in this sense, is the touchstone of symbolist metaphysics: for if it testifies to a reality superior to art, that reality is not something beyond, but on this side of speech; it does not belong to the domain of essences, but to that of existence; it is not an "idea" one can know or merely approach through language, but a force that can be lived only, in an experience identical with that of love. This is the meaning of Heine's reply, which already contains, we see, the central poetic and philosophical intuition of Pasternak's work.

But is it really a case here of love, of poetry? Heine's victory over Relinquimini ostensibly is that of the seducer over the man in love, of the Don Juan over the poet, of the rake over the simple-hearted. Nothing seems more cynical than the substitution of a casual love affair for the poetic exploit awaited by Relinquimini; nothing more immoral than the maneuver by which Heine lures Camilla Ardenze, a maneuver that the newspaper editor, after being informed, terms blackmail; nothing more false than the game he plays to seduce her, and in which she rightly denounces an actor's pose. And yet, there comes a moment when the casual affair stops being a casual affair, when the blackmail is no longer blackmail, when the pose is no longer a pose: it is the central moment of the story, marked only by the breaking off of a chapter on an unfinished sentence that is to be continued in the following chapter at the moment when the scene of seduction, apparently uninterrupted, suddenly undergoes a change of lighting and becomes a love scene. A miracle has occurred during the scarcely perceptible interval of the suspension points separating the two chapters. Heine has foreseen this miracle; before leaving for Ferrara he has sent Relinquimini the following poetic fragment: "But Rondolfina and Enrico have discarded their old names and changed them for names hitherto unprecedented, he crying wildly 'Rondolfina' and she exclaiming 'Enrico!'" But even foreseen, prepared for, staged, the miracle remains a miracle, its essence being precisely to escape the chain of cause and effect, not to let itself be reduced to the conditions that prepared for it. Enrico-Heinrich Heine is no longer the seducer, nor Rondolfina-Camilla Ardenze the fickle mistress too easily throwing over the man who loves her for a younger and more brilliant rival. They discover each other in love, this "second birth," this invisible and yet total metamorphosis that, beneath unchanged appearances, strips them, along with their "former names," of all the deadweight of their past.

Love is thus not a result justifying the artifices of the seducer, the Don Juan, the rake, but a metamorphosis that annihilates these figures. It is the expectant waiting for this metamorphosis that for Heine is a kind of justification, for it reveals the lover behind the mask of the seducer, the child behind the mask of the rake, the poet behind the mask of the adventurer. Camilla Ardenze has sensed this even before the miracle has come to pass: "For all that, you are—will you excuse my familiarity?—you are, how shall I put it, an extraordinary child. No, that's not the right word—you are a poet! Of course, how is it I didn't find the word before: it was enough to look at you." Rake and innocent at the same time, the poet is an actor who believes in a miracle and who is capable of welcoming it in himself. He knows that the actor's technique is only a way of making himself available for grace, for inspiration, which alone will make of his acting a "mark of Apelles," the infallible sign of his genius, that is to say, of that supreme spontaneity, that supreme naturalness which reveals the true artist. That naturalness is not given, and if it can no more be acquired, it is won at every moment from the inert weight of hollow words, of empty gestures, of which habit makes each of us a prisoner. Such is the paradox of the actor as Heine describes it to Camilla when she reproaches him with behaving as if he were on a stage: "We spend our whole lives on the stage," he replies, "and it is only with the greatest difficulty that some of us are capable of the naturalness which, like a role, is assigned to us at the moment of birth." True naturalness is genius, in the etymological sense of the word; but, as Goethe wrote, genius is a long patience.

One can see that this paradox of the actor is nothing else but the paradox of art, the synthesis of two apparently contradictory components: that of craft and that of inspiration, of technique and of creation, of artifice and spontaneity, of labor and gift, works and grace. In this, 'Ìl Tratto di Apelle" reflects an old concern of Pasternak's, the very one that, if we are to believe Sketch for an Autobiography, made him give up his first calling as a musician ten years before, through having lacked the wish to acquire the indispensable technical skills:

This discrepancy between a new musical thought, which nothing could satisfy, and its missing technical support, transformed the gift of nature which might have been a source of joy into a cause of continual suffering, which at last I could not bear. How was such a discrepancy possible? Basically, there was something that should not have existed, and should have been set right: an inadmissible adolescent arrogance, a nihilistic scorn of a half-baked scholar for all that seemed possible to him to acquire or attain. I scorned all that was not creation, all that was craft, having the cheek to think that in this matter 1 was a fine connoisseur. In real life, I thought, everything should be miracle and predestination, nothing premeditated or intentional, nothing arbitrary.

[Sketch for an Autobiography]

This mystique of inspiration, which Pasternak attributes to the influence of Scriabine, is linked in a more general way to the symbolist climate in which his conceptions of art developed. The antisymbolist generation of 1910, on the contrary, emphasized the role of craftsmanship in art, to the point of defining it sometimes as a mastery (to speak with the acmeists) or as a group of technical procedures (in the language of the futurists and of the formalist criticism which grew up in their wake). It is in this sense that we are tempted to interpret the famous aphorism by which the young Pasternak, switching from music to poetry, rallied to the esthetic of the new generation: "Art, in its fashion, is nothing but a simple homework assignment, whose only requirement is to be done brilliantly" [Sochineniya, 1961]. If Heine's experience does not expressly contradict this formula, it nonetheless shows that the accomplishment Pasternak expects of art is not a simple technical success justifying the artifice, but a veritable metamorphosis effacing and annihilating it; that in his eyes the opposition between artisan and creator, craftsmanship and inspiration, is vain; or at least resolves itself into the paradox of the actor, which expresses the essence and the secret of genius.

This theme of the actor, like the word genius, which Pasternak was later to use in the same sense, retains, however, a certain ambiguity: extended from the domain of art to that of life, it makes the artist the possessor of a superior and autonomous morality which raises him above the crowd and puts him out of reach of its laws. This ambiguity is the one Pasternak later denounced in what he called "the romantic conception of life." "This," he wrote in "Safe Conduct,"

. . . was the conception of life as the life of the poet. It had come down to us from the Symbolists and had been adapted by them from the Romantics, principally the Germans. . . . In the poet who imagines himself the measure of life and pays for this with his life, the Romantic conception manifests itself brilliantly and irrefutably in his symbolism, that is, in everything which touches upon Orphism and Christianity imaginatively. . . . But outside the legend, the Romantic scheme is false. The poet who is its foundation is inconceivable without the non-poets who must bring him into relief, because this poet is not a living personality absorbed in the study of moral knowledge, but a visual-biographic "emblem," demanding a background to make his contours visible.

It is the sentiment of this ambiguity which inspired Pasternak's development of the actor-theme in "Letters from Tula" and The Narrative.

With "Letters from Tula," written in 1918, the image of the actor finds itself challenged, precisely, by the reality of "a living personality absorbed by the study of moral knowledge." The ironic fantasy of "Il Tratto di Apelle" was that of a game of wits; the pathetic sincerity of "Letters from Tula" is that of a confession, translated into the language of fiction, but whose passionate tone suffices to betray its roots in a real experience. The form, too, is no longer that of a fairy tale, but of a realistic short story testifying to a concern for psychological verisimilitude totally absent in 'Ìl Tratto di Apelle." The central event, surrounded by penumbras suggesting its connections with the whole fabric of a life, is a chance meeting that illumines, like a revelation, the conscience of a young poet, and turns him utterly against what he has been until then. The hero is at the station of Tula, where he has just parted from the woman he loves; it is to her that he relates his experience in his letters. This is the psychological context of the revelation, its realistic cause: the separation here being, as is often the case with Pasternak, the moment of discomposure, of unbalance, when love is no longer just a "state of the soul," but an impulse, a force, an unlimited power of renewal.

Like the image of love, the image of the actor is shifted here from the ground of legend to that of reality: it is materialized in the confrontation of the poet with two sorts of actors. The first are film actors, "the worst species of bohemian," who happen to be his table companions at the station buffet in Tula. "They play at being geniuses, bandying phrases with each other, theatrically flinging down their serviettes on the table, immediately after wiping their clean-shaven lips." The horror which this spectacle inspires in the poet stems from the fact that he recognizes himself in them:

I am sick to my stomach over it. It is an exhibition of the ideals of the age. The vaporings they give off are my vaporings, all our vaporings. They are the stifling vaporings of ignorance and of the worst kind of insolence. It is I myself. . . . Here is their vocabulary: genius, poet, ennui, verses, untalented, bourgeois, tragedy, woman, she, I. . . . How frightful to recognize one's traits in others.

And, speaking of himself in the third person: "The poet, who shall henceforth place this word in inverted commas, until it has been purified by fire, the 'poet' observes himself in actors on a spree, in a spectacle indicting his comrades and his generation." For, in his tablemates the poet recognizes an attitude that is not his alone:

A style has come into being in life, such that there is no longer a place on earth where man can warm his soul by the fire of shame; shame has taken on water everywhere and no longer burns. Falsehood and confused debauchery. That is how all those who are out of the ordinary have lived and watered shame, the young and the old; and already it has overflowed onto the crowd, onto the unknown. For the first time since the far-off years of childhood I burn. . . .

The movement by which the poet rises against this image of himself and his time reflected back to him by the actors is a movement of shame: his revolt is a revolt of conscience. He perceives this, and formulates it, at the moment when he is aware that he is at Tula, on the very ground where Tolstoy lived: the incarnation of a literary tradition dominated by ethical preoccupations. "The adventure lies in the nature of the place. It occurs on the territory of conscience, in its gravitational center, in its ore-bearing regions." The revelation of Tula is that of an ethical domain where the character of the actor has no place.

The ham-actor doubtless is only a caricature of the actor. But the caricature is telling only if it hits what is effectively vulnerable. The ham-actor, who sets up the character of the actor as a universal standard, unveils his weak point, which is, precisely, that he cannot be set up as a standard. There is no morality of genius that is not fatally the caricature of one.

Denounced by the ham-actor, the character of the actor is rehabilitated, however, in the second part of the narrative, by an old trouper, long since retired from the stage, who, like the poet, was present at the arrival of the film players. This spectacle, incomprehensible to him at first, soon upsets him deeply; it makes him understand that his day is done, that he is old, that all that is left for him is to die. To escape the invasion, he shuts himself up in his room; and, to deliver himself from the inner tumult it has caused, he begins to recite mechanically an old part, finds inspiration again, and once more becomes the actor he used to be. And there he is, saved, delivered from the nightmare, in proportion as he becomes himself again by letting himself be taken over by the part he plays.

The poet has only a presentiment of the road to salvation: "He told himself everything would begin when he ceased listening to himself and when an absolute physical silence would fill his soul." The old actor is there to suggest the way to silence this invading, autonomous ego "which makes itself the measure of life" and reduces the actor to the level of a ham. "He, too," writes Pasternak, "sought physical silence. He alone of the two heroes in the narrative had found it, by making someone else speak through his own lips." The true actor does not find his ultimate standard in himself, but in the role he incarnates. A morality of genius does really exist. It dwells in its fidelity to a destiny of which it is not author and master, but the one who is chosen.

This, henceforth, will be the fundamental theme of the poet-legend in Pasternak. Its richest and densest expression is to be found in the poem "Hamlet," a parable of the destiny of Yury Zhivago, which unites in one image the actor playing out his role to the end, the character of Shakespeare (who embodies for Pasternak the drama "of the great destiny, the heroic mission, the destiny entrusted into the hands of man") and the figure of Christ, faithful to his divine mission to the point of sacrifice ["Translating Shakespeare," in I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography].

Pasternak links the idea of sacrifice to that of risk, which is already implied in the image of the actor as presented in "Il Tratto di Apelle": "You would not understand half of my words," says Heine to Camilla Ardenze, "if we had not met each other in such a dangerous place. I must believe it is dangerous, although I do not know it for certain myself. . . . " The dangerous place where Heine has met Camilla is the stage of this supreme bit of acting that in his eyes represents real life. But to have knowledge of risk is to admit a limit to the acting, to recognize that it is not genuine life: one understands, consequently, that Heine resists the knowledge. Everything changes from the moment that the actor, assuming a role, admits the existence of a norm outside of his acting. For a role is not only self-subjection; it is also an engagement, thus a responsibility and the acceptance of a risk. This is the new significance The Narrative gives to the image of the actor.

The originality of The Narrative, written in 1929, is to insert the legend of the poet into a realistic context that traces it back to its birth and illuminates its essence. At first sight, The Narrative appears as a rather loose series of scenes evoking the life of a young poet, Serge, whom Pasternak had already made the hero of the verse-novel Spektorski. However, apart from some marginal episodes put in to suggest a vaster novelistic scheme, all the scenes converge in a central episode that gives them unity. This episode takes us back to the summer of 1913, when Serge, having finished his university studies, takes a post as tutor in the wealthy bourgeois Fresteln family. There he meets a young Danish girl, Anna Arild Tornskjold, a widow without means engaged as a lady-companion. She confides to him the humiliations she has had to suffer from coarse employers. He falls in love with her and asks for her hand. But at the same time he has met a prostitute, Sacha, whose distress upsets him deeply.

All of human naturalness, howling and swearing, was there, raised up as on a strappado, at the height of a catastrophe visible from all sides. In the surroundings descried from this elevation, one made it a duty to spiritualize oneself, on the spot and at that very moment; and, in the sound of one's own emotion, one could hear the deserted stretches of the universe, by a common impulse, and in urgent haste, become covered with rescue posts.

The humiliation of Arild, the distress of Sacha, assume for Serge the significance of an ineluctable appeal. He responds instantaneously, and without reflecting a single moment on the hopeless inadequacy of his enterprise, by making a sketch of his first narrative, the synopsis of a play which he intends submitting to a director of theatrical reviews, if only to obtain thereby a minimal fraction of the sums he knows are needed to deliver the women from their bondage. He imagines a young artist, whom he names Y3, as though to stress still more the abstract, non-realistic character of the story. Y3 decides one day to sell himself at auction. He appears in the sale room, transformed for the occasion into a theatrical hall, into which throng the elegant public of the capital. There he displays his talents as a musician and poet, and conquers the audience by the almost miraculous richness of his gifts. Then the sale begins; a rich patron of the arts carries him off, and Y3, having disposed of his acquired millions by distributing them in poor neighborhoods, gives himself up to the good pleasure of his buyer.

Serge imagines also, more vaguely, a sequel to his narrative: the bounties of Y3, far from curing the evils, provoke violence and riots that increase them; the patron, burdened by his acquisition, offers freedom to his slave, who refuses it. . . . But those, Pasternak makes one feel, are only secondary details, like all accessory developments to fill out the theme, enrich the image. The essential has been said, and can be summed up in two points. It is, first, this vision of a stage which, once again, reveals the poet beneath the features of an actor. But art, here, is no more than a sum staked: it stands for everything the actor can put into the balance; it represents at the same time his grandeur and his limitations, his power over men and his powerlessness before misery, evil, and death. The true acting by which he triumphs and fulfills himself is that complete giving of himself, that acceptance of an unlimited risk symbolized by the image of an auction at which the stage of the actor becomes identified with the sacrificial stake.

Secondly, the essential consists in the birth of legend, the pure gushing of the fiction seized at its source, at the moment when it is not yet a work of art, but merely an urgent and spontaneous response of the imagination to the position in which life has placed the poet. For, seen from this angle, the legend of the poet is not a gratuitous revery, a compensatory illusion, an arbitrary invention: it is the immediate and insistent command of an imagination directly connected to reality; it has the imperative character of inspiration. By this very fact it imposes on the poet a role that has nothing arbitrary about it, and that he is not free to choose or reject. The poet is not the author of his legend, but the servant of the destiny it traces for him: the slave of a higher and more significant work than his own person.