The Poems of Dr . ZhivagoI first became familiar with Boris Pasternak ( 1890 - 1960 ) when I was an undergrad in college . Walking through the library late one night , I was startled by a book falling off a shelf . When I went to see what it was , it was a book of his poetry . I later found out he is the author of the novel Dr . Zhivago , which was made into a 1965 drama romance with Julie Christie and Omar Sharif . Years later I was visiting a friend on Vancouver island . She and her mother had recently bought a Victorian house . When my friend ’ s mother found out I was a poet , she said , “ Oh , I have something you might like . It was the only thing left in this house when we moved in . ” It was a book of poetry by Pasternak . Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 and revolutionized Russian poetry . He once said that poets and artists traditionally have no assured place in society and can only live their lives outside it . I hear that voice in his poetry , the voice of a person who watches the world but lives outside the places and people he observes . The Highest SicknessAlthough the dawn thistlekept on chasing its shadowand in the same motionmade the hour linger ; although , as before , the dirt roaddragged the wheels over soft white sandand spun them onto harder groundalongside signs and landmarks ; although the autumn sky was cloudy , and the forest appeared distant , and the twilight was cold and hazy , anyway , it was all a forgery . And the sleep of the stunned earthwas convulsive , like labor pains , like death , like the silenceof cemeteries , like that unique quietthat blankets the horizon , shudders , and beats its brainsto remember : Hold on , prompt me , what did I want to say ? The story in Dr . Zhivago is of a poet whose idealism is shaken by war and the loss of the love of his life . The poet is more mystic than man and sees the world in a dreamlike , surreal way . In this poem , we hear that story again . The speaker sees the world through lenses of metaphor and mysticism but concludes it is all a forgery . The earth shudders and convulses at this revelation and beats its brains trying to remember what it once believed . He ends the poem with a question , “ What did I want to say . ” This reminds me of a similar line in T . S . Eliot ’ s poem , The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock . If one , settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl , And turning toward the window , should say : “ That is not it at all , That is not what I meant , at all . ” The narrator in each poem is questioning what life means . At the root of the voice is loneliness . These are words spoken by people who are alone , who want to go back in time to live their lives differently . In another poem by Pasternak “ A Sultry Night , ” the world is also diminished . It was once a whirlwind , something full of power and force but it has become an orphaned and sleepless waste . In the orphaned , sleepless , damp universal waste , groans tore from their posts , the whirlwind dug in , abated . Most the poems in this essay are taken from My Sister Life , a book published in 1922 and written by Pasternak during the summer of 1917 , in the months before the Russian Revolution . These poems put Pasternak on the map as a poet . At the time he was living in Saratov , a port city in Southern Russia . He was too embarrassed to publish the poems at first because they are written in a nontraditional style . Socialist realism under Stalin called for more traditional forms . <!--[ if gte mso 9 ] > Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer 4 <![ endif ] --><!--[ if gte mso 9 ] > <![ endif ] --> All Russians had to choose between emigrating and living with the new Bolshevik order after the revolution . Pasternak stayed in Russia living in a communal flat in Moscow . Poets Anna Akhmatova ( 1889 - 1966 ) and Osip Mandelstam ( 1891 - 1938 ) also remained . Most of Pasternak ’ s family left Russia for Germany , never to return . When he won the Nobel Prize in 1958 , he was not able to accept the award . He wrote in a telegram to the Swedish embassy , “ Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong , I must refuse it . Please do not take offense at my voluntary rejection . ” After struggling to remain in Russia most his life , he did not want to be stripped of his citizenship by leaving the country . Born in Moscow , Pasternak was the son of painter Leonid Pasternak , a professor at the Moscow School of Painting , and Rosa Kaufman , a pianist . Pasternak ’ s early years were spent surrounded by art , music and literature . Visitors to his home included composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin and writers Leo Tolstoy and Rainer Maria Rilke . Boris Pasternak enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory in 1903 and studied composition . He dedicated six years of his life to this and left the school in 1909 to study philosophy , then later turned to poetry . Three finished piano pieces survive to this day . The poems inMy Sister Life are structured around arrivals and departures , train rides to and from the city and around several relationships the poet had . From PostscriptIt was shadows taking your pulse , it was youturning your face toward the fieldsthat burned , swimming on the hinges of gatesflooded with dusk , ashes and poppies . It was the whole summer in a blaze of podsand labels and sun - bleached luggagesealing the wanderer ’ s breast with wax , setting your hats and dress on fire . This poem is full of light . The luggage is sun - bleached , the clothes and the field are on fire . This is a poem full of passion written by a poet who is in love . He is trying to show us the woman he fell in love with , her face turned toward the fields . She is a gate into a beautiful world where everything seems alive . Even the shadows want to touch her hand , take her pulse , feel her living and breathing within . The world in this poem is hinged on her beauty . Poppies are the dominant image . They are bright flowers with delicate skin - like petals . The pods next to them are bursting . These are two strong images of female and male sexual desire . I ’ ve heard it said if you want to know what ’ s really on a person ’ s mind , read the postscript . It translates the letter into a new light . In a p . s . , we write those last few things we must say . This postscript is plowed through a layer of images . In the structure of the sentences , we hear a speaker trying to get something off his mind and sum it all up : It was this , it was that , it was the way she made me feel , it was how she looked . He paints a picture of her spirit swimming in light . Even her many hats say something about her vibrant character . MoochkapThe spirit sweats — the horizon ’ stobacco - tinged — like thought . Windmills image a fishing village : boats and weathered nets . The village of torpid windmillshovers like a motionless harbor . All smells of weary stasis , uneasiness , and grief . The hours skip past like stones , ricochet across the shallow , not drowning , keeping afloat , tobacco - tinged — like thought . There ’ s time before the trainbut it ’ s drowned by apathy , sunk in limbo , the roilingturbulence before a storm . Even the windmills in this fishing village are still . The buildings are cracked and weathered , the horizon is tainted by tobacco stains and the water is stagnant . We don ’ t want to eat these fish . In Postscript the images surrounding the poet are ripe in his hands , and he wants to show each one of them to us . But no light is in this poem . Time stands still because the machine behind the poet ’ s vision has slipped into indifference , into a separate place where it is hard to believe anything outside this world is moving . This is the gray backdrop for an urban working class , and it is weary with grief , uneasiness and apathy . In the calm before the storm , we see the speaker smoking cigarettes , looking out on the water . The “ hours skip past like stones , ricochet across the shallow , not drowning , keeping afloat . ” Rocks don ’ t float , but the image gives us a sense of what it feels like when everything around us remains the same and nothing is changing . In Addition to All That There Was the WinterThrough lace curtains — ravens — frozen in terror of frost . It ’ s the October whirling , it ’ s terror clawing , crawling , up the steps . Begging , sighing , or groaning , they all rise in unison for October . The wind grabbed the hands of the trees — they raced downstairs to get wood . Snow falls from their knees as they enter the store — It ’ s been so long since we ’ ve met ! Did the snow , so often trampled , scatter from hooves like cocaine ? What impressed me most when I watched the movie Dr . Zhivago was all the snow . People trudge through snow from one scene to the next and tried to stay warm . Having lived in the mountains for years , I know what it ’ s like to live many months in snow . You grow weary of the color white . Staring into that empty color is like staring into your own soul . In this poem we have white snow contrasted with a black raven . Ravens or large crows are also common in the mountains where I lived . Seeing one perched on top of a tree cawing out to others in the distance is ominous . These scavengers have a panoramic view of the world on their high perch and seem to speak not only to each other but to us . The raven is also a symbol of mysticism . In Benedictine monasticism , Saint Benedict is often pictured feeding a piece of bread to a raven in the desert . In Native American cultures , the raven is thought of as a kind of supernatural guide that gives voice to our inner life . The mystical image of the raven in this poem is contrasted with people wiping snow from their pants , breathing in and out the cold air and carrying wood , involved with the mundane tasks of life . They are on earth , in a physical place where people get cold and need to stay warm . It is another image of the poet and the mystic coming up against the cold realities of life . One evening when I was sitting on the mountain alone I heard what sounded like many hinges bending over my head . I looked up and saw several hundred ravens passing above me . They flew to some mysterious place in the west where the sun was setting in the mountains . Everything else on the mountain seems very quiet when you are listening to several hundred wings pass overhead , as if their wings were on hinges of many heavy doors . I felt I had a window into a world no human had ever seen . Ravens are often the shape of loneliness in poems or paintings . In my mind that night , they become something human in their need to fly together , not self - effacing mockers who sit alone in trees . from To Love — To Go — In Endless ThunderAnd so I sang , I sang and died , I died and circled back to herembraces like a bommerang and — as I recall — kept on saying goodbye . One of the most haunting scenes in Dr . Zhivago is near the end of the movie where Yuri sees Lara for the last time . He is on a bus and sees her walk by . They are old now , time and circumstance have separated them , and he had lost all hope of ever seeing her again . When he sees her pass , he stops the bus and tries to run to her but dies of a heart attack on the sidewalk just out of her reach . She walks away and never sees him . The poems in this essay are written by a man who is full of both doubt and hope . Some poems are theaters of loneliness and silence and others are full of great applause . But whichever voice we hear , it opens on the page in an illusory , trancelike way to reveal an emotional state of the poet . Pasternak lived in a time when the landscape of the country he loved was changed by hardship . Each of these poem seems to be about surviving something , whether that be war or anguish or love . 저작 자 표시