One of them might even write like a droning vicar. Two sheep might live in the same field but still be very different sheep, with different styles, ideas and, er, abilities.

Hmm, the idiocy of this thought was not lost on me even at the time. Hell, I’d loved Dostoyevsky, surely Pasternak would be just as good? They were, after all, both Russian. When I had read the second page some seven times and gleaned but a shard of the meaning, I knew I was in deep poop.

A cheerier and somewhat booming voice suggested that it would all be fine and to get on with reading the damn thing, since I’d blinking well promised. A niggling voice in my mind informed me that this book was going to be a torture. An invitation was offered to the group, and swept along on a tide of camaraderie plus affection for the organiser- our Russian expert, Kirsty – I stuck up my virtual hand and said, “Alright I’ll read Doctor sodding Zhivago.” By the end of the first page of Pasternak’s masterpiece, the chills began to creep up my spine, and my face grew hot. That is probably the most galling element of the whole soul-sapping experience. Zhivago, whose title might be rendered in English as “Doctor Life.” These later lyrics are a kind of summing up that reflect, from the perspective of age and approaching death, upon the accumulated experience of a contemplative life amid turbulent and terrifying times.įalen’s fresh new translations of these poems capture their expression of the beauty and the joy, the terror and the pain, of what it is to be alive. “The Poems of Yury Zhivago” are a part of the poet’s famous novel, Dr. The book would go on to become one of the most influential collections of Russian poetry of the twentieth century. In the early work My Sister Life, which commemorates the year 1917, Pasternak, then in his late twenties, found his poetic voice.

The two poetry collections offered here in translation are chronological and thematic bookends, and they capture Pasternak’s abiding and powerful vision of life: his sense of its beauty and terror, its precariousness for the individual, and its persistence in time-that vitality of being with which he is on familiar and familial terms. Boris Pasternak is best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, whereas in Russia he is most celebrated as a poet.

Dr zhivago poems