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6. Boris Pasternak’s Safe Conduct and I Remember A Charmed Life

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) believed that a poet’s real autobiography, his creative and spiritual life, could not be contained in a chronology of autobiographical data, but that it was made up of the collective influences of others who had shaped his work. Thus he wrote in his first autobiography Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct, 1931) of the great symbolist and mystic poet (1875-1926) to whom it was dedicated:

I am not writing my autobiography. … the history of a poet is not to be presented in such a form. … The poet gives his whole life such a voluntary steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography … It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, … I do not present my reminiscences to the memory of Rilke. On the contrary I myself received them as a present from him.1

This is why both in his Safe Conduct and in his second memoir Avtobiograficheskiy ocherk (I Remember. Sketch for an Autobiography, 1957) it was so important for him to establish his poetic lineage. And just as important, in the long run, was his romantic belief that the creative energy behind his poetry was linked to the sacred, spiritual realm. As he put it in 1956 in his essay on “Translating Shakespeare,” poetry used “metaphor as a shorthand of the spirit.”2 Pasternak published his Safe Conduct at the beginning of what were to become the darkest days of Stalin’s reign of terror. The memoir dealt with three aspects of Pasternak’s life. There were, first of all, autobiographical details: first love, his study of under the neo-Kantian in Marburg, Germany, and his giving up philosophical studies in favour of poetry. Then came an exposition of his theory of the creative process where feeling displaced everyday reality by means of image and metaphor. In this process, the images became symbolic of a creative power which energized poetic conception. 3 This poetic power came from a

1 Boris Pasternak, “Safe Conduct,” in Prose and Poems, Edited by Stefan Schimanski, With an Introduction by J. M. Cohen (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1959), p. 24. See also Henry Gifford, Pasternak. A critical study (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 120-24, 131-32. 2 Boris Pasternak, “Translating Shakespeare,” Translated by Manya Harari in I Remember. Sketch for an Autobiography, Translated with a Preface and Notes by David Magarshack (New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960), p. 126. 3 “Safe Conduct,” pp. 62-63. 44 The Time before Death transcendental realm: “In other words [he wrote], I had in mind the manifestation of a power which counter-balanced the manifestation of the world.”4 Finally, in the last quarter of the memoir, he paid an especial tribute to the life and the pre-revolutionary poetry of the futurist poet (1893-1930) who had made such a profound impact on Pasternak and who had just committed suicide the year before the publication of Safe Conduct.5 Speaking of Mayakovsky, Pasternak said: “I was deifying him. I personified in him my spiritual horizons.”6 Seeing him as “the foremost poet of our generation,”7 he found a kindred dimension in his longer poem “Vladimir Mayakovsky (A Tragedy),” (1913): “Here was that profound animation, without which there is no originality, that infinity, which opens out from any one point of life in any direction, without which poetry is only a misunderstanding, something temporarily unexplained.”8 But, with the exception of Mayakovsky’s poem Vo Ves’ Golos (At the Top of My Voice, 1930), written shortly before his suicide, Pasternak could not accept Mayakovsky’s post-1917 revolutionary poetry which he found uninspired and “uncreative”. 9 Though Pasternak would be more explicit about this, later in his I Remember, he was literally taking his life into his own hands for daring to be critical of a poet who had identified himself with the Bolshevik revolution. It was a courageous act at a time when the communist Party was about to inaugurate officially the political regimentation of Soviet art and literature on the model of , a final muzzling of creative freedom that had been gathering momentum throughout the twenties. Keeping this in mind, can understand why Pasternak said almost nothing about Rilke, and very little about the mystic and religious composer (1872-1915) who had also been a very important influence on Pasternak. On the other hand, Pasternak’s retelling of the legend of Elizabeth of Hungary was a bold metaphorical strike against Stalin’s totalitarian state.10 Ultimately, for Pasternak, it was his theory of the creative process which was central to Safe Conduct, and it was this theory that he thought was exemplified in Mayakovsky’s poetry. We might add to this, that though Mayakovsky’s imagery – unlike Pasternak’s – was much more city-oriented,

4 “Safe Conduct”, p. 62. 5 Ibid., pp. 95-126. 6 Ibid., p. 102. 7 Ibid., p. 105. 8 Ibid., p. 100. 9 Ibid., p. 101. 10 Ibid., pp. 45-46. See also “Boris Pasternak (1890-1960): Art of Self-Concealment,” in my The Silenced Vision. An Essay in Modern European Fiction (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 1979), pp. 63-78, here pp. 63-69.