Word: pasternaks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. A second absorbing volume produced by artful questioners who extract provocative ideas on art and life from Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Katherine Anne Porter and other creators...
...issued in book form, contains detailed interviews with 14 major writers, six of them poets. Armed with tape recorders and probing questions the interviewers ranged the U.S. and Europe, talking to Lawrence Durrell in a French cottage, T. S. Eliot in a Manhattan apartment, and the late Boris Pasternak amid the fir trees of Peredelkino...
...hard to imagine the top people of any other profession being so profoundly and articulately dissatisfied with their own work. Poet Marianne Moore laments that she "never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do." Boris Pasternak (described as looking "at the same time like an Arab and his horse") believes it is "no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated." Venerable Ezra Pound, 77, "stuck" and unable to finish his epic Cantos, says, "The question...
...cannot see into the hearts of Yevtushenko and Ehrenburg and the other Soviet writers. One is tempted to set up the model of Pasternak, and say to them that that true dedication to art implies only one course of action. Indeed, a character in One Day known only as K-123 listens to a defense of the film producer Eisenstein, makes a disparaging comment, and is told "But what other treatment of the subject would have been let through...?" K-123 replies in a rage "Ha! Let through, you say? Then don't call him a genius! Call...
...cannot demand Pasternak's martyrdom from all artists, nor perhaps should we want to. Dr. Zhivago will remain an immortal book in the West, but it is inconceivable that it will be read in Russia in the near future. Yevtushenko and Ehrenburg might be toadies, and we might often find them despicable. Yet their dissent, no matter how veiled, will reach the Russian people. And their relentless pressure for new freedoms, no matter how hesitant, can produce an occasional "thaw," can help create a climate that will allow the publication of such works...