Word: pasternaks
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...major in Germany's University of Marburg under a pudgy intellectual martinet, Professor Hermann Cohen, a disciple of Hegel and Kant. In the Gothic-fairy-tale mountain town of Marburg, with its steeply sloping streets and medieval gables, his first serious love came to 18-year-old Boris Pasternak. When the girl turned down his offer of marriage, "[I found] my face was twitching and my eyes constantly filled with tears...
After traveling in Italy, Pasternak returned to Moscow without his philosophy degree and began whooping it up as a bohemian versifier. Pasternak, with his liquid, steel-grey eyes, sensuous lips and proud and pensive look, became famed as a ladies' man. He looked, recalls one acquaintance, "like an Arabian stallion...
...Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin became Russia's three musketeers of modernity. Mayakovsky's poetry was like a shot in the streets. He became the Bolshevik poet laureate; but Big Brother's embrace was crushing, and in the end he killed himself. In his book Safe Conduct, Pasternak conjures up "our State" as the "stone guest" at the funeral. Esenin (who was married for a time to Dancer Isadora Duncan) was an untutored rustic songbird, who pined away in the Soviet cage and also died by his own hand...
Themes & Variations. In the four slim volumes that Boris Pasternak published between 1914 and 1923 (two chief ones: My Sister Life, Themes and Variations), he developed a telegraphic style, sound effects that are almost totally lost in translation and a unique imagery that made the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Pasternak's Definition of Poetry is actually easier to understand than most of his poems...
...Poet Pasternak stressed imagery because he believed that "only the image can keep pace with the successes of nature." A frosty night is "like a blind puppy lapping its milk." The Caucasus is like "crumpled bedding." The dark night of the soul is "blacker than monks, more stifling than clergy." The evening is empty "like an interrupted story." What Pasternak has tried to do in his poetry is not to recollect emotion in tranquillity, but to arrest emotion like a motion picture stopped with all the characters in mid-action...