He was too embarrassed to publish the poems at first because they are written in a nontraditional style. At the time he was living in Saratov, a port city in Southern Russia. These poems put Pasternak on the map as a poet.

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. It was once a whirlwind, something full of power and force but it has become an orphaned and sleepless waste. In another poem by Pasternak “A Sultry Night,” the world is also diminished.

These are words spoken by people who are alone, who want to go back in time to live their lives differently. The narrator in each poem is questioning what life means. If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,Īnd turning toward the window, should say: This reminds me of a similar line in T.S. He ends the poem with a question, “What did I want to say.” The earth shudders and convulses at this revelation and beats its brains trying to remember what it once believed. The speaker sees the world through lenses of metaphor and mysticism but concludes it is all a forgery. The poet is more mystic than man and sees the world in a dreamlike, surreal way. Zhivago is of a poet whose idealism is shaken by war and the loss of the love of his life. 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. He once said that poets and artists traditionally have no assured place in society and can only live their lives outside it. Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 and revolutionized Russian poetry. It was the only thing left in this house when we moved in.” It was a book of poetry by Pasternak. When my friend’s mother found out I was a poet, she said, “Oh, I have something you might like. She and her mother had recently bought a Victorian house. Years later I was visiting a friend on Vancouver island. Zhivago, which was made into a 1965 drama romance with Julie Christie and Omar Sharif. I later found out he is the author of the novel Dr. When I went to see what it was, it was a book of his poetry. Walking through the library late one night, I was startled by a book falling off a shelf. I first became familiar with Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) when I was an undergrad in college.

Dr zhivago poems