The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers

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Authors: Boris Pasternak

The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers

Boris Pasternak

Preface
Boris Pasternak first achieved fame, both in his native Russia and abroad, as a lyric poet. His father was a well-known painter, while his mother was a talented pianist. He studied music for some years, then philosophy at the Universities of Moscow and Marburg. He joined the Cubo-Futurists in 1912, but was only associated with them briefly, and, except for his interest in obscure words and his occasional use of shocking or vulgar imagery, he had little in common with the Futurists. His first collection of poetry,
A Twin in the Clouds
, was published in 1914. He won wide recognition after the First World War with a collection of lyrics called
My Sister Life
, written in 1917 but published only in 1922. With the publication of successive collections, he soon acquired the position of the leading younger poet of Russia. His
Spektorski
(1926) is an attempt at treatment of certain episodes of his own life. As a narrative work, it was somewhat less successful than his lyrics, as were his other narratives,
1905
(1925-26) and
Lieutenant Schmidt
(1926-27), both attempts to celebrate the revolutionary movement in Russia. Pasternak aims at a personal, lyric verse, and the revolutionary movement is a subject which seems alien to his real interests. His collection
The Second Birth
(1932) frequently employs the Caucasus and its magnificent landscapes as a setting, and these poems, like others by Pasternak, sometimes recall Lermontov's Caucasian poetry.
Though Pasternak's poetry is difficult and at times obscure, he became the favorite poet of Soviet intellectuals, and there is little doubt that he is one of the leading poets of our time. The obscurity of his work, its individualism and concern for personal subjectivity made much of his work unacceptable to orthodox Soviet critics, who attacked him for “formalism” and “alienation from the masses.” Apparently driven from original creation by the hostile pressure of his critics, Pasternak turned to translation, producing excellent versions of several of Shakespeare's plays as well as selections from American and Georgian poets. He took advantage of the somewhat more lenient atmosphere of the time of the Second World War to publish two new original collections:
On Early Trains
(1943) and
The Terrestrial Expanse
(1945), which show a certain simplification and greater directness by comparison with his earlier work. But in 1946 the critics launched a new attack, and thereafter he published no poetry except in translation.
As a poet, Pasternak was highly individualistic. Philosophical themes and the contemplation of reality were favorite subjects, along with the more conventional themes of love and nature. Nature in his poetry appears as new and strange; the poet describes her almost animistically as alive, and re-creates for us something of the elemental wonder of a primitive view of the world. But Pasternak's “primitivism” is actually part of a sophisticated but deliberately irrational approach to nature, which he depicted in strikingly rich and novel images. He is unusual as a lyric poet whose poetry tends to be prosaic in its great use of synecdoche and metonymic imagery, of part-whole and object-symbol relations. His metaphors and similes are especially remarkable in their freshness, and he was not in the least afraid to use images of objects which are of a technical nature, or are prosaic or even vulgar. Thus, he compares the guilt of a lover to a skin infection, or the color and feel of fresh air to a bundle of wash taken home from a hospital. Images of sound are particularly striking in his poetry, as when he speaks of the “clatter of winter” or the “rumble of grief.”
Pasternak's prose is an extension of his poetry, with the same prosaic quality and the same unexpectedness of imagery. In 1925 he published his only collection of stories, in which appeared the present work,
The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers
. The story is virtually plotless, full of reminiscences which Pasternak “objectivizes”; a young girl's reactions to the world about her seem to become part of that very world. Another story is
Air Ways
(1925), set against the background of the 1917 Revolution, depicting in a fragmentary and quite unsentimental manner a father's inability to save his illegitimate son, arrested for taking part in a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. But the story as such is less important than its imagery.
Safe Conduct
(1931) is an autobiographical account of the poet's youth and early spiritual development.
Pasternak has been compared to a number of modern poets, including Eliot, Hopkins and Rilke. More than they, however, he is a writer whose subject was a new manner of perception, a manner far more important than what is perceived or what is believed. It is the fresh way of perceiving reality which is original in his work. During the 1920's Pasternak had considerable influence on a number of young Soviet poets, including Tikhonov, Bagritski and Selvinski. But his influence largely waned with the attacks on his work by Soviet critics.
In 1958 a novel by Pasternak,
Dr. Zhivago
, appeared in Italy; subsequently the work was published in English and in many other languages.
Dr. Zhivago
is a lyrical novel of the life of Russian intellectuals during World War I, the Civil War and the early years of the Soviet regime. The hero is a physician and poet who reacts to the tragic happening of history by passive withdrawal and a search for freedom within himself. His love for Lara, the novel's heroine, is a triumphant assertion of life in the face of the logic of historical events; so also is his creative work as a poet. The novel is a symbolic depiction of the spiritual death of Russia, particularly the old Russia of the intelligentsia, in the Revolution; at the end of the book the possibility of regeneration is symbolized by the appearance of Zhivago's daughter Tanya. Marxism and Communism are sharply criticized by the author; to them he opposes a Darwinian conception of life and a Christian philosophy of history which emphasizes individual freedom.
Later in 1958 the Nobel Prize for literature was offered to Pasternak; he at first accepted it, but later rejected it after he had been subjected to a storm of vituperation by Soviet critics. To date (1961) the novel has not been published in the Soviet Union. Pasternak died in 1960 of heart disease.
WILLIAM E. HARKINS
Columbia University.
I
The Long Days
Zhenya Luvers was born and grew up in Perm. Later on, her memories were buried in the many shaggy bearskins of the house, as her little boats and dolls had been earlier. Her father was manager of the Luviewsky Mines and had many customers among the manufacturers of Chusovaya.
The luxuriant, brown-black bearskins were gifts. The white she-bear in the nursery was like a giant, full-blown chrysanthemum. This fur had been especially chosen for “Zhenichka's room.” It had been carefully selected, purchased in a store after long bargaining, and brought to the house by a delivery boy.
In the summer the Luvers lived in a country house on the other side of the Kama. In those years Zhenya used to go to bed early, and did not see the lights of Motovilikha. But, one night, the Angora cat, frightened in her sleep, made a violent movement and woke up Zhenya. Suddenly she saw people on the balcony. The alder tree which overhung the balcony railing was iridescent like thick, dark ink. The tea in the glasses was red. The men's cuffs and the cards were yellow and the tablecloth green. It was like a nightmare, but it was a nightmare with a name that Zhenya knew: it was called “a game of cards.”
But what was going on, on the other shore of the river, in the far, far distance, she could not recognize; it had no name, no definite color or clear contours. Its billowing movements had something dear and familiar about them; it was no nightmare like the one close by, which murmured in clouds of tobacco smoke and threw fresh, wind-tossed shadows on the reddish beams of the gallery. Zhenya started to cry. Her father came in and explained everything to her. Her English governess turned her face to the wall. The explanation was brief: “That is Motovilikha. You should be ashamed of yourself. Such a big girl! Now go to sleep!”
The girl understood nothing and swallowed a salty tear. She had wanted only one thing, to know the name of the inconceivable: Motovilikha. That night the name explained everything and that night the name still held a real and reassuring meaning for the child.
But in the morning she asked what Motovilikha was and what they made there at night. She learned that it was a factory, that it was owned by the government, that cast iron was made there, and that cast iron was made into.... But that did not interest her. She would have liked to know what “factories” were—maybe they were different countries—and who lived in them. But she did not ask this question; indeed, she deliberately refrained from asking it.
That morning she ceased to be the child she had been in the night. For the first time in her life she suspected that there existed phenomena which either kept certain things to themselves or revealed them only to people who could scold and punish, smoke and lock doors with keys. Like this new Motovilikha, for the first time she too did not say everything she thought but kept the essential, basic and disturbing things to herself.
Some years passed. The children were from an early age so used to the absence of their father that fatherhood was linked in their minds with a certain habit of coming seldom to lunch and never to dinner. More and more often they ate and drank, played and shouted, in deserted, solemnly empty rooms, and the coldly formal lessons of their English governess could not replace the presence of a mother who filled the house with the sweet torture of her temper and willfulness as with a familiar electricity. Through the curtains streamed the quiet northern light. It never smiled. The oaken cupboard looked gray, its silverware piled up heavy and severe. The hands of their governess, bathed in lavender water, smoothed the tablecloth. She gave nobody less than his due and had as strong a sense of justice as a feeling for order; her room and her books were always meticulously clean and tidy. The girl who served the food waited in the dining room and went to the kitchen only to fetch the next course. Everything was comfortable and beautiful, but terribly sad.
These were years of distrust and solitude for the girl, of a feeling of guilt and of what the French would call “
christianisme
”—something that could not possibly be translated “Christianity.” Sometimes Zhenya believed that she neither could nor should have things any better; she deserved nothing different because of her wickedness and impenitence. Meanwhile—though the children never became wholly aware of it—the behavior of their parents threw them into confusion and rebellion; their whole beings shivered when the grownups were in the house, when they returned—not
home
, but to the house.
Their father's rare jokes fell flat and sounded mostly out of place. He felt this and sensed that the children noticed it. A tinge of sorrowful confusion never left his face. When he was irritated, he became a complete stranger, from the instant he lost his self-control. One is not touched by a stranger. But the children took care never to answer him impudently.
For some time now, however, he had been insensitive to criticism from the nursery, which was aimed at him dumbly from the eyes of the children. He no longer noticed it. Invulnerable, impenetrable, and somehow pitiable,
this
father was far more terrible than the irritated father, the stranger. He disturbed the little girl more than the boy.
The mother confused both children. She showered them with caresses and gifts and passed whole hours with them when they least desired it, when it oppressed their childish consciences because they felt that they did not deserve it. They did not recognize themselves in the tender pet names that her maternal instinct lavished on them.
And often, when an exceptional calm ruled their souls, when they did not feel like criminals, when everything mysterious that shies away from revelation, and is like the fever before the rash, had left their consciences, they saw their mother also as a stranger, who pushed them aside and became angry without reason. For instance, the mailman would come, and the children would bring a letter to her. She would take it without thanking them. “Go to your room!” The door closed. They hung their heads in silence and were plunged into long, disconsolate doubts.
At first they had sometimes cried; then, after a particularly violent outburst of anger on their mother's part, they became frightened. In the course of the years this fear turned into a concealed hostility which struck ever deeper roots in their hearts.
Everything that came to the children from their parents seemed to come at the wrong moment, from far away, as if produced not by them but by mysterious, unknown causes. It smelled of a great distance and was like the groaning of the folding screens when they went to bed.
These circumstances molded the children. They never knew this, for even among grownups there are few who know and feel what shapes them, forms them and links them with one another. Life lets but a few people in on what it is doing to them. It loves its work too much and talks while it works only with those who wish it success and love its workshop. No one has the power to assist it, but anyone can disturb it. How can one disturb it? Quite simply. When a tree is left to grow undisturbed, it grows crooked, grows only roots or wastes itself upon a single leaf, for it forgets that it must take the universe as its model and, once it has brought forth one out of a thousand possible things, it continues to bring forth the same thing a thousand times.
To ensure that no dead branches remain in the soul to hinder its growth, and that man does not inject his stupidities into the creation of his immortal being, many things are provided to divert his trivial curiosity from life, which does not like to work in his presence and avoids his scrutiny in every possible way. Among these diversions are all genuine religions, all generally accepted ideas and all human prejudices, including the most brilliant and interesting psychology.
The children had already gotten over their first illnesses. Concepts such as punishment, retribution, reward and justice had already, in childish form, penetrated their souls, diverted their consciousness and let life do anything with them that it thought necessary, essential and good.

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