Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography by Christopher Barnes (review)

HUMANITIES 189 1900'- (Marquez? Gordimer?). 'As a major novelist White can't help but be in touch with human creativity- it flows through him,' Steven assures us. What does this statement mean? Only that White is a major writer when he is saying what we want to hear. This kind of argument has no referential or critical value; and so with the overall method of the book. Yet it is White who is repeatedly charged with solipsism, a sad judgment to read on an author so deeply aware of the difficulty of communication. This book tells us more about itself than about the texts it proposes to elucidate. It confronts us with the problem of reading White in an age when isolation of selfis the cardinal sin, and the primacy of spirit over our material existence is no longer believed. Steven closes with the following comment on Memoirs: 'At just under 200 pages the book is small for White, barelylonger than a novella; hedoes not give himselfenough rope to hang himself, so to speak.' Steven's book is 163 pages, which proves the job can be done in less. (J.M. REIBETANZ) Christopher Barnes. Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Volume 1: 1890-1928 Cambridge University Press. xix, 507. £35.00 Born in January 1890, Boris Pasternak was a near-contemporary of T.S. Eliot (born September 1888); their lives share a number of features, apart from currently being the subjects of centennial revaluation. What may be most significant biographically is the early recognition of achieved greatness: 1922 saw the publication of both The Waste Land and My Sister Life, and neither volume was received in terms of promise or potential. At the beginning of 1927, just after the death of Rilke, the critic D.S. Mirsky wrote to Pasternak: 'We have not had in Russia such a poet since the golden Age, and in Europe at the moment there can be disputation only between yourself and T.S. Eliot.' There is a penalty to be paid when early recognition is not followed by death or stagnation: the subsequentcareeris seen not as the accumulation of poetic greatness but rather as a falling off, oreven a betrayal. And those who were unmoved by the early work can take a provocative pleasure in celebrating the later: Four Quartets and Doctor Zhivago are variously regarded as betrayals of radical experimentation, and - usually by critics of reactionary cast - as somehow redemptive of the errors of youth. The career is divided, and Eliot criticism from 1945 and Pasternak criticism from 196o (the publication of Zhivago only just preceding the author's death) virtually excludes the possibility of equal enthusiasm for both halves of the career. That insistence upon discontinuity invites a two-part biography, and yet, oddly, when the discontinuity is manifested as a bibliographical fact, it loses conviction as a biographical one. Christopher Barnes, of the Slavic Department at the University of 190 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 Toronto, gives us the life of Pasternak in two parts the better to assert the coherence of Pasternak's achievement. The year 1928 is not a particularly crucial one in Pasternak's life, and Barnes takes it to stand for the transition in Pasternak's life and writing from the private to the public, from the solitary and visionary to the public and political. That transition was anyway of Stalin's doing, and Pasternak intrigues as a biographical subject by his passivity, by the lack of initiative in his long-delayed responses to the world's events. As he wrote in 1918, against the tendency in Mayakovsky and others to tum poetry into public and political act: 'Some modern movements have imagined that art is like a fountain whereas in fact it is a sponge. They have decided that art ought to spout and gush, whereas it should absorb and saturate itself.... It should always be one of the audience, and have the clearest, most perceptive view of all.' Of the academics that Pasternak encountered in his philosophical training at Marburg, he wrote in extreme condemnation : 'They do not exist. They never conjugate in the passive voice.' Pasternak recognized the problem ofpassivity for the poet, and saw the...