The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers

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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.

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