Pasternak S Lyric

This biographical study, first published in 1985, draws on extensive newly available material and illuminates the life and work of a man who lived through one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history to produce some of his country’s greatest poetry and its most significant modern novel.

Originally published in 1981. This book looks at the autobiographical work of nine twentieth-century writers – Henry Adams, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Boris Pasternak, Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Green and Adrian Stokes. The author argues that often the writer has shaped his life through his craft, coming to understand the pattern of his own existence through the formalism of language. In each case the writer stamps his personality on the work by mean of a distinctive verbal surface whose discipline enables him to evade narrow egotism and forces both reader and writer into an act of collaboration and corroboration. Written at a time when criticism was turning to focus on the relation between the reader and the text, this study added a provocative dimension to the debate and is still an important read today.

"Still, we have the same solitude, the same journeys and searching, and the same favorite turns in the labyrinth of literature and history."—Boris Pasternak to Marina TsvetaevaOne of the most compelling episodes of twentieth-century Russian literature involves the epistolary romance that blossomed between the modernist poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak in the 1920s. Only weeks after Tsvetaeva emigrated from Russia in 1922, Pasternak discovered her poetry and sent her a letter of praise and admiration. Tsvetaeva's enthusiastic response began a decade-long affair, conducted entirely through letters. This correspondence-written across the widening divide separating Soviet Russia from Russian émigrés in continental Europe-offers a view into the overlapping worlds of literary creativity, sexual identity, and political affiliation. Following both sides of their conversation, Catherine Ciepiela charts the poets' changing relations to each other, to the extraordinary political events of the period, and to literature itself. The Same Solitude presents the first full account of this affair of letters and poems from its beginning in the summer of 1922 to its denouement in the 1930s.Drawing on many previously untranslated letters and poems, Ciepiela describes the poets' mutual influence, both in the course of their lives and the development of their art. Neither poet saw any separation between a poet's life and work, and Ciepiela treats each poet's letters and poems as a single text. She discusses the poets' famous triangular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke in 1926, and she addresses the profound significance of Tsvetaeva for Pasternak, who is often perceived (mistakenly, Ciepiela asserts) as the more detached partner. Further, this book expands our understanding of poetic modernism by showing how the poets worked through ideas about gender and writing in the context of what they themselves called a literary "marriage."

Through numerous interviews with Brodsky's contemporaries and vast archival research, MacFadyen offers a vital new slant on Brodsky's early verse, providing the first published translations of these poems, examining his work in relation to a broad international spectrum of influences and revealing the art and craft of his poetry.".