More in ‘Boris Pasternak’

Pasternak’s autobiography, Safe Conduct, was published in English 60 years ago this spring, and has just been republished in an anniversary edition from New Directions; the Russian original of this fragment of formative days was written in 1930, just a year before Pasternak’s first marriage collapsed. And yet there’s no mention of this union with Yevgeniya Lurye, and none either of their son, Yevgeny. The author’s father, Leonid, a portraitist of Leo Tolstoy and the first Russian painter to espouse Impressionism, and his mother, famed pianist Rosa, only make brief appearances; and one would think, from reading for facts, that the only events that ever affected Boris Leonidovich after his birth in 1890 were a mysterious Tintorettan dusk in Venice and meeting the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky.