The long roofs of the platform, stretching into the distance, removed to the last degree the spectacle of the snow falling on the tracks. At such a distance, it seemed that the snowflakes hung in the air almost without moving, slowly sinking into it the way bread crumbs fed to fish sink into the water.

Beyond the opening of the window, by which they lay with their heads thrust forward, spread a flooded area with no beginning or end. Somewhere a river had overflowed, and the waters of its side branch had come up close to the railway embankment. In foreshortening, brought about by looking from the height of the berth, it seemed as if the smoothly rolling train was gliding right over the water.

The fleetness of such observations calls to mind film, especially early silent “motion pictures,” and their antecedents in zoetropes and the Lanterna Magica—any of those old devices that arrested a train’s progress and instead spun shots past a static eye. Each of Pasternak’s train windows is a frame; each sets a small scene. Taken together these scenes form a whole that seems alternately to be a film script and a film itself: Some scenes are fleshed only briefly, while others receive the full treatment with makeup and wardrobe.

Whichever it better resembles however, this new Zhivago—the first translation of the novel in 50 years—is far more psychologically subtle than that kitschy Hollywood vehicle for the emoting of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. This post-Soviet Zhivago is the work of that tireless translating couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In the last two decades they’ve rendered into English all the major novels of Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Complete Stories, a few dozen stories by Chekhov, in addition to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. One pities poor Turgenev—poor genius Turgenev—who awaits his reincarnation at another’s hands.

***

Pasternak himself, born in 1890, lived a tragically cinematic life; in a biopic a younger Martin Landau would have played him with wonderful pathos. Pasternak’s father, Leonid, was a portraitist of Tolstoy and the first Russian painter to engage Impressionism, while his mother, Rosa, was an acclaimed pianist. Pasternak took after her, studying composition with Alexander Scriabin, whose synesthesic theories (colors have sounds) influenced his pupil’s later poetics. Lacking Absolute Pitch but not absolved of ambition Pasternak abandoned music for philosophy, studying briefly in Marburg with Hermann Cohen, founder of Neo-Kantianism—which school marked philosophy’s re-rationalizing, or return to logic after a half-century of metaphysics and materialism—and the foremost Jewish thinker of his age. Another mentor was Russophile Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom Pasternak corresponded. Poetry came easily but prose did not, and Zhivago took nearly a decade a write. Obviously impossible to publish in the Soviet Union, it was smuggled to Milan, where it was issued by the communist but influential Feltrinelli Editore in 1957.

Max Hayward and Manya Harari’s English translation appeared the same year, rife with elisions and lacunae. Besides being more complete than that 1957 version, the Pevear-Volokhonsky Zhivago is linguistically more wild, often complex, sometimes complicated, self-consciously moderne—annexing the epigrammatic wit of Blok and Mayakovsky to the vast prosaic stretches of the 19th-century Russian novel. What in the previous translation was clear and focused has, with a turn of the lens, come into a warm blurriness, a gauze. It is as if Cold War America required clarity—moral transparency requiring transparent prose—but after the fall of Sovietism our verbiage can be just as muddled as our politics. Each is obviously the appropriate Zhivago for its time.

In Hayward-Harari the passage I quoted at the beginning of this review—narrating the Zhivago family’s journey east into Siberia, fleeing the 1917 Revolution—has been smoothed into a placid, pristinated English, as if Pasternak’s original has been covered with a layer of cleansing, conciliatory snow:

The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread crumbs thrown to fishes sink through water.

The second passage is even more starkly abridged:

Through the opening in the window they could see the country covered with spring floods as far as the eye could reach. Somewhere a river had overflowed its banks and the water had come right up to the embankment. In the foreshortened view from the bunk it looked as if the train were actually gliding on the water.

When comparing two translations without the ability to read the source, that source can serve only as an ideal in the critic’s mind—and this ideal is a fertile metaphor for Russia. That country that once sprawled over 11 time zones might not exist except in the various traductions of its interpreters. Zhivago, written as a solace throughout World War II, both embodied and contradicted the two dominant schools following World War I: Tsarist and Communist, the Whites and the Reds. While Revolution foments, Yuri Zhivago, apolitical son of the bourgeoisie, an erstwhile physician and poet, flees Moscow—factual Moscow—for Varykino, a fictional town in the folkloric Urals (one can’t help but note the word kino—“film”—buried at the end of that name). From idyllic privation he’s abducted by Bolshevik partisans to serve as their medic, loses his family to emigration, begins another family with his fated love Larissa Feodorovna, loses her, keeps house with a third woman, writes poetry, dies.

round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

Certainly if this book is read as one gazes passively through a train window this can all founder on melodrama, Slavic soul rendered in Technicolor—huge pans across landscapes, ridiculously contrived coincidences (people who appear later always turn out to have been met earlier on trains; wives and children show up when characters both least and most expect it; people presumed dead have merely changed names and gone underground)—but the active gaze discerns a radical artwork held together through motion alone, sheer velocity. There is nothing sophisticated in Zhivago; not the philosophy—which loves nature as only a Russian loves nature, and loves Jesus as only a Russian Jew loves Jesus (Zhivago is not Jewish, though Pasternak was)—and not even the examples of Zhivago’s poetry, which are elegiac in translation but nothing more. Rather the simplicity of Zhivago suggests just how closely related popular cinema is to the folktale: Both are committed to pure narration; neither feels compelled to reason or explain. A partisan leader who falls from favor shoots himself in the head, and the clumps of blood and exploded brain he leaves in the snow are described as appearing like frozen rowan berries. Pasternak zooms in tightly, holds the shot long. If the folktale is oral lore, the cinema is visual lore—the former is the prehistory of art, while the latter is our living tradition.

***

In 1958, following the novel’s success abroad and Khrushchev’s condemnation, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor he initially accepted—“Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed,” read his first telegram to the Swedish Academy—but four days later was persuaded, or forced, to refuse: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it. Please do not take offense at my voluntary rejection.”

Three years ago a literary critic named Ivan Tolstoi published a book in Russian—The Laundered Novel, not yet translated into English—alleging that Pasternak’s Nobel win was a CIA complot. Apparently Langley headquarters was aware that Nobel bylaws require all books under consideration to have been published in the language in which they were written (the reason for this rule being to ensure that the awarded words are the author’s, not a translator’s). Tolstoi maintains that the CIA intercepted the airplane delivering the manuscript to Italy, forcing it to land in Malta. With passengers waiting on the tarmac, agents photographed the manuscript page by page, then had the novel published in Russian in America and Europe in a limited edition, of which a few copies were presented directly to the Swedish Academy. No other explanation is so convincing as to how Russian Zhivagi surfaced on two continents almost simultaneously, and how a handful found refuge in Sweden with such expedition.

Tolstoi’s investigation makes for fine suspense, and no doubt Pasternak could have engineered a fitting language for it—a style capable of turning an absurd situation into a narrative both representative and timeless; an Eastern Bloc farce into an elemental epic. After all, that was his greatest talent, to neutralize the violent banality of his era by reminding it of eternity—in his characters’ conversational asides, glances, gestures; in scraps of liturgy and peasant song enshrined within his stanzas. Film screen, window, camera viewfinder, the page limited by margin: Such constraints exist to concentrate our perception; they are the visual equivalents of poetic meter. Pasternak’s genius for reminding us of what lies just beyond such frames tells us that without a frame we would be overwhelmed: by nature, by God, by the utter unicity of beauty.

Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel is Witz.

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.

The benefit of memoir is that you can say whatever you wish. In autobiography, one’s life—which is normatively, experientially, a succession of days that all seem the same, that recur weekly, monthly, by the season and by the year—can be revised into those few verses and lines of deep being, of living wholly. Here, Pasternak holds his pen away from any phrase or word that is not exactingly whole, and he appears to have no use for personalities that are not similarly encompassing.

Boris Pasternak

His autobiography is essentially structured around them, or around them as symbols. Safe Conduct begins with a sketch of Russophile Rainer Maria Rilke, another friend of the Pasternak household and a later mentor to the son. Then the young poet—not yet a poet, still a composer and pianist under his mother’s sway—receives a musical education at the hands of Alexander Scriabin; following his forsaking of a music career due to lack of Absolute Pitch, Pasternak gravitates to philosophy, and with money his parents scrape together departs for Marburg to study under the neo-Kantians, notably Hermann Cohen. Homesickness and café disillusion follow, philosophy abstracting into poetry as Pasternak decamps Marburg to tour the Continent before returning to Russia, where he’s nearly met at the train station by the movement called Futurism and its Soviet saint, Mayakovsky.

Such is the formlessness of this book. It is a winding track of memories and poesy that leaves largely unmentioned such negligibles as the First World War and the 1917 Revolution. Readers might be reminded of Rilke’s own faux-autobiography, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, or even subsequent imitative attempts by lesser Russian poets, such as the Precocious Autobiography of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which flits among light criticism of the Stalin years, expressions of solidarity with an exemplary Socialism, and literary gossip: “Pasternak was as yet unintelligible to me. He seemed to me too complicated and I lost the thread of his thought in the chaos of his imagery.”

But perhaps the best analogy can be found in the other arts with which Pasternak concerns himself. Musically speaking, Safe Conduct is a theme and variations, a passacaglia whose grounding bass is the poetry he would later write. Alternately, one could think of his father Leonid’s renowned portraiture and see in the younger Pasternak’s lifewriting a veritable gallery of Rilke’s rigor, Scriabin’s ecstasy, Cohen’s stolidity admixed with Jewish sentiment, and finally Mayakovsky’s Revolutionary verve. While Pasternak was compelled to live long under Stalin, to be canonized by the regime and yet forced to refuse the Nobel Prize for his dissident Doctor Zhivago, Mayakovsky—the incomprehensible laureate of a newer world, who thrilled Pasternak with his “cloud that wore trousers,” his daring and abhorrence of tradition, his womanizing and conversation—commits suicide too young: “The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring.”

On the last page of Pasternak’s memoir, Mayakovsky is turned into a symbol of all Pasternak still has to survive, of all that all Soviet artists had to survive—idealism and its disappointments, opportunity alongside opportunity for gulag—and this transubstantiation of a man into an age is worth quoting in full:

Suddenly, outside, underneath the window I imagined I saw his life, which now already belonged entirely to the past. I saw it move obliquely from the window like a quiet tree-bordered street resembling the Povarskaya. And the first to take its stand in this street, by the very wall, was our State, our unprecedented and unbelievable State, rushing headlong towards the ages and accepted by them for ever. It stood there below, one could hail it and take it by the hand. Its palpable strangeness somehow recalled the dead man. The resemblance was so striking that they might have been twins. And it occurred to me then in the same irrelevant way that this man was perhaps the State’s unique citizen. The novelty of the age flowed climatically through his blood. His strangeness was the strangeness of our times of which half is as yet to be fulfilled. I began to recall traits in his character, his independence, which in many ways, was completely original. All these were explained by his familiarity with states of mind which though inherent in our time, have not yet reached full maturity. He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty.

Certainly it is more difficult to write well than to pull the trigger, and in his outliving of Mayakovsky, Pasternak found his strongest voice, as well as that estranging sense of living one’s own autobiography that might be necessary to poets in their practice. Pasternak once wrote, “the biography of a poet is found in what happens to those who read him,” but the mystical reversal became truer with time: the biographies of readers are found in what happens to the poets who write for them. That is true of the mad frothing youth that read doomed Mayakovsky. And that is true of the grayer, suffering Russia that called Pasternak her own.