Pasternak said that the 50 poems that My Sister, Life comprises should be read and understood as a whole. The book describes a time both in the life of the poetic speaker and in the life of his country.
The speaker is pursuing a woman with whom he is in love, and he has many hopes and fears about the resolution of his feelings. He is parted from his beloved, and he seeks in verse to amuse her, to keep her mindful of him, to woo her as he travels to meet her. She rejects him, and he struggles with the loss.
In “To Elena” the speaker names his beloved, who is also Helen of Troy, matchless and unattainable. The country also has recently undergone a revolution that promised but did not bring a new order. The poems about his trip hint at the aftermath of the revolution and convey the hope it engendered. In the narrative, the speaker, humankind, nature, and nation are one in a rare ecstatic moment.
The poems initially invoke the ghost of Russian romantic writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov, who for Pasternak embodies a free, Russian poetic spirit; later poems evoke the energy of 19th-century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who for him embodies a cultured, cosmopolitan spirit. For Pasternak, these two impulses coexist in the intensity of the poetry and of the era.
“In Memory of the Demon,” the first poem in the book, explicitly alludes to Lermontov and his work, while the four poems that set the tone for the chapter “Lessons in Philosophy” implicitly bring forth the intellectual world Pasternak sees as Pushkin’s. These four poems seek to define entities like soul and creativity and so are like academic philosophy, but many of the other poems are philosophical in tone since they are reflections of and on reality.
In “The Mirror” the surface of the mirror reflects the cup immediately in front of it, while at the same time seeming to reach out to take in the rest of the room and the garden outside. These also appear to rush to meet the mirror, which contains them all. The poems in this volume, like a mirror, reflect reality and, like “The Mirror,” invite thought.
Bibliography
Gifford, Henry. Pasternak: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
O’Connor, Katherine Tiernan. Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life: The Illusion of Narrative. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1988.
Pasternak, Boris. My Sister—Life. Translated by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
Rudova, Larissa. Understanding Boris Pasternak. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Russian Literature, World Literature