Pasternak's My Sister, Life

Inspired by Athena, I ordered a copy of Olga Carlisle's out of print (published 1976)translation of Pasternak's "My Sister, Life" from Amazon, at a reasonable price. The book has the original Russia together with Olga's translations that go for the tone and mood of the poems rather than a word for word translations.  The text is accompanied by romantic images of Russia, Georgia, and Moldova by now deceased photographer Inge Morath, Olga's friend and the wife of Arthur Miller, and something of a legend herself. Bearing in mind the recent posts on how disappointing "Dr. Zhivago" can be, I braced myself for a let down.  I'd read the book during a conference on "My Sister, Life" at Stanford in 1997. Even then after reading the lines about the cup of hot cocoa steaming up a mirror I could not resist a hilarious contemporaneous parody of this piece by a trio of Soviet satiric verse writers, whose joint name I no longer remember, but it was very funny.  Pasternak's work, Like R.M.Rilke, can be breathtakingly beautiful if you are in the right etherial mood, or totally ludicrous if you read it between balancing the checkbook and starting to make dinner. So I blotted out the real world, locked the doors, closed the curtains, brewed some tea with rose petals (they help), and settled in on the couch to read it in one sitting, or rather one reclining. And I loved it. The title seems to play off of the Song of Solomon ( My Sister, my Love stuff) and antique erotic Persian style poetry with lots of lilacs and roses. It summons the cultural amulets he inherited from his parents, his pianist mother Rosalie (there are pages of piano music the turn like the pages of a diary) and his artist father Leonid (the dust from an artist's charcoal stick floats down and settles on drawing paper). For all the pretty images of garden swings, swirling snowflakes, frosted windows and wild vines, there is a subtext of fear and danger.  The ominous Nechaev, whom I met in Ana Siljack's biography of revolutionary Vera Zasulich, makes a cameo appearance in "1905."  Hamlet dreads going on stage. Pasternak identifies with Desdemona and Ophelia, not just Hamlet. The dangerous subtext gives the obsessive pleasure in small beautiful images an edginess and depth that I find compelling. Olga's interviews with Pasternak at the end, in 1960, just before he dies, are revealing.  He is still being harrassed by the Soviet authorities, knowing him endangers his friends (he was too famous abroad to be arrested, but his mistress was), and yet he lives in this large enchanted country house, with an accomplished cook, beautiful afternoon dinners with family and distinquished visitors (who stand up when he enters the room), who dine on venison and tangerines, sip tea and cognac and discuss Chopin and Tolstoy. Like his poems, his circle maintained beautiful surfaces in an otherwise ugly world.