Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternakwas a Soviet and Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 February 1890
CountryRussian Federation
truth naked unarmed
... the unarmed power of naked truth.
real war lying
And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.
eternity hostage captives
You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
writing age faust
The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
eternity all-time hostage
We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
lyric-poetry complicated immensity
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
men anxious myth
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
lonely home dust
Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.
love-you
I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.
real thinking play
It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.
confused love-you jealous
Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.
hate i-hate enough
I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
genuine ripple genuine-life
And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.
truth fool generations
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.