An Excerpt from a Letter by Boris Pasternak to Eugene Kayden
“In your last and previous letters, in your short essay on Pushkin, in your translations of his poetry and in your work on my behalf, I do not find anything other than worthy aims and achievements. You say I am ‘first and last a poet, a lyric poet.’ Is it really so? And should I feel proud of being just that? And do you realize the meaning of my being no more than that, whereas it hurts me to feel that I have not had the ability to express in greater fullness the whole of poetry and life in their complete unity? But what am I without the novel, and what have you to write about me without drawing upon that work, its terms and revelations?
I cannot say, like Mayakovsky, let’s have ‘as many poets as possible, good and various others.’ Against the mere numbers, I should wish — not literally of course — that poets were few; the matter of their scarcity does not interest me much — but that one poet should be true and great, expressing supremely and inimitably the life of his age. Art is not simply a description of life, but a setting forth of the uniqueness of being. What we call the splendor and vividness of description is not a feature imputed merely to style, but something far greater, namely the presence of a new conception and the philosophic sense of life’s own oneness and wholeness. The significant writer of his epoch (and I want no other beside him) is a revelation, a representation of the unknown, unrepeatable uniqueness of living reality. What else is originality if not a cultural event having its source in the world’s absolute total reality?
Many forgotten periods of history were once thought to be the end of the world, like our present nuclear situation. Each age of historical existence is compounded of two terms, the known and the unrevealed. The latter is infinite and unknown, because the future is at all times a part of this unexplored and unknown infinity that I can speak of without resort to mysticism — the burgeoning, profound, momentous tomorrow.
Each art, especially that of poetry, means a great deal more than it comprises. Its essence and values are symbolic. This does in no manner signify that we possess the key by which we can discover behind every word or condition some other hidden sense — mystical, occult, or providential — as was erroneously believed of the dramatic works of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, or Leonid Andreyev. Nor does it mean that each true, creative poetical text ought to be a parable or an allegory. What I want to say is that besides and above the separate tropes and metaphorical turns of a poem there exists a figurative tendency, a drift in the poetry itself and in art as a whole — and that is its chief significance — to relate the general, summary purport of a composition to broader and more fundamental ideas — in order to reveal the sublimity of life and the unfathomable values of human existence. I am tempted to say that art does not equal itself, does not mean itself alone, but that it means tangibly something beyond itself. In this way we call art symbolic in essence.
If I believe an author is not too great in his natural endowments, or if I do not discover in his works this immense spiritual quality, this sense of all-surpassing, overarching importance to life, he is as nothing to me however good the written page. It is as if somebody began to scurry to and fro in an open field, waving flags and lights along the railway track, without a railway train in sight. Art is for me a manifestation and a symptom; it must show that we stand in the presence of new all-encompassing values, in the presence of the great.”
(Obtained from the foreword of Poems by Boris Pasternak, the foreword written and the poetry translated by Eugene Kayden.)
