My Father's Wars : Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century

Translated from the Russian with a preface and notes by David Magarshack In this book, which is both less and much more than an autobiography, Boris Pasternak recalls the incidents and influences that made him the poet and the man he is today. This revealing document, written after his great novel, is for Pasternak himself, next to Doctor Zhivago, his most cherished and important book. From earliest childhood, Pasternak grew up in an artist's world. His father was a painter, his mother a pianist.Tolstoy was a friend of the house, and so was Scriabin. At Tolstoy's tragic death at a lonely railroad station, young Boris accompanied his father, who was called to the scene of death. In his description of this experience and his definition of Tolstoy's creative powers and irradiation, genius meets genius in unforgettable fashion. Pasternak himself belonged to a generation that gave Russia some of the greatest names in modern poetry-Mayakovsky, Esenin, among others; it was this group which expressed a world of radical change in new art forms, in a state of high excitement and ferment. Subtly, by implication rather than direct statement, Pasternak then describes the anguished climate of the terrible years when the greatest among his fellow artists, the closest among his friends, were drawn to suicide or met otherwise tragic ends. The passages in which he speaks, in a few penetrating sentences, of their work and their fate, are marvels of evocation and compassion. It is through this small book, through what it tells and what it omits, that one comes to understand on what anvil the man was forged who since has become a symbol of lonely courage, and stepped out of the history of literature into the history of mankind.