Discover the Best Books Written by Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the oldest child of painter Leonid Pasternak and pianist Roza Kaufman, was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890. His father taught art at the school, serving as Pasternak’s childhood home. His parents received constant visits from prominent Moscow writers, artists, and intellectuals, including the yet unknown Rainer Maria Rilke in 1899, whose writing greatly influenced Pasternak. 

In addition to his parents, Pasternak’s teachers were private tutors until he entered high school in 1901, where he received a classical education. While he drew well, to his father's delight, his first love was botany, and second, music. Inspired by the composer Alexander Scriabin, who was a friend of the family, Pasternak devoted six years to the study of composition. Three finished piano pieces composed by the young poet have survived from these years.

Although everyone assumed that Pasternak would become a professional musician, he was wary of his lack of technical skill. In 1909 he gave up his musical career for good when he entered the law faculty at Moscow University. He soon turned to philosophy, and although he appeared to be heading toward an academic career, he ultimately gave it up in 1912 to pursue his true calling—poetry. Yet Pasternak’s poetry and prose would always bear the mark of his youthful enthusiasm for music and philosophy.

The years preceding the Bolshevik Revolution were a time of great intellectual and artistic richness in Russia. Since the turn of the century, the country has enjoyed a philosophical and religious revival in which Russian Symbolist poets played a leading part. In the arts, the Russian avant-garde was closely linked to new movements in Western Europe; it was the age of Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall of Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky.

The great poet of the age was Alexander Blok, a Symbolist who came of age prior to the flourishing of the great generation of Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak.

The outbreak of the war found Pasternak on the Oka, a river eighty miles south of Moscow, and in his letters of this time, his descriptions of the people's grief foreshadow his later prose and verse. Pasternak could not serve in the army; a childhood falls from a horse, leaving him with one leg shorter than the other. 

He spent much of the time between 1914 and 1917 as a clerk at a chemical works to the far east of Moscow. His prolonged period away from the city was a productive one for him. Pasternak composed two volumes of verse during the war years. One was destroyed by fire in 1915. The other was published in 1917 as Over the Barriers.