Pasternak's My Sister, Life transformed Russian poetry

Person: Boris Pasternak
Lived: 1890–1960
Field: Poetry and fiction
From: Russian

The story

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 into a cultured, assimilated Jewish family. His father, Leonid, was a celebrated painter who illustrated Tolstoy's novels, and his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist. Visitors to their home included Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Rilke. Inspired by Scriabin, Pasternak first trained as a composer, then studied philosophy at the University of Marburg in Germany under Hermann Cohen before deciding to devote himself to poetry.

Unable to serve in the First World War because a childhood fall from a horse had left one leg shorter than the other, he spent much of 1914 to 1917 working at a chemical plant in the Urals. After the February Revolution of 1917 he returned to Moscow. In the summer that followed, between the two revolutions and in the middle of an unhappy love affair, he wrote the poems that became My Sister, Life.

In the chaos that followed, publishing became almost impossible, so the poems reached readers through recitals in literary cafés and copies passed around in manuscript. The book was finally published in Berlin in 1922. Its striking alliterations, wild rhythms and everyday vocabulary, with hidden echoes of Pushkin, Lermontov, Rilke and the German Romantics and of Kant's philosophy, made love, nature and weather seem to speak at once. Nothing in Russian verse sounded quite like it.

The collection immediately placed Pasternak among the leading writers of his time. It revolutionised Russian poetry, made him a model for younger poets, and decisively changed the work of Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva and others. Both Soviet writers and émigrés abroad praised it as pure, unbridled inspiration.

My Sister, Life remains one of the landmarks of twentieth-century poetry. The lyric gift it revealed runs through all of Pasternak's later work, from his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe to the poems of Yuri Zhivago that close Doctor Zhivago, and it was central to the Nobel Prize he received in 1958, which cited his achievement in contemporary lyrical poetry.

Why it matters

My Sister, Life renewed the language of Russian poetry and shaped the work of a whole generation of poets.

About Boris Pasternak

Russian poet and author of Doctor Zhivago, smuggled to the West in 1957, who was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature and forced by the Soviet state to decline it.

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Boris Pasternak

1890–1960 · Poetry and fiction

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