My Own Deep Soul

Leo Tolstoy, by Leonid Pasternak

You, my own deep soul,
trust me. I will not betray you.
My blood is alive with many voices
telling me I am made of longing.

What mystery breaks over me now?
In its shadow I come into life.
For the first time I am alone with you—

you, my power to feel.

From The Book of Hours I, 39

Memory Is Not Enough

Black Sea with Moon, Nurse with Baby

by Leonid Pasternak 

To Lou Andreas-Salomé, Duino, late autumn, 1911

Memory is not enough...
I do not recollect. What I am
is alive in me because of you. I do not reinvent you
at sadly cooled-off places you have left behind.
Even your absence is filled
with your warmth and is more real
than your not-existing. Longing often meanders
into vagueness. Why should I throw myself away
when something in you may be
touching me, very lightly, like moonlight
on a window seat.

Uncollected Poems

To Make Sense of Things

 Boris Pasternak Writing

by Leonid Pasternak

I yearn for my work, because it always helps me make sense of things. For never was a horror experienced without an angel stepping in from the opposite direction to witness it with me.

Letter to Marianne von Goldschmidt Rothschild

December 5, 1914

What Lies Ahead

A Sunbeam, by Leonid Pasternak

Nothing alien happens to us, but only what has long been our own. We have already had to rethink so many concepts about motion; now we must also begin to learn that what we call fate comes not from outside us but from within. . . . Just as for so long we were mistaken about the movement of the sun, we are still mistaken about what lies ahead of us in time.

Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

Be Ahead of All Parting

On the Sofa, by Leonid Pasternak

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

The Panther

Pine Trees and the Sea, by Leonid Pasternak

His gaze, forever blocked by bars,
is so exhausted it takes in nothing else.
All that exists for him are a thousand bars.
Beyond the thousand bars, no world.

The strong, supple pacing
moves in narrowing circles.
It is a dance at whose center
a great will is imprisoned.

Now and again the veil over his pupils
silently lifts. An image enters,
pierces the numbness,
and dies away in his heart.

New Poems

To Be in Nature Now

Island Rügen, by Leonid Pasternak

A solitary sojourn in the country is, especially at this moment, only half real, because the sense of harmlessness in being with nature is lost to us. The influence on us of nature's quiet, insistent presence is, from the start, overwhelmed by our knowledge of the unspeakable human fate that, night and day, irrevocably unfolds.

Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé

September 9, 1914

To Praise

The Golden Autumn, by Leonid Pasternak

Praise, my dear one.
Let us disappear into praising.
Nothing belongs to us.

Uncollected Poems

(From Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efron)

Overflow

Unloading a Train Car, by Leonid Pasternak

(click to enlarge the painting)

Thus the overflow from things
pours into you.
Just as a fountain's higher basins
spill down like strands of loosened hair
into the lowest vessel,
so streams the fullness into you,
when things and thoughts cannot contain it.

From the Book of Hours II, 10

Balance

Collecting Apples, 1918, by Leonid Pasternak
(click on painting to enlarge)

Oh trees of life, when is your wintertime?
We are not in balance. Not in agreement
as migrating birds are. Late and overtaken,
we hurriedly try to catch the wind
and fall into a random swamp.
To bloom and to wilt is all the same to us.
Somewhere lions still walk the earth.
As long as their majesty endures, so does their power.

From the Fourth Duino Elegy

The Vastness of Connection

Palestine - The Heat and the Donkey, by Leonid Pasternak

Bereft of knowledge before the heavens of my life,

I stand astonished. Oh the great stars.

Their rising and their setting. How quiet.

As if I did not exist. Am I taking part? Do I discount

their pure power? Does it rule the movement

of my blood? I will yearn for no closer connections

and accustom my heart to its farthest reaches.

Better it live with the spine-chilling stars

than with the pretense of some protection hovering near.

Uncollected Poems

Our Closest Friend

Leo Tolstoy, by Leonid Pasternak

Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us. So long as we stand in opposition to Death we will disfigure it. Believe me, my dear Countess, Death is our Friend, our closest friend, perhaps the only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations. And I do not mean that in the sentimental, romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy

Epiphany, 1923

The Impermanence We Are

Moscow During the Winter, by Leonid Pasternak

It seems
our own impermanence is concealed from us.
The trees stand firm, the houses we live in
are still there. We alone
flow past it all, an exchange of air.

Everything conspires to silence us,
partly with shame,
partly with unspeakable hope.

From the Second Duino Elegy

Life's Bestowal of Riches

The Road to Clear Polyana, by Leonid Pasternak

You might notice that in some ways the effects of our winter experiences are similar. You write of a constant sense of fullness, an almost overabundance of inner being, which from the outset counterbalances and compensates all deprivations and losses that might possibly come. In the course of my work this last long winter, I have experienced a truth more completely than ever before: that life's bestowal of riches already surpasses any subsequent impoverishment. What, then, remains to be feared? Only that we might forget this! But around and within us, how much it helps to remember!

Letter to Lisa Heise

May 19, 1922

Entering

Alexander Pushkin at the Seashore, by Leonid Pasternak

Whoever you may be: step into the evening.
Step out of the room where everything is known.
Whoever you are,
your house is the last before the far-off.
With your eyes, which are almost too tired
to free themselves from the familiar,
you slowly take one black tree
and set it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence.
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,
your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Book of Images

Lifting My Eyes

Roses, by Leonid Pasternak

Lifting my eyes from the book, from the tightly sequenced lines
to the full and perfect night:
Oh how like the stars my buried feelings break free,
as if a bouquet of wildflowers
had come untied:

The upswing of the light ones, the bowing sway of the heavy ones
and the delicate ones' timid curve.
Everywhere joy in relation and nowhere grasping;
world in abundance and earth enough.

Uncollected Poems

I Choose to Begin

At the Window. Autumn. by Leonid Pasternak

I love all beginnings, despite their anxiousness and their uncertainty, which belong to every commencement. If I have earned a pleasure or a reward, or if I wish that something had not happened; if I doubt the worth of an experience and remain in my past--then I choose to begin at this very second.

     Begin what? I begin. I have already thus begun a thousand lives.

Early Journals

Welcome to A Year with Rilke

Sketch of Rilke, by Leonid Osipovic Pasternak

Daily posts will begin January 1, 2011. We hope you will enjoy Rilke's words with us.