Tao Te Ching
Boris Pasternak Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к
1890 – 1960 CE
Russia's greatest poet
Poet, translator, composer, and novelist; Pasternak wrote some of the most popular poems ever written in the Russian language. Leo Tolstoy was a close family friend and Pasternak's father illustrated his books. Other family friends included Rachmaninoff and Rainer Maria Rilke. Family connections and literary status kept him alive during the Stalin years but even during the Khrushchev era his books were censored. At great personal risk and fearing a firing squad he published Doctor Zhivago in Italy. With the support of the the British MI6 and the American CIA, the book found a wide audience, won a Nobel Prize that Pasternak was forced to reject, and initiated family persecutions that continued until Gorbachev in the 1980s. Since 2003 however, it is read by all 11th grade Russian high school students.
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Generations
The Lost Generation (1883 – 1900 CE)Unlisted Sources
A Girl from a Different World
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
LIFE magazine
Night (Ночь)
Quotes by Boris Pasternak (21 quotes)
“What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.”
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“Men who are not free... always idealize their bondage.”
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“They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise. (June 1960)”
from LIFE magazine
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“Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist,
Don't give in to sleep.
You are eternity's hostage
A captive of time.”
from Night (Ночь)
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“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”
from LIFE magazine
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“What has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example.”
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“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”
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“Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Solovyov or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.”
from A Girl from a Different World
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“People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.”
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“Man is born to live, not just to prepare to live.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing... It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view of overcoming it.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“To live life to the end is not a childish task.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“Marxism is too uncertain of its grounds to be a science. I do not know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism.”
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“As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“To run true to type is the extinction of a man, his condemnation to death. If he cannot be assigned to a category... half of what is needed is there. He is free from himself, he has acquired an atom of immortality.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, and the powers of darkness will in time be crushed by the spirit of light.”
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“Revolutions are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries.”
from Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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“If, in a bad dream, we had seen all of the horrors in store for us after the war, we should have been sorry not to see Stalin go down together with Hitler: an end to the war in favour of our allies, civilized countries with democratic traditions, would have meant a hundred times less suffering for our people than that which Stalin again inflicted on it after his victory.”
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Quotes about Boris Pasternak (3 quotes)
“Pasternak was a Russian patriot—his sense of his own historical connection with his country was very deep... This passionate, almost obsessive, desire to be thought a true Russian writer, with roots deep in Russian soil, was particularly evident in his negative feelings toward his Jewish origins.. he wished the Jews to disappear as a people.”
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“Pasternak has universal meaning, for he embodies the fight the artist and the seeker after truth must wage everywhere against official dogma and conformist pressures.”
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“Pasternak was a poet of genius in all that he did and was... I visited him almost weekly, and came to know him well. I cannot hope to describe the transforming effect of his presence, his voice and gestures.”
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