Alexander Zholkovsky

The Window in the Poetic World of Boris Pasternak

F WE ASK OURSELVES in what pose it is most natural to imagine the figure of the poet who emerges from Pasternaks verses, or against what kind of background one ought to paint an ideal portrait of him, or against what kind of back cloth the action of his poems unfolds and the creative work of the poet himself unfolds, then one of the most suitable answers would probably be: by a window. The words quoted in the epigraph are about Pushkin, but essentially this is a poetic self-portrait of Pasternak himself. It is typical of him himself to list objects and to divide them into objects of the external world and objects of everyday use which exist for him on an equal footing and which enter into contact with each other. It is Pasternak himself who loves to depict various situations of the contact between the street and the room