Books: Early Pasternak

THE LAST SUMMER (159 pp.)—Boris Pasternak, translated by George Reavey —Avon (paperbound, 50¢).

“A new novel by Nobel Prize Winner Pasternak,” trumpeted the gaily colored cover. Actually, the book was neither new nor a novel. Scarcely longer than a long short story, The Last Summer was first published in Leningrad 25 years ago, some two decades before Doctor Zhivago was written. Last year, with a shorter introduction (soso) and in the same translation (first-rate), the story appeared in the U.S. in a collection of poems and articles entitled Noonday 1. It sold an unexciting 10,000 copies. With a bustling campaign of come-on ads and a first printing of 250,000, Avon hopes to do better and tap the rich Zhivago market, now nearing the 1,000,000 mark.

Anyone who found the first 75 pages of Doctor Zhivago heavy going will find The Last Summer no easier. It is told in the same crosscutting flashbacks, as if unrelated strips of film were spliced together to achieve a unity of mood rather than magic. The time is 1916, and Russia is in the midst of war. The hero, Serezha, has come to visit his sister, and soon falls asleep. In a kind of Proustian reverie, he sleepwalks through events of the past—particularly through the fatefully serene prewar summer of 1914, which the young Pasternak nostalgically calls “that last summer when life appeared to pay heed to individuals, and when it was easier and more natural to love than to hate.”

Some of the episodes are clearly autobiographical. Like Serezha, for instance, Author Pasternak was once a tutor in the home of a well-to-do merchant. As a tutor, Serezha is plagued less by his duties than by the drives of his own masculinity. He has tortured Platonic talkfests with Anna Arild, companion to the mistress of the house; Anna is a strait-laced Danish widow who interprets Serezha’s every comment as a prelude to seduction. Finally, sexual tension drives him into the arms of the town prostitute, a “hoarse beauty” of an earthiness so casual that, “while standing in a nightshirt with her back to Serezha and answering him over her shoulder, she quite shamelessly and unashamedly made water in the tin basin.”

Shuttling between carnal and romantic love, Serezha discovers a passion more powerful than either: writing. In a scene of almost comic Victorian romanticism, complete with smelling salts and kneeling suitor, Anna Arild rejects Serezha, and the young writer is free to pursue the hard mastery of his craft. Boris Pasternak himself did not attain that mastery until he wrote Doctor Zhivago. Despite its vivid imagery, lyricism and passion for the individual. The Last Summer is an apprentice work.