Hingley does a good job of approaching Pasternak, particularly given that Pasternak was so chary of providing evidence of his personal life. The biography was a good read, and certainly motivated me to read more of Pasternak's work. I knew a fair amount about Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva going in to reading this book and it felt like it filled in some of the missing pieces even if Pasternak is not a writer with whom I can identify in the same way. For me, the only unfortunate aspect of the book was the nagging feeling that Hingley was somehow taking sides in the veracity of the various women in Pasternak's life. It added a weird gossipy kind of tone to places. Still a commendable effort.

One thing which you perhaps shouldn't have in mind when reading this book, is the strange idea of Pasternak's that men are poets by making poetry, while women are poets by making children, as that could disturb your sympathy with the author.
On the other hand, that is exactly what this book is about.
Pasternak's concept of what discerns poets from other people, is that the poet fights to understand the world, while other people don't really care, or have been given all the answers already.

As Zhenia, the heroine of this book, enters her puberty, she has to learn to understand a world that doesn't help her much in her struggle. She has to learn why she should be ashamed of her menstruation, and why no one wants her to know about her mother's miscarriage. Not until she realises the connection between the both - that she, like her mother, can bear children - Zhenia is able to mature into a complete human being.

And just as Zhenia's pubertal existence is like a fever haze, Pasternak's writing is as fascinatingly hard to get a firm hold of. The modernist he is, he has in his writing dissolved all the 'solid patches' of conventional prose.

Pasternak's novella is more of an extended prose poem - its movement is not through narrative or character, but the flux of imagery, both observational and metaphorical. An invalided Russian soldier arrives in 1916 at a remote factory town near the Urals to stay with his married sister; he rests after the long train journey, and reminisces, or dreams, about the months preceding the outbreak of World War One, his graduation from college, his job as a tutor with a wealthy, unhappily married family, his relations with various women (his sister, his mistress, her paid companion, prostitutes).

This slight story is merely a frame on which is hung the overpowering expression of a developing artistic sensibility, as it transforms the world around it - the sights, sounds and smells; the description of storms, city streets, parks, dust-winds, snows. The language is continually, fluidly metamorphosing, in keeping with the artist's mind, so that the reader is continually jolted and carried away from thought to evocation to feeling. In this world, the human beings are passive, phantom-like, while things, objects, nature, have an active, conscious power.

Like Joyce's similar 'Portrait of the artist as a young man', this dense poetry of autobiography and bildungsroman strives towards the creation of a work of art, in this case a rather portentous drama (which is apparently devastatingly beautiful in the Russian); while the reader is always conscious of the shadows of war and Revolution (the book was published in 1934).

According to Lydia Slater in the introduction, George Reavey's translation came out at a time (1959; revised 1960) when hundreds of inferior, rushed translations were cashing in on the success of 'Doctor Zhivago' and the author's Nobel Prize refusal - she says 'it is surprising to find that some translations from Pasternak really do have something in common with the original text'. Reavey captures the density of Pasternak's language and his jarring stylistic effects, but he rarely captures that 'pure and undiluted poetry', that 'drama and lyricism' Slater finds in the original. In any case, Pasternak's illumination of the mundane and of awakening consciousness seem, to me, to lack the magic or humour of Nabokov's contemporary Russian work.