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“As a Giftl …” Zhivago, The Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Rosette C. Lamont
Rosette C. Lamont*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing 67, New York
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Extract

An art critic in defining recently the special quality of an artist built up on Aristotle when he said, “The difference between an animal and a plant is that the animal throws off its young while the plant simply grows new buds upon the same stalk. The artist is an animal, not a plant.” One of the central themes of Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, is the peculiar need of the artist to eject the product of his creation. The act is life-giving, intimate, and personal, yet at the same time free and objective.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 5 , December 1960 , pp. 621 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 “Legend and Symbol in Dr. Zhivago,” The Nation, 25 April 1959, 364–373.

2 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (Univ. of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1959). The Russian text. All translations of the poems are my own.

3 Doctor Zhivago (Pantheon: New York, 1958), p. 10.

4 Nicola Chiaromonte, “Pasternak's Novel,” The Partisan Review, xxv (Winter, 1958), 130.

5 Paul Eluard, Choix de Poèmes (Gallimard, Paris, 1941), p. 98.

6 Claude Vigée, “Contemporary French Poetry,” The Partisan Review, xxv (Winter, 1958), 64.

7 Luke ix. 44.