ABSTRACT
On publication 'Safe Conduct' was indeed widely denounced for its 'idealism' and within two years Boris Pasternak was effectively silenced. 'Safe Conduct' begins with a railway journey, and the first part ends with the author travelling by rail to Germany. 'Safe Conduct' is not so much an attempt at autobiography or 'autobiographical sketch' as a history of how Pasternak became a poet, and what 'the life of a poet' actually means. As early as 1916, in the essay The Black Goblet, Pasternak was groping towards this idiosyncratic theory of time. In this essay Pasternak distinguishes between 'time' as it turns into 'history' and 'eternity' which people can never truly know but which is the particular concern of the lyric poet. It is highly appropriate, therefore, that 'Safe Conduct' should be a book that comes more and more into focus as they read it, a book that, like all great art in Pasternak's opinion, describes its own birth.
