ABSTRACT
Tsvetayeva was among those who hastened to welcome its appearance, launching the superb, frenzied eulogy of Pasternak contained in her essay Cloudburst of Light. Pasternak entered literature as a loose adherent of Russian Futurism — a movement that embraced a wide variety of poets without combining them on a common platform. Pasternak added to these reservations a distaste for the public strutting and flamboyancy — the carrot buttonholes, the cheeks painted with flowers, the outrageous garb — cultivated by the more strictly orthodox among his fellow Futurists. He was not much given, as many of them were, to that most bourgeois of activities: shocking the bourgeoisie. In accordance with this policy, the militant eccentricities of Futurism gradually disappeared from Pasternak’s work over the years. They are more prominent in his first collection than in the second, and there are still fewer of them in the third.
