ABSTRACT
The lyrics written by Pasternak from 1956 onwards have remarkable unity as reflections of his mood, and it is not surprising that he wished to publish them as a collection. Akhmatova explained that she had comforted him by saying that, even if he had written nothing in the last ten years, he would still remain one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. If one now turns from the issue of poetry versus prose to consider Pasternak's prose fiction in isolation, while seeking to establish the relative merits of the pre-1940 and the post-1940 periods, his greater strength seems to be displayed in the second. The appalling serf-based tyranny of Nicholas, which forms the background of Blind Beauty's Prologue, must at some level of the author's consciousness have been equated with the still more appalling slave state instituted by Stalin and only partially demolished under Stalin's successors.
