On the horse Parsnip

John Bayley

• Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years 1930-1960 by Evgeny Pasternak
  Collins Harvill, 278 pp, £15.00, January 1990, ISBN 0 00 272045 0
• Boris Pasternak by Peter Levi
  Hutchinson, 310 pp, £17.95, January 1990, ISBN 0 09 173886 5
• Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Vol.I: 1890-1928 by Christopher Barnes
  Cambridge, 507 pp, £35.00, November 1989, ISBN 0 521 25957 6
• Poems 1955-1959 and An Essay in Autobiography by Boris Pasternak, translated by Michael Harari and Manya Harari
  Collins Harvill, 212 pp, £6.95, January 1990, ISBN 0 00 271065 X
• The Year 1905 by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Chappell
  Spenser, £4.95, April 1989, ISBN 0 9513843 0 9

A not unmalicious fellow poet once said of Pasternak that he resembled a horse: ‘the same big awkward profile and large eyes that seem to look intently without seeing anything’. The horse-faced parsnip – Pasternak means parsnip in Russian. This is very endearing. What other great poet has the bigness and animal closeness of the equine, and words that plod like hooves with such delicate precision through twigs and grasses? The girls chanting the ‘candle’ poem at his funeral must also have longed to have given him a lump of sugar? One of the best little scenes in Dr Zhivago is the doctor riding home through the Urals forest, with his slow beast undulating under him, and ‘dry volleys of sound bursting from the horse’s guts’. As some of the photos in Evgeny Pasternak’s splendid book reveal, his father looks most at home wearing massive braces over his collarless shirt, like girths and a crupper.