Это ведь только в плохих книжках живущие разделены на два лагеря и не соприкасаются. А в действительности все так переплетается! Каким непоправимым н… - Boris Pasternak

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

"To Be the Famous..."

To be the famous isn’t attractive,
Not this could ever elevate,
You needn’t to make your archive active,
You needn’t your scripts to be all saved.

Self-offering’s aimed by creation,
But ballyhoo or cheap success,
It is a shame, if worthless persons
Are talks of towns’ populace.

But you’ve to live without phony,
To live such life that, after all,
To gain love of the space symphony,
And answer to the future’s call,

And oft to leave gaps in your traces
In fate, but in the papers, crooked,
To mark the chapters and main places
On margins of your being’s book,

To fully sink in the unknown,
And hide in it your own steps
Like hide itself, if mist is grown,
The whole landscape of the place.

The others, by the living traces,
Will pass your way through, bit by bit,
But wins and losses of your battles
You have not to discern on it.

You’ve never – not by fate or folly –
To lose an atom of your face,
But – be alive, alive and only,
Alive and only, till your last.

February
Boris Pasternak

It's February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it, sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.

Six grivnas* for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where drizzles fall
Louder than any ink or tears

Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.

A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.

*Grivna: a unit of currency.