Customer Reviews

Zhenia's Childhood

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One thing which you perhaps shouldn't have in mind when reading this book, is the strange idea of Pasternak's that men are poets by making poetry, while women are poets by making children, as that could disturb your sympathy with the author.
On the other hand, that is exactly what this book is about.
Pasternak's concept of what discerns poets from other people, is that the poet fights to understand the world, while other people don't really care, or have been given all the answers already.

As Zhenia, the heroine of this book, enters her puberty, she has to learn to understand a world that doesn't help her much in her struggle. She has to learn why she should be ashamed of her menstruation, and why no one wants her to know about her mother's miscarriage. Not until she realises the connection between the both - that she, like her mother, can bear children - Zhenia is able to mature into a complete human being.

And just as Zhenia's pubertal existence is like a fever haze, Pasternak's writing is as fascinatingly hard to get a firm hold of. The modernist he is, he has in his writing dissolved all the 'solid patches' of conventional prose.