In an uncollected letter to TS Eliot, Pasternak explores their shared aesthetic in ambitiously faulty English. His vocabulary is exceptionally wide, and his intellect has a pronounced metaphysical cast. Pasternak's work is also difficult because his mind-set is unpredictably complex, evocatively associative, synaesthetic and polysemous. Beside Pasternak's name, Stalin reputedly scribbled the instruction "Don't touch this cloud-dweller". This time, the sentence for Mandelstam's anti-Stalinist poem was a mild form of exile – but in the great purge of 1937 he was one of the 44,000 liquidated. Fortunately, Stalin was too impatient to understand, and cut off the call. Questioning a homicidal despot's power to his face carries some risks. When Stalin startled the life out of him with a "friendly" midnight phone-call – Well? What can you say about that poem of Mandelstam's? – Pasternak replied with a deflective discussion of what was, for him, the fundamental issue of human right over life and death. In his increasingly difficult times, it also became safer not to be easily understood. His work is notoriously hard to translate. As a public speaker he was incomprehensible. In the 30s a Soviet cartoon turned him into a long-jawed sphinx, paws curled over a lectern. T he Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once said that Boris Pasternak looked like an Arab and his horse.
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