Leonid Krol read for us a book by Dmitry Bykov «Boris Pasternak».
“The brilliant “Pasternak” by Dmitry Bykov is a documented reliable, detailed book that tells almost more about its author than about its hero. Having taken up such a global topic as the biography of the great poet, Bykov, accustomed to being in the center of attention himself, seems to be undergoing a kind of psychological training that allows him to look at himself through the prism of someone else’s life, move away from momentary worries and free himself from the stupid fuss, which — voluntarily or no — his (and not only his — ours!) life abounds.
The desire to be reflected in the mirror of precisely Pasternak’s fate seems to play a special role for the author. Plunging into the vicissitudes of his biography, Bykov seems to be tasting various options for realizing his creativity, exploring various possibilities for resisting the temptations of life, and most importantly, ways for the individual to survive in society. And in this capacity, the figure of Pasternak, with his heightened sense of life, with a tragic sense of the finiteness of being, with constant haste and sudden flashes of hope, turns out to be unusually related and close to Bykov.
Turning to the fate of Boris Leonidovich, his biographer practices spiritual asceticism, the essence of which is to write not about himself, but about others. That is why there are so many secondary characters in the book — friends, lovers, enemies and simply contemporaries of the poet, who appear through the darkness of non-existence, gain flesh, and then again dissolve into the shadows. Thus, Bykov not only looks closely at real people, but also lives fully in time with their hearts and concerns.
So it seems that by concentrating on other people’s destinies, looking for parallels in them with his own, Dmitry Bykov consciously achieves the internal goals that almost every thinking person tends to strive for: to achieve clarity and clarity of sight, to gain the opportunity to calmly realize what excites him in reality. Not allowing himself to speak openly on the eternal and somewhat banal topics of interest to him — “how the soul works”, “how to survive in the surrounding rudeness” (namely, they, in my opinion, are central in his book), he creates a platform where everything In this case, one can speak in the language of metaphors and symbols, thereby again approaching his hero, who equally strived to «be like everyone else» and to acquire «an uncommon facial expression.»