I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography (Russian: Avtobiografichesky ocherk) was written in 1957 and published in English by Pantheon Books in 1959, appearing in Russian only in émigré publications. Pasternak wrote it as a replacement for Safe Conduct, which he had come to regard as too ornate, too self-consciously literary. Where Safe Conduct is a young man’s book — brilliant, dense, showing off — I Remember is an old man’s book: calm, generous, and possessed of a clarity that comes from having survived everything the twentieth century could throw at a Russian intellectual.
The autobiography covers much of the same ground as Safe Conduct — childhood, Scriabin, Marburg, Mayakovsky — but the treatment is entirely different. Pasternak writes about Tolstoy (whom his painter father knew), about Rilke (who visited the Pasternak household when Boris was a child), about the literary world of pre-revolutionary Moscow, and about his own development as a poet with a warmth and specificity that the earlier book, for all its brilliance, lacked.
The final sections, dealing with the writing and publication of Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel Prize affair, are restrained to the point of understatement. Pasternak does not dramatize his persecution — he simply notes what happened and moves on, as though the Soviet literary establishment’s attempt to destroy him were a weather event: unpleasant but ultimately insignificant compared to the work itself.
Collecting I Remember
First edition in English (Pantheon Books, New York, 1959): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100