On Early Trains (Russian: Na rannikh poezdakh) was published in 1943, during the Second World War. It was Pasternak’s first collection of original poetry in over a decade. Through the late 1930s, Pasternak had effectively stopped writing original verse — the terror of the Great Purge, during which many of his friends and fellow poets were arrested or killed, made silence seem the only safe course. He survived by translating: Shakespeare’s tragedies, Goethe’s Faust, Georgian poetry. The translations were brilliant — Pasternak’s Hamlet became the standard Russian version — but they were also a form of exile from his own voice.
The war changed everything. Pasternak was evacuated with other writers to Chistopol, a small city on the Kama River, and the experience of sharing wartime hardship with ordinary Russians reconnected him to a sense of purpose. The poems in On Early Trains reflect this reconnection: they are about commuter trains, wartime Moscow, the Russian landscape in winter, and the quiet courage of people enduring privation. The style is stripped bare — no more metonymic chains, no more dazzling leaps of association. The poems speak directly, and their emotional effect is more powerful for the directness.
The title poem describes a predawn train journey from Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino into Moscow, shared with workers, soldiers, and women going to market. It is a poem about community — about the simple fact of being among one’s people — and it carries an emotional weight that comes from Pasternak’s years of isolation.
Collecting On Early Trains
First edition (Sovetsky Pisatel, Moscow, 1943): Softcover, wartime production.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $800–$2,000
- Very good: $300–$800