Safe Conduct (Russian: Okhrannaya gramota) was published in 1931 and is Pasternak’s first sustained work of autobiography — though “autobiography” barely describes a book that approaches its subject with the obliqueness of a poem. The narrative covers Pasternak’s youth, his studies in philosophy at Marburg, his decision to abandon music (he had trained as a composer under Scriabin), and his gradual discovery of his vocation as a poet. But the story is told in prose so compressed, so charged with metaphor and association, that reading it feels less like reading a memoir than like reading a long, intricate poem about memory itself.
The book’s three sections are organized around encounters with three figures: the composer Alexander Scriabin, whose music first awakened Pasternak’s artistic ambition; the philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose lectures at Marburg demonstrated the power of rigorous thought; and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose volcanic energy and revolutionary commitment represented everything Pasternak admired and could not emulate. The Mayakovsky section, written shortly after Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930, is an elegy that Pasternak refused to sentimentalize: he presents Mayakovsky as a genius who destroyed himself by subordinating his art to politics, a warning that Pasternak took deeply to heart.
The title — Safe Conduct — refers to a laissez-passer, a document guaranteeing safe passage. Pasternak’s “safe conduct” is art itself: the conviction that creative work provides a kind of immunity, a protected space within which the artist can survive the pressures of history. The idea would be tested to its limits in the decades that followed.
Collecting Safe Conduct
First edition (Moscow, 1931): Softcover.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $1,500–$4,000
- Very good: $500–$1,500
- English translations (various): $30–$100