Second Birth (Russian: Vtoroe rozhdenie) was published in 1932 and represents a deliberate break in Pasternak’s poetic development. The “second birth” of the title is both personal — his new marriage to Zinaida Neuhaus, his discovery of the Caucasus — and artistic: a conscious attempt to abandon the dense, metaphor-saturated style of My Sister, Life in favor of a plainer, more direct idiom that he hoped would reach a wider audience.
The collection is uneven — some poems achieve a luminous simplicity that rivals Pushkin, while others feel strained, as though Pasternak were forcing himself into a register that did not come naturally. The Georgian poems are the collection’s strongest: Pasternak’s encounters with the landscapes and cultures of Georgia and Armenia produced some of the most vivid travel poetry in Russian literature. The love poems to Zinaida are tender but less inventive than the earlier love poetry — the price of simplicity, perhaps, or the difference between the passion of an affair and the contentment of a marriage.
The political context is inescapable. By 1932, Soviet literary doctrine was moving rapidly toward Socialist Realism — the demand that literature serve the state by depicting heroic workers and the triumph of socialism. Pasternak’s turn toward simplicity was partly an attempt to accommodate this demand without surrendering his artistic integrity entirely. The accommodation was temporary: within a few years, Pasternak would fall silent as a poet, entering the “deaf-mute” period of the late 1930s and 1940s during which he survived by translating Shakespeare.
Collecting Second Birth
First edition (Federatsiya, Moscow, 1932): Softcover.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $1,000–$3,000
- Very good: $400–$1,000