Selected Poems is not a single publication but a concept that Pasternak revisited several times during his career — the idea of gathering his best work into a volume that would represent him as he wished to be represented. The most significant Russian selection appeared in 1946, when Pasternak prepared a volume of selected verse that was approved for publication but then effectively suppressed during the Zhdanov crackdowns on Soviet culture. English-language selections have appeared in numerous editions, the most important being the translations by Henry Kamen (1946), the Penguin selection translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (1983), and the comprehensive selection translated by Richard McKane and others.
Pasternak was a ruthless self-editor. He repudiated much of his early work, including poems from A Twin in the Clouds (1914) and Above the Barriers (1917) that other poets would have been proud to claim. His self-criticism was not false modesty but a genuine conviction that his early style — brilliant, complex, sometimes obscure — had been a wrong turning, and that the simpler, more direct voice he achieved in his later work was closer to what poetry should be.
The selected poems, in whatever edition, reveal the arc of Pasternak’s development: from the dazzling metonymic experiments of My Sister, Life, through the attempted simplification of Second Birth, the silence of the 1930s, the wartime lyrics of On Early Trains, and finally the Zhivago poems, which represent Pasternak’s ultimate achievement — poetry of such limpid clarity that its extraordinary depth reveals itself only on rereading.
Collecting Selected Poems
Market values vary significantly by edition:
- Early Soviet editions (1930s–1940s): $200–$1,000
- English translations (Penguin, 1983): $10–$30
- Signed copies of any edition: Significant premium