In the Certificate of Assets, an autobiographical essay I had written in the 1920s, I analyzed the circumstances of my life that shaped me. Unfortunately, the book was marred by unnecessary sophistication, a generalized sin of those times. In the present draft I will not avoid partial reproduction of it, although I will try not to repeat myself.
In his short Autobiography, a draft he completed in 1957, Boris Pasternak presents snapshots of his life from his early years, when as a young child he lived with his parents at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow where his painter father taught, his memories and thoughts about important intellectual figures, from Scriabin to Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sergei Yesenin, his meetings with great Georgian poets when he traveled to Georgia with his second wife, and who influenced, already from his adolescence, the artistic development and evolution of this great Russian.
Before the reader's eyes, an entire world comes to life before and after the October Revolution, before and after the two world wars.
Pasternak, with the sensitivity and penetration of a poet and prose writer, documents in an exceptionally poetic manner precious moments from his difficult life in the first half of the 20th century.