According to Yevgeny Pasternak, the writer's son, the manuscript of "The Story of a Counter-Octave" came with a bundle of odd papers his father had asked him to burn for firewood in 1945. This unfinished story was written in 1913, at about the same time as "The Twin in Clouds," and it is a companion piece to the early prose works "The Sign of Apelles" (1915) and "Letters From Tula" (1918). It tells of a church organist, Amadeus Knaur, in a fictional Hessian town of the eighteenth century who became so engrossed in his improvisations on the organ after the Whitsunday service that he never noticed how his little son, who had somehow strayed among the mechanical workings of the instrument, was crushed to death by one of its levers. Years later Knaur came back to the town, possibly by an accident of Divine Providence, and asked to be reinstated in his old job, but was indignantly rejected. No one ever saw him again.
Once Pasternak wrote in a poem: "Our significance is in what we lose." Nevertheless, this early romantic and symbolic piece has some merit as a record of the writer's developing artistic devices in prose which constitute an unbroken line leading to his great novel Doctor Zhivago. One of these is an attempt to write of people and things, of the processes of nature, of changes in light with the passing of the day and of the movement of time itself as a single living entity, as continuum without qualitative dividing marks. The result is that people with their emotions do not come through as persons but rather as poetic images. Another device, following from this, is to establish a direct and meaningful correspondence between events in nature and crucial turning points in human lives in a manner which appears to move from strange coincidence to intimations of magic or, as the critics of Doctor Zhivago used to say, o pathetic fallacy. In Pasternak's work this is not a false but a poetic logic, and one cannot say enough to emphasize the difference between the two. (p. 119)
Rimvydas Šilbajoris in World Literature Today (copyright 1977 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 51, No. 1, Winter, 1977.
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