SOURCE: "Pasternak's Short Fiction," in Russian Literature Triquarterly, Vol. 3, May, 1972, pp. 279-302.

In the following excerpt, Mossman outlines Pasternak's "prose vision, " discussing thematic and stylistic aspects of Pasternak's short fiction. Mossman notes in particular Pasternak's focus on history, the individual, causality, estrangement, and the relationship between art and reality.

The period in Soviet literature stretching from the Revolution through the 1920s represents a prolonged coming of age, both for the literature itself and for many of the writers taken in the context of their literary biographies. Following the culminai poetic tradition of Symbolism, writers sought their voice in prose. In alarm the poetic world took notice of the shift toward prose. The magnitude of historical events seemed to draw the artist away from poetry toward a regenerated tradition of prose realism.

Boris Pasternak's poetry of the 1910s, formally accomplished and innovative, seldom escapes a certain prankishness, the obscurance...