The Last Summer

The Last Summer is only 90-odd pages long in my Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1960, but it’s more than a short story. Titled Povest (A Tale) when first published in 1934, it’s not listed among Boris Pasternak’s works in the Russian edition of Wikipedia, suggesting that perhaps the original was never published in the USSR as a separate title. (As far as I can tell, that is, using Google Translate’s word сказка meaning fairy tale, fable or story). Maybe Povest was published in a journal or a collection, and only published separately as a book when it was translated in 1959 by George Reavey and published by Peter Owen in the afterglow of Pasternak’s Nobel Prize in 1959.
The first thing to say about the introduction by show more Pasternak’s sister Lydia Slater is that it’s more about legacy-building than about clarifying the story. There are a great many superlatives, and she quotes V.S. Pritchett as saying it is a concerto in prose. She says its central theme is poetry, the essence of which is the suffering woman.
Well, maybe it is. She was at Oxford in 1960, which was the year of Pasternak’s death, though I do not know whether when the book went to print he had already died (of lung cancer, see the cigar in his hand in his father’s sketch on the book’s cover?) People who read Russian may well agree with her comparison of his work with Tolstoy’s. But those of us reading the book now, knowing all the weight of Soviet history and the constraints under which he wrote, and making do with the English translation, may beg to differ. Because to me, The Last Summer seems to be—thematically—more than about poetry.
Slater’s florid assertions to protect Pasternak’s status as a great poet may be because she would have been well aware of Soviet outrage about Doctor Zhivago and the CIA’s machinations to ensure that Pasternak got the Nobel Prize. She would have known that Pasternak’s wife and daughter were vulnerable to retaliation for Dr Zhivago reaching the west (see Wikipedia re their prompt despatch to the Gulags after his death). Even from the safety of Oxford, it would have been imprudent for Slater to point out any veiled anti-Soviet allusions in The Last Summer.
And they are there, though it takes close reading to find them, in a book difficult to comprehend because it is so clouded by reminiscences loosely interwoven, cutting into each other, brilliant descriptions of people, situations, thunderstorms, and thoughts. I started it three times before I took out my journal and began making copious notes and slowly got the drift of it. By the look of the two- and three-star reviews at Goodreads, most readers struggle with it too.
The Last Summer is bookended by Serezha’s return from Moscow to his sister Natasha’s house in Ousolie in 1916, a heavily polluted salt-mining place not even granted town status until 1925. This date is significant, because it’s (prudently) before the October Revolution in 1917, but after the failed one of 1905. Natasha is depicted as having believed in the aims of the 1905 revolution and as far as she is concerned the revolution has only been postponed. Here she is:

Like all of them, Natasha believed that the most demanding cause of her youth had merely been postponed and that, when the hour struck, it would not pass her by. This belief explained all the faults of Natasha’s character. It explained her self-assurance, which was softened only by her complete ignorance of her defect. It also explained those traits of Natasha’s aimless righteousness and all-forgiving understanding, which inwardly illuminated her with an inexhaustible light and which yet did not correspond with anything in particular. (p.32)

Natasha, in other words, has no idea what she is in for. (Pasternak, writing in 1934, had by this time, seen Lenin come and go, and had time to see the Soviet state in action. Russia was becoming industrialised, the consequent crisis of agricultural distribution had failed to be ameliorated by collectivisation, and he had witnessed the acquisition of private homes and subsequent overcrowding that he writes about so well in Doctor Zhivago).
To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/07/the-last-summer-by-boris-pasternak-translate... show less

A strange novella: beautiful in places, with dream-like qualities and hence the reader is often a little lost too.

Serezha visits his sister and family in 1916 Russia. He is very tired and dreams/reminisces about his recent past, particularly his time as tutor to a rich boy and the lady's companion who was also employed there.

The meandering nature of the book is echoed by significant references to water, swimming and floating, including "washed in public notoriety" (and oxymoron?), "women... had swum to the street surface, raised by chance and attraction from non-existence". and the fact that the story Serezha tries to write opens "Then it began to rain" because "such drafts inevitably abound in water as an element".

There are also some show more striking metaphors, such as "the streets on an empty stomach were impetuously straight and surly", "her self-assurance, which was softened only by her complete ignorance of her defect" and a prostitute's rug which "with a rare show ofobeisance invited him not to stand on ceremony"!

Overall, I liked parts of it, but wasn't won over by the whole. On the other hand, it's very short, so that was fine. show less