SOURCE: "Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak," in Language in Literature, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 301-17.

In the essay below, which was originally published in German in 1935, Jakobson delineates how Pasternak's poetic disposition affected his prose works, lending insight into Pasternak's short fiction. Jakobson concludes, "Pasternak's prose is the characteristic prose of a poet in a great age of poetry."

Textbook categories are comfortingly simple: prose is one thing, poetry another. Nevertheless, the difference between a poet's prose and that of a prose writer, or between the poems of a prose writer and those of a poet, is very striking. A mountaineer walking in the plains can find no foothold and stumbles over the level ground. He moves either with touching awkwardness or with overemphatic artistry; in either case it is not his natural gait, but involves obvious effort and looks...