SOURCE: "Pasternak and the New Russian Prose," in Pasternak: A Critical Study, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 84-97.

In the excerpt below, in which he discusses stylistic and thematic aspects of Pasternak's short fiction, Gifford claims there is a strong thematic relationship between Pasternak's verse and fiction, and that this fiction is often characterized by a focus on artistic and childlike sensibilities.

I

When in 1923 [Evgeny] Zamyatin surveyed the 'new Russian prose' [in his Litsa] he reserved consideration of Pasternak to the end, after making shrewd and often merciless comment on the Proletkult writers, on the Serapion Brothers (to whom, with Shklovsky, he had acted as mentor—they included Mikhail Zoshchenko and Vsevolod Ivanov), and on Pilnyak and Leonov. 'Pasternak', he observed,

has chosen the most difficult but also the most promising path: this is a writer entirely by himself [bez rodu i plemeni] . . . The change [sdvig], the novelty...