Twenty Minutes - Pasternak and Creativity

John Rowe reads Evening by Boris Pasternak - a prose poem about a young poet found among other unfinished jottings long after the writer's death and translated for the first time into English by Angela Livingstone, research professor at Essex University. Written in Moscow in 1910, nearly 40 years before Doctor Zhivago, Evening bears the influences of the impressionist paintings of Pasternak's father as well as the Symbolist movement in Russian poetry. It centres on a poet named Reliquimini - Latin for 'you are left behind' - and is said to suggest compassion for the things of the inanimate world which are neglected.