Boris Pasternak's My Sister-Life

You have a book in you," said Charents, listening to M.'s poems about Armenia. (This was in Tiflis-in Erivan he would not have dared to come see us.) M. was very pleased by these words: "Perhaps he's right-I may really have a book in me." A few years later, at M.'s request, I took a sheaf of his Voronezh poems to Pasternak, who, after looking at them, suddenly spoke of the "miracle of a book in the making." With him, he said, it had happened only once in his life, when he wrote "My Sister Life." I told M. about this conversation and asked: "So a collection of verse doesn't always make a book?" M. just laughed

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