Notes

Boris Pasternak, Letters, “INTERPRETATION,” The New Yorker, June 24, 1996, p. 110

It is every critic's right to detail the impression produced on him by a work of art--in his preferred or customary manner... But I don't believe that the peripheral details of interpretation are as important as Mr. Wilson thinks. Rather, their relative unimportance has a special, deliberate meaning for me. This unimportance is central to my language--the real tongue of my thought.
.. .
I was attracted by the unusualness of the usual. The supreme pleasure consists in capturing the taste of reality, in successfully rendering the atmosphere of being. Which is the ambience, the surrounding whole, the total environment.
But there is a paradox. While I pondered the problem of capturing this sense of circumambient reality in art, the outcome was , if not diametrically opposed to the masterpieces of the 19th century, ay least significantly different from them.
My sense of reality--the whole--has always been this: that there is a purpose, an end...a reached sending... Whatever the cause, reality has been for me like a sudden, unexpected arrival that is intensely welcome. I have always tried to reproduce this sense of being sent, of being launched.
...
Behind and beyond all these highlighted and emphasized trifles (even in their sharpened magic), and in addition to the described human fates and historical events, there is an effort in my novels to represent the whole sequence (facts, beings, happenings) as a great moving entity... a developing, passing, rolling, rushing inspiration. As if reality itself had freedom of choice... Hence the reproach that my characters were insufficiently realized. Rather than delineate, I was trying to efface them. Hence the frank arbitrariness of the "coincidences." Here I wanted to show the unrestrained freedom of life, its very verisimilitude contiguous with improbability...