We were music in the ice…’ – this is how Pasternak described the fate of the generation that in the twenties had to ‘move from lyric poetry to epic poetry’. It was then that he created great works, thoroughly imbued with the revolutionary element: the poems ‘High Disease’, ‘The Year Nine Hundred and Fifth’, ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’. The time demanded an epic genre, and Pasternak accepted this challenge. But ‘music in the ice’ – lyric poetry, ‘high disease’, the need for an ‘individual story’ – lived all this time in the maturing novel in verse ‘Spektorsky’.