In the Certificate of Financial Status, an autobiographical essay I had written in the 1920s, I analyzed the circumstances of my life that shaped me. Unfortunately, the book was spoiled by useless affectation, a widespread sin of those years. In this present draft, I will not avoid partially reproducing it, although I will try not to repeat myself.

In his brief Autobiography, a draft he completed in 1957, Boris Pasternak presents snapshots of his life from his early years, when as a small child he lived with his parents at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Moscow where his painter father taught, his memories and thoughts about important intellectual figures, from Scriabin to Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sergei Yesenin, his meetings with great Georgian poets when he traveled to Georgia with his second wife, and those who influenced, already from his adolescence, the artistic development and evolution of this great Russian.
Before the reader's eyes, an entire world comes alive before and after the October Revolution, before and after the two world wars.
Pasternak, with the sensitivity and insight of the poet-novelist, offers in an exceptionally poetic way precious moments from his difficult life in the first half of the 20th century.