" It is not a young man’s response, which was more what we expected, but that of an elderly man of letters, which is all the more significant, perhaps, because it shows us the unexpected direction taken by Pasternak on his interior journey in his long period of silence. This last survivor of the Westernising, avant-garde poets of the 1920s has not detonated in the ‘thaw’ a display of stylistic fireworks long held in reserve; after the end of the dialogue with the international avant-garde, which had been the natural space for his poetry, "

― Italo Calvino , Why Read the Classics?