For many years, a poem allegedly written by a Nobel laureate in literature has been circulating on the Internet. We checked whether this is indeed the case.

The full poem looks like this:

To love so much that your heart skips a beat,
So that every breath is like the first time,
Just to warm up your soul
By the fire of your beloved, sweet eyes.

To love so much that in a minute of happiness
You could give your life
So that, despite all the bad weather,
Still hope and wait.

So that every glance is like a revelation,
Every kiss is like a gift from God.
To touch hair
It would start a fire in my heart.

Love so much that every desire
It was brought to life. And there are countless of them.
So that every day is like a spell
Repeat: “Thank you for existing.”

Signed by Boris Pasternak, it is actively spreading on social networks (Facebook, "VKontakte") and on sites with collections of quotes ("Pearls of thought", Socratify.net). It is read at various school and community events (e.g. Tomsk And Dzerzhinsk) and in YouTube, printed in magazines.

At first glance, the poem does not look like most of Pasternak’s works: the scarcity of images and poor rhymes (“happiness” - “bad weather”, “give” - “wait”, “not to count” - “is”) are striking in it. And the phrase “every breath is like the first time” suspiciously coincides with a line from the 1990s pop hit “I love you to tears"(performer - Alexander Serov, author of the text - Igor Nikolaev).

“Checked” did not find the specified poem in any five-volume collection (1989–1992) of Pasternak's works, nor the complete 11-volume (2003–2005). It is also not available in the accessible segment of the Google Books project.

The earliest mention of this poem found by Verified was in November 2008, when it was published on a LiveJournal user's blog. makedonsky6 without attribution. In April next year in one of publications under the poems the name of the author appeared - Roman Golubnich. There is an author with the same name and surname on the Internet, but his style, judging by selection poems on Golubnich’s personal page on the website “Stihi.ru”, is completely different. None of his works are similar to the poem attributed to Pasternak, both in size and subject matter.

Two months later, in June 2009, on the same website “Stihi.ru” there is a poem with the same first line, but different rest of the text posted poetess Galina Volenberg.

In 2015, the official blog of the Russian State Library appeared in LiveJournal. publication, dedicated to the network phenomenon of attributing the authorship of viral poems to famous poets, including Pasternak: “Where does it come from, this creeping chaos? There is where. Let's take a closer look at just one of the sources of the spread - the VKontakte page "The best poems of great poets." <...> The names of famous poets are placed under poems... to put it mildly, purged of the slightest literary merit. Some of the cited “poems by Pasternak” were published in the group many times, each time collecting a thousand or two hearts and several hundred shares. Subscribers to the page do not notice the deception and uncritically accept on faith all the materials posted by the administration. Meanwhile, the group is part of an openly commercialized “network of communities”, the organizers of which make money from advertising, including the publication of any texts and images. This is a business: any graphomaniac can become a Pasternak by paying a reasonable amount. Just 3,500 rubles, and your text begins an unstoppable march across the Internet, signed with the name of the great classic.”

Moreover, as one of the most striking examples, the authors of the post cited the poem “To love so that your heart skips a beat...”.

In the comments to the publication it was indicated that the author of the viral poem was the young poetess Elizaveta Kinchenko. Indeed, a user with that name posted this work was published on the literary website vpoetah.ru in 2013. However, earlier publications of the poem under her name could not be found, as well as other works by Elizaveta Kinchenko (perhaps this is a pseudonym). “Verified” was unable to contact her. Thus, there is no reason to assume that the popular poem “To love so that your heart skips a beat…” belongs to Pasternak. He is not in the poet’s books, and they began to attribute him to the Nobel Prize only at the turn of the 2000–2010s. The exact authorship of “Verified” could not be established; most likely, this is a little-known online poet.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons