This hand-made book illustrates my favorite poem of Russian poet Boris Pasternak  “In everything I seek to grasp…”

When I need to describe myself (as a person or as a professional) I can do this with the words of this poem.  This is the main thing that I can say about myself.  The image which is inextricably linked with this poem for me is a tree.  In nature, in life, everything grows and evolves from the bottom up, from small to large. But man, to understand the essence of things, should go in reverse order: from the surface to the depth. So I wanted to illustrate the story of the search for meaning, told by Boris Pasternak. Therefore, my tree lives according to the laws of that search, and not by the laws of nature: not grows from the bottom up but from the top to the roots.

 

In everything I seek to grasp

The fundamental:

The daily choice, the daily task,

The sentimental.

 

To plumb the essence of the past,

The first foundations,

The crux, the roots, the inmost hearts,

The explanations.

 

And, puzzling out the weave of fate,

Events observer,

To live, feel, love and meditate

And to discover.