Темы и вариации Чайковского: к интерпретации цикла “Зимнее утро” Бориса Пастернака

Abstract

The article presents a reading of the cycle “Winter Morning” (“Zimnee utro”) from Boris Pasternak’s fourth book of poetry, Themes and Variations (Temy i variatsii, 1923). The cycle is constructed from variations on the images and motifs of predecessors, both poets and musicians, including Aleksandr Pushkin, Vasilii Zhukovskii, Apollon Maikov, Aleksandr Blok, and Petr Tchaikovskii and his Children’s Album. This analysis of the text – at the level of its lexical, rhythmic and syntactic features – demonstrates the profound convergence of music and poetry, the interweaving of literary and musical allusions, and the inclusion of contemporary experience into the course of history as basis for the creative transformation of the world in Pasternak’s poetics. With this analysis, we demonstrate why and how lyrical poetry functions as a key source for the reconstruction of the poet’s political, cultural-historical, conceptual, and spiritual views.