Boris Pasternak and Silver Age Intellectual Culture: From Modernist Aesthetics to the New Classical

Abstract

ABSTRACT Boris Pasternak is a key figure in the history of twentieth-century Russian culture. The artistic originality of his poetry and prose has been the subject of fruitful discussion within literary theory and history, the phrase “the poetry of Pasternak” has been interpreted as a culturological concept, and the novel Doctor Zhivago has been recognized as perhaps the most significant work of Russian literature of the last century. This article examines the issues related to Pasternak’s inheriting of the values and meanings of Russian classical culture, which became a focus of polemics among Russian émigré intellectuals. The author argues that Pasternak inherits and masters the artistic language of modernism (as a complex result of intertwining of Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism), yet in the process of his development as literati he clearly overcomes the aesthetic attitudes of modernism, eventually arriving at a new version of the classical. Pasternak’s poetry and prose addresses the spiritual issues central to Russian literature. The unique interpretation and resolution of these urgent issues in the writer’s mind determines the content of his profoundly original aesthetics of creativity.