Leonid Pasternak’s Venice (1904)

Abstract

The article (written in the genre of “intellectual area studies,” which allows to organically combine careful tracking of a specific human destiny and an accurate understanding of variable cultural and geographical contexts) examines the circumstances of the first visit to Italy in May-June 1904 by Russian artist Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (1862-1945), the father of the poet Boris Leonidovich Pasternak. Unlike the B.L. Pasternak’s “Italian journey” (1912), well known to literary scholars from the poem “Venice” (in two editions: 1913 and 1928) and the “Venetian chapters” of the memoirs Safe Conduct (1931), the details of Leonid Pasternak’s journeys to Italy (1904, 1912, 1923) remain practically unknown to researchers. The author of the article believes that the surviving materials about Leonid Pasternak’s five-day stay in Venice in 1904 make it possible to reconstruct the peculiarities of the self-identification of the artist Leonid Pasternak. The article provides numerous examples of how L.O. Pasternak, a descendant of a Russian-Jewish family from Odessa, in his memoirs and correspondence with his wife, pianist Rosalia Pasternak, emphasizes his “Odessa” identity, which has numerous parallels with the “Venetian” identity. Modern Venice appears to the “Southerner” Leonid Pasternak as an Italian analogue of his native Odessa. The author demonstrated that such self-identification of L.O. Pasternak is explained not only by the fact of his Odessa origin and long residence in a multinational South Russian city but also by the circumstances of his youth studies at the Odessa Art School, whose founders and teachers were, among others, Italian artists and sculptors, who made a great contribution to the cultural history of Odessa.