Love, Death and Creation: Boris Pasternak and Two Rilke Requiems

Abstract

Boris Pasternak's lifelong admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is well known and has been documented in his published correspondence and the autobiographical memoirs Okhrannaia Gramota and Liudi i polozheniia. His translations of Rilke's Requiem fur Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth and Requiem fur eine Freundin may be seen as expressions of this admiration; however, Pasternak's translations of Rilke reflect far more complicated motives than simple homage to a beloved poet's craft.2 In the late 1920s and early thirties Rilke became for Pasternak a touchstone in the evolution of his own public and private persona. Through the Rilke translations Pasternak speaks of the pressures of life and especially byt on creative people, of the growing political pressures on literature, and of his gradual realization that in Soviet Russia the price of creativity may be death. Pasternak also understood that Rilke had consciously constructed his private life-his relationships with women, his insistence upon solitude-so as to serve his art. During these years Pasternak came to realize that he faced the same life dilemmas as the older poet and attempted to follow his example, or at least to justify his actions and needs by invoking the Rilkean model. This essay will discuss the nature and implications of the Rilkean presence in Pasternak's Okhrannaia Gramota, Rekviem, Po odnoi podruge Rekviem and Stikhi moi, begom, begom. Because life and art meet and intertwine in Pasternak's turning to Rilke, my analysis will draw alternately upon Pasternak's letters, memoirs, the relevant Rilke and Pasternak texts and their external referents. When the pianist Mariia Iudina asked Boris Pasternak to translate some Rilke poems for her students in December 1928, he refused: Peqb mia o nepeBoxe HeCKOJIbKHX cTHXOTBOpeHHH Hi3 'Studenbuch,' H X ei oTKa3aJI, noTOMy ITO 6biJI 3aHIT, a KpOMe Toro H aoJIr CBOH naMATHI Rilke HcnojHAio B pyroM coBceM nniaHe,