On Life and Death (Pasternak’s <i>Safe Conduct</i>)

Abstract

The article analyzes B.L. Pasternak’s Safe Conduct. In this work, the poet comprehends the crisis events of his own life in the trinity of professional aspirations: music, philosophy, and poetry. Conceptual ideas, an attempt to create an aesthetic theory, a theory of culture, political journalism permeate both the poetic and prosaic works of Pasternak. The autobiographical work Safe Conduct is a kind of legal document certifying a person’s individual right to his own past or present life, protecting them also from the state. The Marburg period of Pasternak’s life, marked by his studies with the famous neo-Kantian H. Cohen, contributed to the formation of his inner personal experience, his interrogative attitude to the world. Pasternak’s philosophical position is the desire for liberation from any requirements of environment, for metaphysical freedom, for staying in a state of vision of the whole. The leitmotif of his poetry and his philosophy in poetry is an appeal to the beginning. At the point of beginning, where there is nothing yet, one has to find logic, at this point one cannot consider himself either a poet or a philosopher. Here is stored the moment that poetry longs for, the poetry can only be “random” poetry, the poetry that is only now arising, that is “inhibited in the speech of herbs or in the slip of the tongue of an unexpected conversation.” The idea of the beginning allows Pasternak to understand life as the life of a poet as well as to identify this beginning in each person. This suggests that the truth itself is a lyrical truth, the uniqueness and foundation of that truth are “immeasurable greater than myself and than the poetical conceptions surrounding me,” this truth contributes to the process when a person in his life impulse turns into an image.