The Philosophical Modus of Russian Literature: Boris Pasternak’s Creative Experience

Abstract

In the article, we analyze the features of B.L. Pasternak’s creative self-consciousness. From our point of view, Pasternak’s works should be reviewed in philosophy as a problem of the reception of Russian culture within the framework of inheritance of its tradition. According to our idea, creative continuity is an interiorization of the ethical and aesthetic ideals of culture. In this context it may be relevant to use the philosophical and cultural approaches to discuss the problem of continuity. This article focuses on Boris Pasternak’s ethically motivated philosophy of creativity. The writer again appealed to the “eternal” moral issues of Russian literature. On the one hand, for the modernist Pasternak, the individually unique way of life is important, even it is a weird lifestyle, which is incomprehensible and follows its own internal logic. On the other hand, he is concerned with the compilation of images and meanings of world literature and art. In this case, the appeal to the Christian tradition of Russian and European cultures as well as the practice of the translation of literary texts becomes an important tool for dialogue with the past, its philosophical and spiritual cognition. Therefore, when we identify the features of the poet’s creative self-consciousness, we should note the combination of radical innovation and protective traditionalism as well as the special way of synthesizing the new and the old. These peculiarities create a unique artistic style of utterances of Pasternak as a modern writer. His poetry and prose reaches a high literary and philosophical generalization level, and it can claim to be an author’s version of the philosophy of creativity, which has its own aesthetic language expression.