Doctor Zhivago Research Articles

The Gospel Text and Its Role in the Formation of the Literary Plot (The Idiot by F. M. Dostoevsky and Doctor Zhivago by B. L. Pasternak)

The analysis of any literary text containing biblical motifs has repeatedly attracted the attention of researchers. The purpose of this article is to examine the gospel plot, highlight its invariant properties and find out how F. M. Dostoevsky and B. L. Pasternak use archetypal motifs that allow these images to fit into the Christo-centric structure of both works. This structure is based on associations related to the relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene and the forming complex of motifs: beauty, fall, suffering, spiritual transformation and resurrection for a new life. In addition to such archetypal motifs, both authors use motifs that go beyond the scope of the evangelical text, including the motifs of childlike innocence, light and the railway, which set the main coordinates of the formation of heroes. Hence, it is shown that the interaction of two groups of motifs provides the dynamics of the development of the literary plot of the novels The Idiot and Doctor Zhivago.

Urnov, D. (2021). Literature as life (2 vols). Moscow: Izd. Sabashnikovykh. (In Russ.)

The 2-volume book of personal recollections, literary memoirs, immediate reactions of a literary critic and thoughtful opinions of a scholar covers a greater part of the second half in 20th-c. Russia. In agreement with the promise in the book’s title, literature was more than part-time, it was life itself, books as real as people, sometimes even more real. The author is with them who love classical Russian and English literature and is very strict on others whose tastes are being shown off as radically modernist or avant-garde. Pushkin and Shakespeare are the objects of the academic study and eternal fellow-travellers for the author who rejects Joyce with Ulysses , Pasternak with Doctor Zhivago , and Bunin with Dark Avenues [ Tyomnye allei ], presumably not on any political or moral reason but primarily as the books badly written. Urnov’s own book is sincere when the author speaks about his position in life and literature, and it will stay as an opinionated commentary to the time partly gone, partly going on.

Boris Pasternak's Letter to a Lovelorn Oklahoman

Boris Pasternak's Letter to a Lovelorn Oklahoman Todd Fuller (bio) and Nicolas Pasternak Slater (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution leonid pasternak, boris beside the baltic at mereküla (1910), oil on canvas In August 2021 University of Oklahoma alumnus Ron K. Jones donated a letter that he had received in 1959 from Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) to OU Libraries' Western History Collections. In October 1958 Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but, under pressure from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Union of Soviet Writers, declined to accept it. WLT is proud to publish Pasternak's 1959 letter here for the first time along with a note by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Mr. Pasternak's nephew. From Peredelkino, Russia, to Norman, Oklahoma In the spring of 1959, as the Cold War raged between the former Soviet Union (present-day Russia) and the United States, two strangers, who shared a common bond, exchanged letters. One stranger, Ron Jones, was a brokenhearted young man who would soon graduate with a business degree from the University of Oklahoma. The other, Boris Pasternak, was (by this time) an oppressed poet, writer, and translator of great literary renown. The bond they shared was the epic novel, Doctor Zhivago, which Pasternak completed in the mid-1950s, had smuggled out of the Soviet Union by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1956, and published in 1957. Upon its release, the novel was translated into numerous languages, including English. Ron Jones was fascinated by the novel because a young woman he was dating constantly raved about the book. To impress her, he read it numerous times. Though they were scheduled to attend a spring dance at his fraternity, she was not impressed and broke off the date. As a result, Ron grabbed his typewriter, locked himself in the women's restroom at the Phi Delt house (this after taping an "out of order" sign on the door), and wrote an impassioned letter to the author of Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak's response to Ron's letter specifically demonstrates the author's contempt for those literary critics attempting to impose various meanings and symbols onto the novel. [End Page 20] May 4th, 1959 MY DEAR RONNY K. JONES, may good fortune always and everywhere accompany you in your life, as you have had it with me; here is my answer you desired and dreamed of. Your fellow students are right in many respects. Not all written letters from me and to me reach their goal, not all arrived letters am I able to read to the end, especially the handwritten and the long ones, rare and very few of them have I time and possibility to reply. So much the more will I profit by the transient opportunity of […] writing to you to say in passing some casual truths. I read praising eulogistic English articles on "Dr. Zh," searching after separate hidden senses behind each word of the novel, suspecting deep symbols in every small, insignificant and shallow detail; making whole allegorical constructions out of such, obtained in that way comments, ascribed to the text. It is an error, a deplorable, measureless exaggeration. The main property or feature of the book is the flow of astonishment, of the novelty and singularity of the usual, that permeates the book. This breath is a common faculty of the volume, not a particular statement or truth to be found and cited on a certain place where it had been put. Art in general, every art is symbolical in a whole, large sense of directed attraction or force, and not in the meaning of rebukes or charades, consisting of many partial riddles to be guessed separately and then joined together for the final solution. Not only art, language, every language is still more symbolical, but also in the sense of indifferent meaningfulness, in the significance of spiritual energy or activity. Language is connected with reality and life, history of language is partly history of facts and countries, of developments and ages. Surnames of persons are everywhere derived from names of things. But will it hence appear that each isolated name or image or situation of my novel should mean more than...

Semiotics of the Train in Russian Literature: Intermedial and Metapoetical Aspects

This article explores the intermedial and metapoetical semantics of the artistic image of a train. This image is part of the artistic semiotics and plays two interrelated roles: it marks the connection between the discourses of cinema and literature and signifies the act of artistic creation. Based on the Russian literature of the ХХ–ХХI century, this article reviews the origins and development of the arrival of a train as a cinematic metaphor, as well as the ways of depicting images in time and space (including the inner space). Before the age of cinema, the classic Russian literature introduced the railroad motif to make the discourse more dynamic and to highlight the key opposition between traditional lifestyle and technological progress, e.g. in works by F. Ostrovsky, A. Chekhov, etc. The literature of the XX century merged cinematic devices with literary motifs and introduced fragmentation, editing, changing angles, and other new ways of artistic perception, e.g. in A. Platonov’s oeuvre. Train imagery may attain mythological semantics when it manifests the themes of disaster, death, Apocalypse, and revolution, thus becoming a metapoetical symbol, e.g. in B. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In the contemporary Russian literature, train movement is associated with the life of human consciousness (V. Pelevin) or with text generation (S. Sokolov). In some cases, episodes of rail traffic interspersed with episodes of filming complicate the narrative and multiply transitions from external to internal focalization (E. Vodolazkin).

Провинциальный интеллигент на изломе истории (о чистопольском враче Д.Д. Авдееве – прототипе доктора Живаго)

This article dwells on the biography of the provincial doctor Dmitry D. Avdeyev (1879–1952) unfolding during the dramatic events in 20th-century Russia. The methods of intellectual history and micro-historiography allow us to create a certain “portrait of a provincial doctor against the background of the era”, who had to make cultural choices. The paper analyses the impact of Avdeyev’s life on the image of Doctor Zhivago, the protagonist in Boris Pasternak’s famous novel, who embodied the best features of the Russian intelligentsia: selfless devotion, action for the common good, disregard of material wealth, and commitment to the timeless humanistic ideals. Avdeyev’s origin and family as well as his professional path are described. Further, the paper studies the everyday life and practice of the ordinary provincial doctor in the early 20th century, including the period of the Civil War and famine of 1921–1922 in the Volga region. It is emphasized here that Avdeyev’s reminiscences of these tragic events, which he had shared with writers evacuated to Chistopol and Yelabuga (1941–1943), were directly and indirectly reflected in Doctor Zhivago. During the war, the doctor’s house in Chistopol became a kind of a writers’ club and a literary salon. It is concluded that the dramatic clash between Avdeyev’s (and Doctor Zhivago’s and, to some extent, Pasternak’s) thoughts and dreams and the reality of post-revolutionary Russia, as well as their being fettered by the actualities of the epoch were, nevertheless, overcome through the spirit of creativity and due to finding meaning in serving the Russian people. This paper provides deeper insights into the lives and behavioural patterns of Russian intellectuals during this landmark period and can be used in interdisciplinary research on the intellectual history of 20th-century Russia and in literary studies.

The associative experiment as an investigative method of the translation process

This paper deals with the psycholinguistic cognitive process investigation methods of text reception and the translation process, the free associative experiment, which can be seen as a complex investigation method. Its application is, thus, to be embedded in the translational experiment, from the perspective of translation polyvariety: Two German novel translations „The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov and „Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak are to be analyzed in the frames of the psycholinguistic experiment. The source of the translation polyvariability is the subjective character’s meaning interpretation, which is based on probabilistic processes and associative meanings. Emotions play an important role here. The empirical data obtained will be used for didactic purposes in the prospective translators´ training.

“Dr Zhivago” in the Amazon rainforest

The author of the article makes an attempt to verify the veracity of the story set out by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in his poem "Dora Franco". It is about a copy of Doctor Zhivago, which the poet discovered in a small library in the town of Leticia in the Amazon part of Colombia in 1968. The book bore an inscription of the soviet writer Sergei Smirnov. This fact is remarkable not only because Doctor Zhivago was still banned in the USSR, but also because in 1958 it was Smirnov who chaired the meeting of writers which expelled Pasternak from the Writers' Union. Archival searches, analysis of contemporaries' testimony, as well as interaction with a colleague from the Amazonas department made it possible to discover that Sergei Smirnov had indeed visited Leticia several months before Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Together with the translator he attended the same places, performed in the same House of Culture and interacted with the same people (e.g. the famous animal trapper Mike Tsalickis). During this trip to Colombia in 1967 Smirnov often had to answer uncomfortable questions about Pasternak. Nine years after the Pasternak affair, it is clear from newspaper articles that not a trace of aggression remains in the words of the chairman of the "trial", while ego-documents by their contemporaries suggest that Sergei Smirnov regretted the role he had assumed in 1958 for the rest of his life. The research also established that there may have been only one library in Leticia before the 1980s — the House of Culture, which both Smirnov and Yevtushenko mention in their travel reports. Both indirectly confirm that there were no Russian books in it. We couldn't find out whether Doctor Zhivago was the only exception, i.e. was already on the bookshelf, or whether it was brought by Smirnov and the translator N. Bulgakova. However, we were able to confirm that it was a Spanish translation of the book. Since the very book itself has never been found, we cannot unequivocally assert that the inscription of the penitent Smirnov in Pasternak's book is not a figment of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's fiction; however, our research allows us to think that this story did take place.

The Motive of Peace in the Works of B. Pasternak and M. Bulgakov

The concept of peace entered into Russian culture from the Bible and became its important spiritual tradition. With the development of secular literature, peace has gradually come out of the sacred field and become the significant aesthetic concept rich in connotation. In their works, Pasternak and Bulgakov reflect on the peace in the field of existence and art, especially the ontological value of family and love, thoughts about history, death and creativity. The concept of memory plays an important role in the artistic world of the two writers. Bulgakovs and Pasternaks books are testimony to rebirth and immortality, which is the way they participate in the sacred cause. The paper analyzes the place and role of the motive of peace in the novels of B. Pasternak Doctor Zhivago and M. Bulgakov The Master and Margarita in their similarities and differences. In this regard, the images of the house, music, creativity as the focus of the artists world are compared, the typological related figures of the beloved muse and the savior are considered, the specificity of the disclosure of the theme of immortality in creativity is noted.

Wrongdoing and Forgiveness in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

Could even the most ideal love justify betrayal? The author invites the reader to examine Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago through the lens of wrongdoing and forgiveness. She ponders whether Lara Antipova and Yura Zhivago can justify their actions with the beauty and the force of their love. In the light of the moral consequences of their actions, she finds such justification to be impossible. In her view the novel, culminating in the main characters’ deaths, opens itself to a transcendental sphere in which wounded people are laid bare in their humanity before themselves, free of the baggage of guilt and harm, ready for conciliation.

“Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak in Italian criticism of the 1950s: a discussion in the magazine “Il Ponte”

the article will focus on the history of the first publication of the novel “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, on its influence on the formation of opinion about Boris Pasternak as a truly major prose writer, as well as on the potential role in the further receipt of the Nobel Prize by the author in 1958. As one knows, the first publication took place in Italy. It is from Italian cultural figures Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (the first publisher of the novel) and Pietro Antonio Zveteremich (its translator) it depended on how the novel would be received abroad, where Boris Pasternak had not been well-known by the late 1957 – the Swedish Academy initially refused to nominate the writer as a Nobel laureate due to insufficient fame in wide literary circles. After the publication of “Doctor Zhivago”, it was essential to determine what the content of the first reviews of this work would be. The paper reviews the first reviews of the novel in the Italian press, in particular, the discussion that unfolded in the independent monthly magazine “Il Ponte”. Such well-known cultural figures in Italian literary circles as Guglielmo Petroni, Carlo Cassola, and Manlio Cancogni spoke out. Their opinions were not ignored, they were accepted by the general public.

Symbolics of the book and the space of cultural memory in the «final book» of Boris Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”

This article examines one of the symbolic components of the «objective world» of the novel about the writer – the image of the «book». It is noted that its use in the poetics of «Doctor Zhivago» is multifunctional. In addition to the characteristics of the artistic space, the «book» acts as a «finished object» that implements «universal and all-encompassing semantic segments» in the plot associated with cultural memory, the integrity of life and the world order. Special attention is paid to the content of the genre designation of «final book», which is applied to a number of «polymorphic» novels of the late 19th – 20th centuries and is considered in the context of «genre generalisations» in literature. The meaning of lexical components used within this genre designation is clarified. The occasional meaning «target», contained in the word «final», allows one to see in the intense self-reflection of the writer, which has a significant impact on the creative process, aspiration to cognise the «hidden essence» of things. The appeal to the goals inherent in the «ontological construction» of beings is defined in the philosophical tradition as «phenomenological reduction» (EGA Husserl), «transcending the spirit beyond its limits» (RM Garrigou-Lagrange). These processes are responsible for the retardation of the phase of the formation of the concept of the work – a phenomenon that has not yet been fully explained.

Female Characters in Doctor Zhivago and Their Role in the Fate of the Protagonist

The article attempts to compare the three female characters in the novel Doctor Zhivago to identify their role in the formation of the psychological image of the main character, as well as their main functions as characters in the plot structure of the novel. Distinguishing the terms “character” and “hero” as theoretical concepts, we seek to establish the complementarity of two methods: character analysis as a way of structuring the text, on the one hand, and phenomenological, which allows us to capture the uniqueness of a single hero, as well as its influence on the fate of other participants in the action. Taking into account the long-term work on Doctor Zhivago, the author of the article proceeds from the idea that along with autobiographical material in the characterization of three women – Tonya, Larisa, and Marina, B. Pasternak widely uses plot analogies with masterpieces of Russian and world literature, as well as certain allusions to biblical images. Important here is the principle of inseparability and non-confusion in the depiction of the fates of the three women in their relationship with the main character, associated with the Christian tradition. For the first time, the article introduces the essentiality– existentiality opposition to compare the main female figures. At the same time, it is important that the author, creating female images, uses a different measure of fabulousness associated with the vicissitudes in the life of the main character – the maximum in the relationship of Yuri and Lara and the minimum in relation to the hero with Marina. There is also a different degree of detail of the three images, the use of symbols in their characterization, and the symbolization as the main method of Marina’s characterization is noted. The author concludes that the outstanding Russian poet and novelist B. Pasternak shows a high degree of skill, penetrating the depths of female psychology. At the same time, while maintaining the principles of construction characteristic of the classical narrative, the writer, thanks to the special arrangement of the material, gives the novel features that bring it closer to the best examples of world literature of the twentieth century.

Linguistic organization of the duality of mythological worlds in B. Pasternak’s poem "Wind" ("Veter")

This article presents a linguopoetic analysis of Boris Pasternak’s poem "Wind" ("Veter") from the position of the lingual embodiment of the duality of mythological worlds. This research focuses on the symbol of "the wind as a spirit", upon which the poem’s whole mystical idea relies. The purpose of this article is to reveal which the linguistic means used to translate the duality of mythological worlds, as well as how this cognition merges with the author’s experience and determines the poem’s figurative system and idea. The understanding of the duality of mythological worlds requires the law of participation (L. L vy-Bruhl) – the identification of the mental, emotional, and physical properties of a person and nature. In Pasternak’s poem, the suffering and rushing "I" of the deceased lyrical hero becomes the wind. In this study, the word-symbol "wind" is studied in the semantic and semiotic aspect as a sign. Its signifier is the lexeme wind meaning 'perceptual idea of an air flow'; signified – the symbolic meaning of 'spirit, soul, immortality', due to the etymological meaning of the word and pagan mythology. The results reveal that the symbol "wind" is the carrier of the duality of mythological worlds, and it programs the fictional world of the poem: on the one hand, these are the actual world of the lyrical heroine, the house, and the wind, which swings pine trees; on the other hand – the imaginary world of the spirit of the dead lyrical hero. The lexical resources of the poetic text translate this opposition in the ratio of the words I and wind, personal pronouns I and you, as well as the words ended and alive. At the grammatical level, the duality is expressed by the contrast of the verbal forms of the past and present time, as well as by the passage from the indirect thought (the lyrical hero’s mental monologue) to the 3rd person narrative about the wind and the pine trees and by the return of the poem to the lyrical hero’s indirect thought at the end. This is how Pasternak implements one of the main ideas of his novel "Doctor Zhivago" – the idea of immortality, which is confirmed in the article by referring to the novel’s macro context and biographical materials.

The October Revolution as the Passion of Christ: Boris Pasternak’s Easter Narrative in Doctor Zhivago and Its Cultural Contexts

This article offers a new interpretation of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago in the cultural and historical context of the first half of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the interrelationship between religion and philosophy of history in the text. Doctor Zhivago is analysed as a condensed representation of a religious conception of Russian history between 1901 and 1953 and as a cyclical repetition of the Easter narrative. This bipartite narrative consists of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ as symbols of violence and renewal (liberation). The novel cycles through this narrative several times, symbolically connecting the ‘Easter’ revolution (March 1917) and the Thaw (the spring of 1953). The sources of Pasternak’s Easter narrative include the Gospels, Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and pre-Christian mythology. The model of cyclical time in the novel brings together the sacred, natural and historical cycles. This concept of a cyclical renewal of life differs from the linear temporality of the Apocalypse as an expectation of the end of history.

Текст-ментатив в русской литературе XX-XXI веков

The subject of the article is the text-mentative and its functioning in the Russian literature of the XX-XXI centuries. The concept of ‘mentative’ (which appeared in linguistics since the beginning of the XXI century by analogy with ‘narrative’) means a text with a mental reference, dialogically responding to the word and thought of the other. In linguistics, there is a typology of communicative strategies of the mentative in relation to the speech of the other. There are 8 strategies, they are equal logically, but unequal in dialogical and, consequently, heuristic relations. In Russian fiction, the text-mentative was established in the middle of the XIX century. That was due to the beginning of the stage of convergence of the artistic and non-artistic word in Russian literary evolution. The novel “War and Peace” by L. Tolstoy, containing multiple mentative fragments and entire chapters, became a clear sign of the mentative appearance in fiction. The stage of convergence of the artistic and non-artistic word continued until the end of the XX century, and all this time the specific weight and importance of the mentative in Russian fiction were steadily increasing. The article shows functioning of the mentative in the ideologically and artistically most important works of Russian literature of the mid – late XX century. These are novels by B. Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”, A. Bitov “Pushkin’s House”, V. Pelevin “Generation ‘P’”, A. Chudakov “The Mist Falls on the Old Steps”, texts by A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Rasputin, V. Makanin. In all these works, the mentative allows us to formulate the key thoughts for the self-consciousness of the XX century Russian literature: morality, truth, the meaning of life and the danger of consumerism. In the XXI century, in the works by M. Kucherskaya, E. Chizhova, E. Vodolazkin, the mentative also occupies a large place, appearing in ideologically important fragments of works. As a result of the above, it is concluded that the role of the mentative in Russian literature of the XX century was steadily increasing. The authors of the article suppose that we witness starting of the stage of mental thematization of writing in the Russian literary evolution in the XXI century.

The free associative experiment as a psycholinguistic investigation method of the trans lation process: A theoretical insight

This paper deals with the psycholinguistic methods of investigation of the cognitive process of text reception and the process of translation – the free associative experiment. The psycholinguistic experiment can be seen as a complex investigation method. The application of the psycholinguistic experiment is thus to be embedded in the translational experiment in the aspect of the polyvariety of translation: Two German translations of the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak are to be analyzed in the frames of the psycholinguistic experiment. The source of the polyvariability of translation is the subjective character of the interpretation of meaning, which is based on probabilistic processes and associative mean-ings. Emotions play an important role here. The empirical data obtained will be used for didactic purposes in the training of prospective translators.

«Свет Без Пламени»: Лестница Якова Л. Улицкой И Доктор Живаго Б. Пастернака

In her interviews and essays, Ulitskaya has often alluded to the great effect that Pasternak’s poetry, and especially Doctor Zhivago, has had on her. In one of the episodes of her novel The Big Green Tent, she describes a first encounter with Pasternak’s novel; the teacher of literature who plays a decisive role in the lives of the main characters reads a manuscript copy of the novel and describes it as a worthy continuation of 19th-century Russian prose.The parallels between the novels The Big Green Tent and Doctor Zhivago have al- ready been the subject of scholarly attention but the connection between Jacob’s Ladder and the Pasternak novel has not been studied so far. In this study, I examine this connec- tion: on the one hand, at the level of macrostructures, the chronotope, the patterns of the heroes’ fates and the principal thematic elements, and on the other hand, at the level of cer- tain microstructures.The latter are linked to the present-day plot of Ulitskaya’s novel and, more specifi- cally, Nora’s life. Nora reads the correspondence and notes that her grandfather left for her as well as the KGB documents about Yakov Osetsky towards the end of her life (and the plot itself). As a result of this, she wishes to write the novel that her grandfather Yakov could not due to the historical situation.The process of Nora’s confrontation with the past and her becoming a writer are coded in Ulitskaya’s text by two of the poems of the Zhivago cycle Winter Night and August and also in the related episodes of Pasternak’s novel. All of these have biographical relevance and present creation as a fundamental element of life, which is closely linked to love and death as well as metaphysical experience. The symbolic parallel of this in Zhivago’s August is the transfiguration of Jesus and “the light without a flame” that blinds the disciples. This symbolism appears in Jacob’s Ladder on two levels: first, in the stage set that Nora creates for King Lear, and second, as a concomitant of her confrontation with the past and her becoming a writer.It is in this way that the fundamental elements of Pasternak’s life and poetry play a crucial role at the level of microstructures: they provide the context and symbolism of the central question of Ulitskaya’s novel, the nature of “the essence” of the human.

Subject-material ontology in “Doctor Zhivago”, the “final book” by Boris Pasternak

The article is addressed to the problem of typological characteristics of a number of novels distinguished by a long-term, large-scale conception and genre "proteism". Conventionally referred to as the "final books", these works represent an attempt to create a "universal text" of cultural memory. Such a text is intended to reveal the "totality of being", to answer the main questions of life. Through the prism of signs of the "final book", this article examines the novel "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak. The main attention is focused on the study of the ontological aspect of the objective, material world of the work, in particular, household objects and interior components. In descriptive fragments, the frequency lexemes "thing" and "object" are highlighted, which act as a reduced description. Their "collective" semantics creates conditional, generalised images of material and ideal objects that realize the idea of contact between the existential (sacred) and the ordinary and the idea of restoring unity (integrity). The lexeme “thing” acts as an actualiser of meanings associated with the concept of a way of life, an order of things, harmonious to a greater or lesser extent. The lexeme “object” is most often marked by the state of “ontological uncomfortableness”, “alienation” of objects of the external world from a person, which arose as a result of the disintegration of “living” connections, the absence of “contact” and decline in general. The opposition “thing-object” implements in the narrative “ready-made / code” philosophical generalisations, which are differentiated depending on situations, and it expresses the assessment of reality given by the narrator, whose worldview in many cases is extremely close to the position of the protagonist.

ПОЭЗИЯ И ПРОЗА БОРИСА ПАСТЕРНАКА В ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ АМЕРИКАНСКИХ СЛАВИСТОВ

The review considers the American and Russian Slavic studies on diverse aspects of the poetry and the prose by Boris Pasternak. L.S. Flaishman focuses on the early period of the Boris Pasternak creative work, on the autobiographical motifs in the poem «August» and on the first publication of poems from the novel «Doctor Zhivago» - «Stichi is Rossii» ( Poems from Russia ) in the journal «Grani» ( Facets ). K.V. Polivanov and K.M.F. Platt discuss the revolution theme in the poems by Pasternak included into his poetical cycle «Bolezn’» ( Disease ). A.K. Zholkovsky draws parallels between Pasternak’s pre-war poems and the novel «Doctor Zhivago».

МУЗЫКАЛЬНАЯ КОНЦЕПЦИЯ РОМАНА Б.Л. ПАСТЕРНАКА «ДОКТОР ЖИВАГО» В КОНТЕКСТЕ ЖАНРА ДУХОВНОЙ АВТОБИОГРАФИИ

The purpose of the article is to study the role of the musical imperative in the modernization, transformation of the spiritual autobiography genre in the novel by B.L Pasternak Doctor Zhivago. To achieve this goal, the following tasks are required: a brief overview of biographical facts of the writer’s life, illustrating the path of his aesthetic philosophy and worldview, artistic formation, in which music played a dominant role; to study the musical imperative at the ideological-philosophical, system-structural, and aesthetic-artistic levels. While researching, biographical, systemic, structural, and hermeneutic methods were used. One of the culminating pages in the biography of Pasternak, the content of which had influenced Pasternak’s creative world, would be the day when he heard the sounds of musical improvisation on the piano by Skryabin, who was creating Divine poem. The sounds of music had merged with reality, the voice of nature, becoming a single whole with it. With a transforming and creative effort of memory, impressions coming from childhood would be built into the figurative-conceptual chain of his worldview “Life − music − creativity – poetry”, in which “music and poetry speak the same language of art”. All the creative heritage of B.L. Pasternak, including the final work − the novel Doctor Zhivago, which is represented as a kind of spiritual autobiography, both personal and the entire generation, respectively, serves as a generalization of the historical, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic paths of the Silver Age, a part of which was the author himself. Merging with its voice, and at the same time absorbing it into himself, he became a generalized representation of his generation portrait. In Doctor Zhivago, music appears at the level of mentions, quotations, and various sound images throughout the text. Their main ideological and semantic content is summed up by the words of Vedenyapin, in which Music is the equivalent of Truth, a “divine voice”, “raising above the animal and carrying it upward”, giving an inner impetus to the personality to move along the path of history to eternity. Research results. The ideological and philosophical setting of the musical novel organization is the idea of Music as a metaphor of the Artist-Christ, the embodiment of eternity, the path and a new history established by the sacrifice of Christ, leading to the human spirit. Accordingly, the theme of the path in spiritual autobiography as an ascent from the carnal to the spiritual level of consciousness, the attainment of eternity is reflected in the musical key as a progress of progress towards music and “melodization” of the spiritual path. At the systemic and structural level, the musical imperative is built in the form of a counterpoint principle substantiated by B.M. Gasparov, and the complex tiered hierarchical organization of the novel, in which all levels (individual, socio-historical, eternal) gravitate towards a single value center − the Artist-Christ − and merge in symphonic polyphony in unison. At the aesthetic and artistic level, this is achieved through the lyricization of the narrative, rhythmic insertions that “illuminate” the prose part, like the “voice of eternity”, repetitions, dividing the narrative into prose and lyrics as a form of music (the earthly path and eternity as its finale and the achievement of completeness existence) and, most importantly, building an acoustic space, contributing to the creation of a suggestive effect of “audibility” of the text. The acoustic space is built thanks to the presence of numerous sound images, the melodiousness and rhythm of the prose part, inserts from sacred texts and church chants, the attraction of Chopin`s techniques and motives, as well as the motive of distant sound as a timeless messenger of apocalyptic “future”.