Pasternak's Poetry Research Articles

Boris Pasternak and Silver Age Intellectual Culture: From Modernist Aesthetics to the New Classical

ABSTRACT Boris Pasternak is a key figure in the history of twentieth-century Russian culture. The artistic originality of his poetry and prose has been the subject of fruitful discussion within literary theory and history, the phrase “the poetry of Pasternak” has been interpreted as a culturological concept, and the novel Doctor Zhivago has been recognized as perhaps the most significant work of Russian literature of the last century. This article examines the issues related to Pasternak’s inheriting of the values and meanings of Russian classical culture, which became a focus of polemics among Russian émigré intellectuals. The author argues that Pasternak inherits and masters the artistic language of modernism (as a complex result of intertwining of Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism), yet in the process of his development as literati he clearly overcomes the aesthetic attitudes of modernism, eventually arriving at a new version of the classical. Pasternak’s poetry and prose addresses the spiritual issues central to Russian literature. The unique interpretation and resolution of these urgent issues in the writer’s mind determines the content of his profoundly original aesthetics of creativity.

The Early Pasternak's Mythopoetic Images

The article discusses some aspects of the early Pasternak's poetry, in particular of two poems, ‘The Urals for the First Time’ and ‘Mirror’. The author discusses the device of metonymy, as well as images in these poems that can be seen as operating as the device of “making strange”, as formulated by Viktor Shklovskii. Here the motif of the railroad is especially important. Other motifs can be considered as rooted in ancient mythology, in particular in ancient Oriental (Hittite) poetry. Jakobson's discussion of the statue coming alive is also relevant in this context.

The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture

This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically outmoded, Ann Komaromi argues that they have a certain usefulness when reconceived as structural components of an autonomous unofficial field. This critical model is developed with polemical reference to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of culture. The late Soviet opposition between art and politics is explored through Andrei Siniavskii's struggle with editors over the 1965 edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry and via the organization of the famous 5 December 1965 “Meeting of Openness” coordinated by Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin. The critical model proposed emphasizes the material history of conceptions of autonomy fundamental to the field, profiling dynamic binaries and permeable boundaries as sites of critical interest.

The Children's Poetry of Pasternak: Pasternakian Poetics in Miniature

The Children's Poetry of Pasternak: Pasternakian Poetics in Miniature

Boris Pasternak et la philologie russe des années 1910-1920

Борис Пастернак и русская филологическая жизнь 1910-1920-х гг. Статья посвящена изучению как личных так и интеллектуальных связей, существовавших между Б. Пастернаком и русскими формалистами Москвы (МЛК) и Петрограда (ОПОЯЗ). Цель статьи – не столько определить, в какой степени Пастернак освоил идеи формализма, сколько выявить место поэта в критической системе критиков-формалистов. К тому же внимание автора обращено не только на главные фигуры течения, но и на менее известных лиц (таких, как напр. Александр И. Ромм), не только на «старшее» (Тынянов, Эйхенбаум, Шкловский, Якобсон...), но и на «младшее» поколение (Б. Бухштаб, Лидия Гинзбург, Н. Степанов...). В центре статьи – анализ работы Б. Бухштаба, посвященной поэзии Пастернака, написанной в 1928 г., но так в то время и не опубликованной. Работа Бухштаба не только представляет собой безусловный вклад в пастернаковедение, но также связана с кругом вопросов, касающихся постформализма.

Judaic Spiritual Traditions in the Poetry of Pasternak and Mandel'Shtam

Judaic Spiritual Traditions in the Poetry of Pasternak and Mandel'Shtam

Introduction: The Poetry of Pasternak [Part II

In Pasternak's poetry, portrayal of nature occupies first place (for he often reveals soul of man, feeling of love, and so forth, through device of landscape). Let us now examine how his artistic system was able to engrave pictures of contemporary history. The poet had significant prerequisites for dealing with this theme: sensitive attention to the voice of life and freedom from pseudo-poetic canons that forbid self-expression in low language of everyday life. As we know, during first years of Revolution many poets experienced major difficulties precisely in that regard, and confined their language to a skimpy set of pretty words in general use, Nightingale' was permissible, ‘oil burner’ not, said Mayakovsky, ridiculing them. The matter at issue was right of poetry to vocabulary of its own day.

Introduction: The Poetry of Pasternak [Part I

For a long time, knowledge of Pasternak's work was confined to a comparatively narrow group of connoisseurs and lovers of poetry. Pasternak's literary isolation and solitude were commented on by critics for many years and partially explained by the difficulties even in understanding the text which the reader had when he opened his book for the first time. A critic wrote, at the end of the 1920s: "Readers found an utterly unique poet. In order to understand him, it was necessary to make a certain effort, in a sense to reorganize one's customary mode of comprehension. His manner of perception and even his vocabulary seemed at first unacceptable, astounding. Importunate questions about his ‘incomprehensibility,’ and about ‘how that could be’ long accompanied the appearance of each of his books."