Essay “Criticism of the novel by B. L.

B.L. Parsnip

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (29.I./10.II.1890, Moscow - 30.V.1960, Peredelkino near Moscow) began literary activity in circles formed around the Symbolist publishing house "Musaget", his first poetic book "Twin in the Clouds" in 1914 it was published by the literary group Lyrics, whose members were reproached by critics for imitating the Symbolists. Later, in his autobiographical prose “Safety Certificate” (1930), B. Pasternak called “Lyrics” an epigone circle. The poetics of B. Pasternak's early poems was influenced by I. Annensky, who was close to the Symbolists. From I. Annensky he adopted the features of the style (including free, psychologized syntax), thanks to which he achieved the effect of spontaneity, simultaneous expression of different moods lyrical hero. In the literary community, the poems in the collection “Twin in the Clouds” were perceived both as containing a certain touch of symbolism and as opposing the poetry of symbolism. V. Bryusov, in his review “The Year of Russian Poetry,” noted that B. Pasternak’s poetry expressed futurism, but not as a theoretical norm, but as a manifestation of the poet’s soul.

After the split in Lyrics in 1914, B. Pasternak joined its left wing and, together with S. Bobrov and N. Aseev, created a new literary group, futuristic in its aesthetic orientation, Centrifuge, whose publishing house published his second poetry book “Over Barriers” was published. The work of B. Pasternak of this period developed in line with Russian futurism, however, the position of the members of the Centrifuge, including B. Pasternak, was distinguished by relative independence and independence from poetic norms. The critical part of the first almanac "Centrifuge" "Rukonog" (1914) was directed against the "First Journal of Russian Futurists" (1914). Thus, B. Pasternak’s article “The Wasserman Reaction” contained attacks against the poetry of the ego-futurist and subsequently imagist V. Shershenevich. Questioning the futuristic nature of his work, B. Pasternak classified the poetry of V. Khlebnikov and, with some reservations, V. Mayakovsky as true futurism. For the third almanac, “Centrifuges,” conceived in 1917, but never published, B. Pasternak’s article “Vladimir Mayakovsky. “As simple as a moo.” Petrograd, 1916" Having expressed his support for the poetry of V. Mayakovsky, B. Pasternak pointed out two requirements for a real poet, which V. Mayakovsky answered, and which B. Pasternak will present to himself throughout his entire work: clarity of creative conscience and the poet’s responsibility to eternity.

In the early lyrics of B. Pasternak, the themes of his future poetic books were outlined: the intrinsic value of the individual, the immortality of creativity, the aspiration of the lyrical hero to the worlds, his coexistence with gardens, storms, nightingales, drops, the Urals - with everything that is in the world:

“With me, with my candle level / Blooming worlds hang”; “Get the cab. For six hryvnias, / Through the gospel, through the click of wheels, / To be transported to where the downpour is / Even noisier than ink and tears.” In the poems in the collection “Over Barriers,” B. Pasternak looked for his own form of self-expression, calling them sketches and exercises. The feeling of the world in its integrity, in the interpenetration of phenomena, entities, and personalities determined the metonymic nature of his poetry. Thus, “Petersburg” is an expanded metonymy, in which the properties of related phenomena are transferred into in this case city ​​and Petra.

Subsequently, in a letter from B. Pasternak to M. Tsvetaeva in 1926, an opinion was expressed about the inappropriate handling of words in the poems of the collection “Over Barriers”, about excessive mixing of styles and shifting emphasis. In his early poetry, B. Pasternak paid tribute to the literary school, but already in his 1918 article “Several Provisions” the idea was voiced about the need for a poet to be independent; He compared symbolism, acmeism and futurism to holey balloons.

In the summer of 1917, B. Pasternak wrote poems that formed the basis of his book “My Sister is Life.” Later, in " Safe-conduct certificate", the poet noted that he wrote the book with a feeling of liberation from group literary addictions. The poems of the summer of 1917 were created under the impression of the February events, perceived by the Russian intelligentsia largely metaphysically, as a transformation of the world, as a spiritual revival. In B. Pasternak's book there is no political view of what was happening in Russia. For him, February is the erasing of the barrier between human conventions and nature, the feeling of eternity that has come to earth. The poet himself pointed out the apolitical nature of the book. The poems were dedicated to the woman to whom the “element of objectivity” carried the poet with “unhealthy, sleepless, mind-blowing love,” as he wrote to M. Tsvetaeva (5, 176).

The book expressed the author's concept of the immortality of life. Professionally engaged in philosophy in the 1910s at Moscow and Marburg universities, B. Pasternak was faithful to the Russian theological, philosophical and literary tradition. Revolutionary nihilism did not touch his worldview. He believed in the eternal life of the soul, first of all, the soul of a creative person. In 1912, he wrote from Marburg to his father, the artist L. O. Pasternak, that he saw in him an eternal, irreconcilable, creative spirit and “something young.” In 1913, at a meeting of a circle for the study of symbolism, he made a report “Symbolism and Immortality,” in which he identified the concepts of “immortality” and “poet.” In the winter of 1916–1917, B. Pasternak conceived a book theoretical works about the nature of art; in 1919 it was called “humanistic studies of man, art, psychology, etc.” - “Quinta essentia”; it included the article “Several Provisions”, in which the poet recalled that to the four natural elements of water, earth, air and fire, Italian humanists added a fifth - man, that is, man was declared the fifth element of the universe. This concept of man as an element of the eternal universe became fundamental to the work of B. Pasternak. He turned to Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Proust and in their work, their destinies, he sought confirmation of the idea of ​​​​the immortality of the soul and the inner freedom of the individual. Both in his youth and in the last decade of his life, working in an atheistic state, he was focused on questions of eternity in the context of Christianity. Thus, he believed that Leo Tolstoy stepped forward in the history of Christianity, introducing with his creativity “a new kind of spirituality in the perception of the world and life,” and it was Tolstoy’s “spiritualization” that the poet recognized as the basis of his own existence, his manner of “living and seeing.”

In the book “My Sister is Life,” the work of M. Lermontov is presented as the meaning of immortality. The book is dedicated to him. All his life B. Pasternak hoped to reveal the secret of Lermontov’s essence; he himself believed that he managed to do this in the novel Doctor Zhivago. The Demon (“In Memory of the Demon”) is an image of Lermontov’s immortal creative spirit: he is eternal, that’s why he “swore by the ice of the peaks: “Sleep, friend, I will return as an avalanche.”

In the lyrics of B. Pasternak in the summer of 1917 there was no feeling of trouble, it sounded faith in the infinity and absoluteness of being:

In a muffler, shielding myself with my palm,
I’ll shout to the kids through the window:
What, dear ones, we have
Millennium in the yard?
Or:
Who blazed the path to the door,
To the hole covered with cereals,
While I was smoking with Byron,
While I was drinking with Edgar Poe?

The eternity of existence was manifested in the bustle of everyday life. Herself eternal nature grew into everyday life - this is how in the poems of B. Pasternak the image of a mirror appeared in which the garden is “shaking”, the image of drops that have the “heaviness of cufflinks”, crows in lace curtains, etc. Nature, objects, man himself are one:

In this concept of being there was no category of staticity; the guarantee of immortality is in dynamics; life in Pasternak’s lyrics was manifested in movement: “The run-up of those willow groves”, about rain - “Flosh, flow with an epigraph / To love like you”; “My sister’s life is still in flood today / Was crushed by the spring rain about everyone.”

Following Vl. Solovyov, who expressed philosophical definitions in poetic form (“In an earthly dream we are shadows, shadows... / Life is a play of shadows, / A series of distant reflections / Eternally bright days,” etc.), B. Pasternak introduced the genre of philosophical definitions into poetry. In the book “My Sister is Life” he included the poems “The Definition of Poetry”, “The Definition of the Soul”, “The Definition of Creativity”. The nature of poetic creativity seemed to him to be a direct expression of all that exists in its unity and infinity:

The phenomenon of poetic creativity lies, as B. Pasternak believed, in the fact that an image can visually connect worlds: “And bring the star to the fish tank / On trembling wet palms...”

In the 1922 article “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of Russian Poetry,” V. Bryusov outlined the characteristic features of B. Pasternak’s lyrics during the period of the book “My Sister is Life,” pointing out the thematic omnivorousness, in which the topic of the day, history, and science , and life are located, as it were, on the same plane, on equal terms; and to philosophical reasoning expressed in figurative form; and on bold syntactic constructions, original word subordination. V. Bryusov also noted the influence of revolutionary modernity on B. Pasternak’s poetry.

Revolutionary modernity, however, had an ambiguous effect on the mood of B. Pasternak. The first years of the October Revolution, with its “propaganda-poster” bias, which was alien to the poet, placed him “outside the currents - apart.” The post-October period seemed to him dead, its leaders - artificial, uncreated creatures by nature. In 1918, he wrote the poem “Russian Revolution,” in which modernity was associated with a characteristic imagery: rebellion, “blazing furnaces,” “children in the boiler room,” “human blood, brains and drunken naval vomit.”

In the dead time, B. Pasternak turned to the theme of the living soul. In 1918, he wrote a psychological story about the maturation of the soul of a child from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, “Childhood of Eyelets.”

The soul of Zhenya Luvers is as mobile, sensitive, reflexive as nature itself and the whole world, in which the street was “in turmoil”, the day was “breaking through”, “bursting for dinner”, then poking its “snout into the glass, like a heifer in a steamy stall ”, the logs fell onto the turf, and this was a sign - “evening was born”, the blue of the sky “chirped piercingly”, and the earth shone “fatly, like melted water.” This one world corresponded to the heroine's childish syncretic consciousness, her undifferentiated perception of man, life and space. For example, in her feeling the soldiers “were tough, snoring and sweaty, like the red cramp of a faucet when a water supply is damaged,” but the boots of these same soldiers “were pressed down by a purple thundercloud.” She absorbed everyday and universal impressions in a single stream. Therefore, the accidents in her life turned into patterns: a fellow traveler in the compartment, a Belgian - her father’s guest, a criminal who was being taken to Perm, the born Aksinya, decimal fractions became components of her life; therefore she experiences a strong sense of resemblance to her mother; therefore, the death of Tsvetkov, who was indifferent to her, is a tragedy for her; therefore, when reading “Fairy Tales,” a strange game took over her face, subconsciously she transformed into fairy-tale characters; because she is sincerely concerned about what the Chinese are doing in Asia at such a time dark night. We have already observed such a vision of space, little things, events, people in the lyrical hero of the book “My Sister is Life.”

In the early 1920s, B. Pasternak gained popularity. In 1923, he published his fourth book of poetry, “Themes and Variations,” which included poems from 1916–1922. In a letter to S. Bobrov, the poet indicated that the book reflected his desire for clarity. However, the poetics of a number of poems in “Themes and Variations” presented a certain figurative multi-layeredness; the meaning of the stanzas was hidden behind their syntactic brevity or complexity, phonetically weighted line: “Without pincers the approach of the van / Tears out the crutches from the niches / Only with the roar of completed runs, / Raising dust from the distance”; “The automatic block / The torment began further, / Where, in anticipation of the gutters, / the East shamanized mechanically”; “A separate life from the body, and a longer one / Leads, like an uninvolved penguin to the chest, / The patient’s wingless jacket is a flannel: / Either a drop of warmth for her, then move a lamp.” This corresponded to the aesthetic requirements of the LEF formed at the end of 1922, to which B. Pasternak joined.

The avant-garde poetics of B. Pasternak's poems caused critical controversy. In the 1924 article “Pushkin’s leftism in rhymes,” V. Bryusov pointed out the new rhyme of the futurists, opposed to the classical, Pushkin rhyme, with the obligatory similarity of pre-stressed sounds, with a mismatch or optional coincidence of post-stress sounds, etc., citing the rhymes of B. Pasternak: Pomeranian - get dirty, stern - stern, next to you - add more, kerosene - gray - blue. I. Ehrenburg in the book “Portraits modern poets"(1923) wrote about the illumination of the general chaos of B. Pasternak's poetics with the unity and clarity of his voice. In S. Klychkov’s article “Bald Mountain,” published in Krasnaya Novy (1923. No. 5) with the editorial note “printed for discussion,” B. Pasternak was criticized for the deliberate incomprehensibility of his poetry, for replacing expressiveness with purposeful complexity. K. Mochulsky in the article “On the dynamics of verse,” pointing to the destruction of poetic norms - symbols, old names, familiar connections - in the poet’s poems, drew attention to a number of their features, including the fact that each sound is an element of rhythm.

In “Krasnaya Novy” (1926. No. 8) an article by the theorist of the “Pereval” group A. Lezhnev “Boris Pasternak” was published, in which the author proposed his version of the poetics of Pasternak’s verse. Discussing the principle of linking associations in the poetry of B. Pasternak, A. Lezhnev noted: for the classics, a poem revealed one idea, for Pasternak it consists of a number of sensations connected to each other by one association. The next poetic principle of B. Pasternak, which A. Lezhnev pointed out, is linearity: the emotional tone, without ascents and descents, is equally intense. Further: the poet deliberately makes a semantic break in the chain of associations, omits any associative link. A. Lezhnev came to the conclusion about the “psychophysiology” of Pasternak’s poetry, which can also be seen in “Childhood Grommets.” The works of B. Pasternak are created, the critic reasoned, from a subtle psychological weaving, but not of feelings and emotions, but of sensations (from rooms, things, light, streets, etc.), which are on the border between purely physiological sensations and complex mental movements .

An opposite view of the phenomenon of Pasternak’s poetics was expressed by G. Adamovich in his book “Loneliness and Freedom,” published in New York in 1995: the poet’s poems at the time of their origin were not associated with emotions or feelings; the words themselves gave rise to emotions, and not vice versa. In addition, the critic saw in B. Pasternak’s poems a pre-Pushkin, Derzhavin tragedy.

It is characteristic that B. Pasternak himself pointed out the dithyrambic nature of his early poetry and his desire to make the verse understandable and full of the author's meanings - such as that of E. Boratynsky.

The poet grew a protest not only against the aesthetic principles of DEF with the priority of the revolution of form, but also against Lef’s interpretation of the poet’s mission in the revolutionary era as a life-builder, a transformer, which made the poet’s personality dependent on the political situation. In the poem “High Disease” (1923, 1928), B. Pasternak called creativity a guest of all worlds (“Visits in all worlds / High Disease”), that is, free in time and space, and himself - a witness, not a life-builder. The theme “poet and power”, “lyrical hero and Lenin” was considered as a relationship between a contemplator and a doer. V. Mayakovsky, having subordinated creativity to the era, turned his position into a “propaganda propaganda popular print”, a poster (“I printed and wrote posters / About the joy of my decline”).

B. Pasternak did not accept the dominant at that time public consciousness principles of revolutionary necessity and classism. As he wrote in “High Sickness,” “Even more ambiguous than song / The dull word is the enemy”; the same attitude is expressed in the poem towards the division of the people into “the octopus class and the working class.” Revolutionary necessity became a tragedy for man; B. Pasternak wrote the story “Air Routes” (1924) on this topic. A former naval officer, and now a member of the presidium of the provincial executive committee, Polivanov simultaneously learns about the existence of his son and about the revolutionary sentence passed on him, the execution of which he is unable to prevent. The plot with unexpected recognition, the mystery of blood ties and their rupture, the fatal predetermination of a person’s fate, an insurmountable conflict, deception, a mysterious disappearance, the death of a hero, a situation in which a person himself does not know what he is doing, corresponded to the philosophical and dramatic canon of ancient tragedy. The role of fate in B. Pasternak’s story is expressed in the image of airways, the invariably night sky of the Third International: it silently frowned, compacted by a highway roller, leading somewhere like a rail track, and along these paths “the straightforward thoughts of Liebknecht, Lenin and a few minds departed their flight." The heroes of "Airways" are deprived of freedom of choice and self-expression.

In the second half of the 1920s, B. Pasternak created works about the revolutionary era, the ideological orientation of which contradicted “Air Routes”. These were the poems “Nine Hundred and Fifth” (1925–1926) and “Lieutenant Schmidt” (1926–1927), the poetic novel “Spektorsky” (1925–1931). B. Pasternak, calling “Nine Hundred and Fifth” a “pragmatic-chronistic book,” argued that in “Spektorsky” he said more and more to the point about the revolution. After reading “The Year Nine Hundred and Five,” M. Gorky spoke approvingly of its author as a social poet.

The epic poem “Nine Hundred and Fifth” was written as a chronicle of the first Russian revolution: “the beating of the crowd,” the “Potemkin” uprising, Bauman’s funeral, Presnya. In the poem, the time of revolution is presented as the era of the masses. The fathers lived in a time of romantic service of heroes, “dynamites,” personalities, Narodnaya Volya members. In 1905, this time is perceived as an irrevocable past (“Like a story / From the age of the Stuarts / More distant than Pushkin, / And seen / Like in a dream”), the time of the heroic masses comes to the fore. Determining who was right and wrong, B. Pasternak placed the blame for the blood on the authorities: the workers were “filled with a thirst for revenge” by the introduction of troops into the city, “beatings”, and poverty; the reason for the uprising on the Potemkin was “the meat was stinking”; The Black Hundred provoke the students. However, in “Lieutenant Schmidt” a hero already appears who, both by the will of fate and thanks to his own conscious decision, becomes the chosen one of the revolution (“And the joy of sacrificing oneself, / And the blind whim of chance”). Schmidt is presented with a choice: he realizes himself on the verge of two eras, he seems to be betraying his environment (“From the wrong ships, friends from school, / Friends of those years. / Quarreled and met in stakes, / Threatened with a noose”) and “stands up with whole homeland,” he chooses Golgotha ​​(“For some to punish and repent, / For others to end at Golgotha”). In “Spectorsky” B. Pasternak wrote about his personal choice - the image of the writer Spectorsky is largely autobiographical. The fates of Sergei Spektorsky and Maria are given in the context of the post-October revolutionary era, when “the unit defeats the class,” when hunger and subpoenas entered everyday life, when “no one spared you,” when “socialized furniture” was dismantled by commissariats, “everyday items” by to the workers, “and valuables and provisions to the treasury.” Under the silent sky of revolution “And the people were as hard as rocks, / And the faces were as dead as clichés.” The hero, an “honest simpleton,” participates in the distribution of socialized utensils. The justification of the era was motivated in the poem by the revolutionary choice of the “patriot” and “daughter of the Narodnaya Volya” Maria (“She jokingly pulled the revolver / And in this gesture everything was expressed”); in the revolution she came into her own as a person (“surely you have to be something?”).

However, during these same years, B. Pasternak came to the idea that the greatness of the revolution turned into its own opposite - insignificance. Revolution, as he wrote to R.M. Rilke on April 12, 1926, broke the flow of time; he still feels the post-revolutionary time as immobility, and defines his own creative state as dead, assuring that no one in the USSR can write as sincerely and truthfully as M. Tsvetaeva wrote in exile. In 1927 the poet came out. from LEF. On this occasion, he wrote: “I never had anything in common with Lef... For a long time I allowed a correlation with “Lef” for the sake of Mayakovsky, who, of course, is the greatest of us... made fruitless attempts to finally leave the team, which itself only included me in its ranks conditionally, and developed its mosquito ideology without asking me.” .

From 1929 to 1931, the magazines “Zvezda” and “Krasnaya Nov” published the poet’s autobiographical prose “Safety Certificate”, and in it he expressed his understanding of the psychology and philosophy of creativity: it is born from the replacement of true reality with the author’s perception of it, the poet’s personality expresses itself in the image, he “throws” the weather on the heroes, and “our passion” on the weather. The truth of art is not the truth of truth; the truth of art contains the ability for eternal development, the image embraces reality in time, in development; imagination and fiction are necessary for its birth. Thus, the poet aesthetically justified his right to freedom creative self-expression, while the life of V. Mayakovsky seemed to him to be a pose, behind which there was anxiety and “drops of cold sweat.”

At the end of the 1920s, in the style of B. Pasternak, there was a clear reorientation towards clarity. In 1930–1931, B. Pasternak again turned to lyrics; V next year His poetic book “The Second Birth” was published, in which philosophical and aesthetic priorities were given to simplicity: “One cannot help but fall towards the end, as into heresy, / Into unheard-of simplicity.”

Simplicity as a principle of perception of the world was associated in the imagination of B. Pasternak with the theme of kinship “with everything that is.” Thus, in the “Safety Certificate”, inanimate objects were declared a stimulus for inspiration, they were from living nature and testified to its “moving whole”; the poet recalled how in Venice he went to the piazza on dates “with a piece of built-up space.” In “The Second Birth,” everyday life itself became a lyrical space that accommodates the hero’s moods: “the enormity of the apartment” brings sadness, the “sleepless smell of matiol” becomes heavy, the downpour is filled with “calf” delights and tenderness. The concept of the world as a moving whole was expressed in the motif of the penetration of a person’s inner world into the objective world (“The thin-rib partition / I will pass through, I will pass like light, / I will pass as an image enters an image / And as an object cuts an object”), as well as the affinity with the non-objective world (“But even so, - not like a tramp. / I will enter into my native language as a native”).

The poems of “The Second Birth” are not just autobiographical (“Everything will be here: what I have experienced / And what I still live with, / My aspirations and foundations, / And what I have seen in reality”) - they are intimate: B. Pasternak’s lyrics are dedicated to two women - the artist E.V. Lurie and Z.N. Neuhaus: the marriage with the first collapsed, it began with the second new life. In love, the lyrical hero seeks simplicity and naturalness of relationships. In the clarity and lightness of the beloved is the clue to existence (“And the secret of your charm / Is tantamount to the clue to life”).

Comprehension of the lightness and grace of being is accompanied by the theme of accepting “worlds of dissonance,” which has already been heard in the poetry of A. Blok and in the poetry of S. Yesenin. The lyrical hero of B. Pasternak accepts everything, welcomes everything: “and the fatal blue of the sky,” and “the whole essence” of his beloved, and “the fluffy batting of poplars,” and “last year’s despondency.”

In the 1930s, B. Pasternak was a poet recognized by the authorities. At the First Congress of Writers, N. Bukharin called him one of the most remarkable masters of verse of that time. But in the second half of the 1930s, realizing the ambiguity of his position, the unnaturalness of the alliance between power and a free artist, he retired from the proscenium of the official literary life. In 1936–1944, he wrote poems that formed the poetry book “On Early Trains” (1945). In them, the poet, secluded in Peredelkino’s “bear corner,” declared his life concept, in which inner peace, contemplation, regularity of being, the consistency of poetic creativity with the creativity of nature, and quiet gratitude for the given fate became priorities; as he wrote in the poem “Rime”:

And the white dead kingdom,
To the one who made me shiver,
I quietly whisper: “Thank you,
You give more than they ask.”

In the book, B. Pasternak expressed his feeling of homeland. In this image there is neither lubokism nor a taste of partisanship or revolutionism. His Russia is not Soviet state. His perception of his homeland combined intimacy, intellectuality and philosophy. Thus, in the poem “On Early Trains” a sensual note sounded:

The essence of Russia is revealed through talents. It is a “magic book”, it contains “the autumn twilight of Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and Levitan” (“Winter is Coming”). The homeland expresses itself in nature, it is “like the voice of a forest”, “like a call in the forest”, it smells like “a birch bud” (“Revived Fresco”). During the war, she was also the intercessor of the Slavic world; she was assigned the mission of liberator and comforter (“Spring”). B. Pasternak created the image of Russia - the chosen one, she has a special “Russian destiny”:

And Russian fate is boundless,
What can you dream about in a dream?
And always remains the same
With unprecedented novelty.

("Indiscretion")

During the Great Patriotic War, Russia goes through difficult trials and defeats evil. War stories were interpreted by the poet, essentially, in a Christian way. War is a conflict between “murderers” and “Russian boundless fate.” The invaders are guilty before the poet’s homeland of the New Testament sin; they repeated the crime of Herod in Bethlehem: “The fear of the awakened children / Will never be forgiven,” “The torment of the little cripples / Can’t be forgotten” (“ Scary tale"); “And we always remembered / the girl picked up in the field, / with whom the canals amused themselves” (“Persecution”). In poems about the war, the theme of future punishment for violence against children sounds: the enemy “will pay”, he will “be counted”, he will “not be forgiven”, “the offenders must pay us.”

Enemy aircraft are “night evil spirits” (“Zastava”). The souls of those who sacrificed their lives in the battle with “evil spirits”, with the enemy, gain immortality. The theme of sacrifice and immortality of the soul is one of the main ones in the “Poems about War” cycle. In the poem “Courage,” nameless heroes, not counted among the living, carried off their feat “to the abode of the thunderers and eagles”; in the poem “Winner”, the “immortal lot” fell to all of Leningrad. The sapper, a hero with “the innate resilience of a peasant,” died, but managed to complete a combat mission - he prepared a hole in the barriers, through which “the battle poured in”; his comrades put him in the grave - and time did not stop, the artillery spoke “in its two thousand throats”: “The wheels in the clock moved. / The levers and pulleys woke up”; such sappers “did not save their souls” and gained immortality: “It is customary for everyone to live and burn, / But then you will only immortalize life, / When you draw a path for it to light and greatness / With your sacrifice” (“Death of a Sapper”).

Military feats in B. Pasternak's military lyrics were interpreted as asceticism, which soldiers performed with prayer in their hearts. “In a frenzy, as if in prayer,” the avengers rushed “after the murderers” (“Persecution”), Desperate scouts were protected from bullets and captivity by the prayers of loved ones (“Scouts”). In the poem “The Revived Fresco,” the entire earth was perceived as a prayer service: “The earth hummed like a prayer service / For the aversion of the howling bomb, / Like a censer, smoke and rubble / Throwing out the carnage”; pictures of the war were associated with the plot of the monastery fresco, enemy tanks - with a snake, the hero himself - with St. George the Victorious: “And suddenly he remembered his childhood, childhood, / And the monastery garden, and sinners.” It is characteristic that in the drafts the poem was preserved under the title “Resurrection.”

In his poems about the war, B. Pasternak expressed a Christian understanding of the significance of man in history. In the Gospel, he was attracted by the idea that in the kingdom of God there are no nations, it is inhabited by individuals. These thoughts will gain special meaning V creative destiny poet in the winter of 1945–1946, when he began writing the novel Doctor Zhivago. B. Pasternak, who perceived post-revolutionary reality as a dead period, sensed a military living life, in which both the immortal principle and the community of personalities were manifested.

The novel "Doctor Zhivago" was completed in 1955. It was not published in the USSR, although the author attempted to publish it in Novy Mir. In September 1956, the magazine refused to publish the novel, citing the fact that the work, in the opinion of the editorial board, distorted the role of the October Revolution and the intelligentsia that sympathized with it. In 1957, Doctor Zhivago was published by the Milanese publishing house Feltrinelli. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Pasternak wrote a novel about life as work to overcome death. Yuri Zhivago’s uncle Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest who was defrocked at his own request, argued that life is the work of unraveling death, that only after Christ did life begin in love for one’s neighbor, with sacrifice, with a sense of freedom, eternal, that “a person dies in the midst of work dedicated to overcoming death." Immortality, according to Vedenyapin, is another name for life, and one only needs to “remain faithful to immortality, one must be faithful to Christ.” B. Pasternak believed that the personality of Christian times always lives in other people. He believed in the immortality of creativity and the immortality of the soul. According to F. Stepun, in the messianic utopia of Bolshevism, B. Pasternak “heard the voice of death and saw the mute face of a man grieving over the desecration of the most precious thing that the Creator has bestowed upon man - the desecration of his godlikeness, in which the mystery of personality is rooted.” The novel explored the theme of life and death, the living and the dead. In the system of images, heroes with significant surnames - Zhivago and Strelnikov - oppose each other.

Zhivago and those close to him lived in love, sacrificing themselves and with a sense of inner freedom, even in Soviet Russia, into which they could not fit. They lived life as a test. The hero believed that everyone is born Faust in order to experience everything.

The image of Zhivago personified the Christian idea of ​​the intrinsic value of the human person, its priority in relation to communities and peoples. His fate confirmed Nikolai Nikolaevich’s conclusion that circles and associations are contraindicated for talented people: “Any herdism is an approach to untalentedness, it doesn’t matter whether it’s loyalty to Solovyov, or Kant, or Marx.” The novel truly reflects the Christian idea, according to which in the kingdom of God there are no nations, but there are individuals. He wrote about this to his cousin, the famous philologist and classicist O.M. Frydenberg October 13, 1946

The concept of the intrinsic value of personal life influenced the nature of Zhivago’s worldview, which was similar to the feelings of the lyrical hero of Pasternak’s poetry. His destiny is realized in everyday life - pre-revolutionary, war, post-war. The hero appreciates life in its vain, everyday, moment-to-moment, concrete manifestations. He is guided by Pushkin’s attitude to life, by his “My ideal now is a housewife, / My desires are peace, / Let me have a pot of cabbage soup, and a big one”: Pushkin’s lines are dominated by everyday objects, nouns, things - and essences; objects “lined up in a rhyming column along the edges of the poem”; Pushkin's tetrameter seemed to the hero as a “measuring unit of Russian life.” Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky “looked for meaning, summed up the results”; Pushkin and Chekhov simply lived in “current particulars,” but their lives turned out to be not “particular,” but a “common matter.” Zhivago reflected on the urgency, on the significance of everything, including the unreasonable in the bustle: things barely noticed during the day, as well as thoughts not brought to clarity or words left unattended, at night, acquiring flesh and blood, “become themes of dreams, as if in retribution for the day’s neglect of them.”

The antipode of Zhivago, obsessed with the Strelnikov revolution, thinks in general, great and abstract categories. Abstract and his idea of ​​good. His entry into the revolution occurred naturally, as a logical step, as a real manifestation of his maximalism. Aspiring as a child to “the highest and brightest,” he imagined life as a lists on which “people competed in achieving perfection.” His thinking was utopian, he simplified the world order. Feeling that life is not always the path to perfection, he decided to “someday become a judge between life and the dark principles that distort it, come to its defense and avenge it.” The nature of a revolutionary, according to Pasternak, is maximalism and bitterness. Strelnikov decides on a superhuman mission. Revolution for him - doomsday on the ground.

Revolutionary reality, as interpreted by Pasternak, is the revolutionary madness of an era in which no one has a clear conscience, which is inhabited by secret criminals, untalented Bolsheviks with their idea of ​​​​transforming all real human life into a transitional period. Zhivago became disillusioned with the revolution; he realized that what happened in 1917 was not the same revolution of 1905 that the youth in love with Blok worshiped, that the revolution of 1917 was bloody, a soldier’s revolution, which grew out of the war, and was directed by the Bolsheviks. This is a revolution of people who are deaf and dumb by nature. The episode in the compartment is symbolic: Zhivago’s fellow traveler is a deaf-mute, for whom the revolutionary upheavals in Russia are normal phenomena.

Having understood life as a military campaign, Strelnikov, ultimately rejected by the revolution itself, is forced to repent of his bloody sins. He is tormented by sad memories, conscience, and dissatisfaction with himself. Both Zhivago and Strelnikov are victims of the revolution. Zhivago returns to Moscow in the spring of 1922, “wild.” The motif of savagery is also expressed in the image of the post-war country. Peasant Russia went wild: half of the villages Zhivago visited were empty, the fields were abandoned and not harvested. The hero finds Moscow “deserted, dilapidated.” He dies in a tragic year for the country, which marked the dispossession of kulakism - 1929. The fate of Zhivago’s beloved woman Larisa is sad: she was probably arrested, and she died or disappeared in one of the “countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.” In the epilogue of the novel the theme of tragedy post-revolutionary Russia expressed in the dialogue between Gordon and Dudorov. The characters talk about camp life, about collectivization - “a false and failed measure”, about its consequences - “the cruelty of Yezhovism, the promulgation of a constitution not designed for application, the introduction of elections not based on the elective principle.” The unbearable reality is also expressed in the perception of the Patriotic War, despite its bloody price, as a “good”, “a wave of deliverance”.

The novel begins with an episode of the funeral of Yuri Zhivago's mother; the story about the hero's life ends with a description of his funeral. Between these episodes is the path of knowledge.

On earth, the hero lives his immortal life after death in creativity. His poems are discovered in the papers of the late Zhivago. They constitute the seventeenth and last part of the novel - “Poems of Yuri Zhivago”. Already the first - “Hamlet” - is in tune with the theme of the novel. In the image of Hamlet, Pasternak saw not the drama of spinelessness, but the drama of duty and self-denial, which connects Hamlet’s fate with the mission of Christ. Hamlet renounces his right to choose in order to do the will of the One who sent him, that is, the “stubborn plan” of the Lord. In Hamlet’s prayer “If only it is possible, Abba Father, / Carry this cup past,” the word of Christ spoken in the Garden of Gethsemane sounds: “Abba Father! All things are possible for You; carry this cup past me.” The theme of “Hamlet” correlates with the theme of the last poem “The Garden of Gethsemane”, which expresses the idea of ​​the novel: the way of the cross is inevitable as a guarantee of immortality; Christ, having accepted the cup of trials, giving himself up as a sacrifice, says: “To me for judgment, like the barges of a caravan, / Centuries will float out of the darkness.” The hero of the poem “Dawn” also takes on the burden of human worries: “I feel for them all, / As if I had been in their shoes.”

Such penetration of personality into human destinies, immersion in human vanity, in everyday life - a covenant from above (“All night I read Your covenant”). For Christian Pasternak, it is valuable that Christ explained Divine truth with parables from everyday life. In “Dawn” the image of poetry is “omnivorous”; it expresses not only the secrets of the universe, but also the little things of life. The subject of poetry is life itself. Zhivago’s poems are dedicated to her: “March”, “On Passion”, “ White Night”, “Spring thaw”, “Wind”, “Hops”... He equally sings of the “heat of temptation” (“Winter Night”) and household chores: “The currant leaf is rough and clothy. / There is laughter in the house and the glass is clinking” (“Indian Summer”).

After completing Doctor Zhivago, B. Pasternak began an autobiographical essay, People and Positions, in which he questioned the idea of ​​​​creating new poetic means of expression. B. Pasternak’s aesthetic positions are focused on the classical literary language. Arguing with aesthetic concepts A. Bely and V. Khlebnikov, he wrote that the most amazing discoveries in creativity were made “in the old language.” Thus, Pasternak’s idol Scriabin “using the means of his predecessors renewed the feeling of music to its foundation,” and Chopin said his stunning word in music “in the old Mozart-Fieldian language.” In moments of creative discovery, the content overwhelms the artist and does not give him time to think about innovation in form. Pasternak drew attention to some aspects of psychology and culture that accompany discoveries. For example, Scriabin’s ideas about the superman are “a primordially Russian craving for extremes,” and it is this extremeness, this craving for infinity that underlies the creation of not only “supermusic,” but also everything that the artist creates. In the fate of Blok, Pasternak highlighted “everything that creates a great poet” - fire and tenderness, a whirlwind of impressionability; among these definitions there is also “one’s own image of the world” - that which shaped Pasternak’s work. Remembering S. Yesenin, B. Pasternak identified a sign of artistry, in other words, the highest Mozartian principle.

These aesthetic criteria - extremeness, his own image of the world, the Mozartian principle - were organic to the work of B. Pasternak, but they contradicted the aesthetic norms of official literature of the 1950s, and therefore B. Pasternak experienced an internal drama, which he expressed in a poem in 1959 “Nobel Prize”: “I was lost like an animal in a pen. / Somewhere there are people, will, light.” In one of his letters in 1924, B. Pasternak conjectured that Russia notices and singles out people in order “to then slowly strangle and torture them” (5, 158). Zhivago is an image of a creative personality, endowed with talent and slowly being suffocated. In his hero, Pasternak, by his own admission, imprinted himself, and Blok, and Yesenin, and Mayakovsky.

The desire to affirm and reveal one’s own image of the world, which was in many ways different from what Soviet, fundamentally atheistic, philosophy and literature offered, determined the content of the poems of 1956–1959, which made up the cycle “When it clears up.”

Moving away from the conflict of modern life, B. Pasternak created his inner world on the principles of harmony and peace. It was as if he lived not according to the law of the country, but according to the canon of the universe. In the poem “When it clears up,” the temple became the model:

It's like the inside of a cathedral -
The expanse of earth, and through the window
The distant echo of a choir
Sometimes I can hear.
Nature, peace, hiding place of the universe,
I will serve you for a long time,
Embraced by a hidden trembling,
I stand in tears of happiness.

In “Safety Certificate,” the poet conjectured that only the image keeps up with the successes of nature. Poetry is adequate to nature, therefore it is a means of understanding the essence of the world. That is why the lyrical hero of his poem “In everything I want to reach...” would have broken up the poems like a garden, bringing into them “the breath of roses, / The breath of mint, / Meadows, sedge, hayfield, / Thunderstorms rolling.” Poetry is an assistant in comprehending the “essence of past days,” “the properties of passion,” and “heartache.” In the poem “Untitled” there is the same theme of the adequacy of creativity to nature: “Touchy, quiet in everyday life, / Now you are all fire, all burning. / Let me lock up your beauty / In the dark chamber of a poem.” About this - in “Being Famous is Ugly...”: through poetry you can “Attract the love of space to yourself, / Hear the call of the future”; true poetry expresses living life, false, with hype and success, - dead, archival.

The very form of the poem symbolic name“Eve” conveys the initial process of understanding the essence of the world. Recognition begins with associations, comparisons, and guesses. The form of “Eve” captures an intuitive comprehension of the world when there is still no clarity of definitions. The poem is built on chains of metaphors and comparisons: midday “threw the clouds into the ponds,” as if they were a fisherman’s nets; the firmament is sinking like a net, and into this sky, as if in a net, a crowd of bathers is swimming; rings of yarn curl like snakes - as if the “tempter - a serpent” was hiding in the wet knitwear; woman - “like a tightness in the throat.” The same convention, uncertainty is present in the poem “Man”: “You were created as if in rough draft, / Like a line from another cycle, / As if in earnest in a dream, / You arose from my rib.” In the poem - metaphor "July" the surrounding world is something insubstantial, abstract, not amenable to specific definitions: July is a ghost, a brownie, a tenant, shadows. But now convention gives way to clarity, the world becomes transparent, definite, united, understandable. All the phenomena of nature and everyday life, all the actions of the heroes are simple, familiar, calm, they are correlated with the harmony of existence. This is the world in the poems “Picking Mushrooms” (“we’re hanging out picking mushrooms”, “ankle-deep in dew”, “a mushroom is hiding behind a stump”, “the trucks are full”), “Silence” (an elk “comes to a fork in the road”, “among the thicket a moose stands”, “a moose eats a forest crouch”, “an acorn dangles on a branch”), “Hacks” (dragonflies scurrying about, “collective farmers laugh with a cart”, “the earth is fragrant and strong”). Everyday, familiar existence is built in Pasternak’s poems in the cycle of “births, sorrows and deaths” (“Bread”), in the “days of the solstice,” in the infinity of God’s world, in which “the day lasts longer than a century” (“The Only Days”).

This article is one of a series of articles inspired by Lotman's incorrect (or seemingly incorrect) thoughts, set out in his book Culture and Explosion (1992) and illustrated with passages or entire literary works.

Nameless heroes

Besieged cities

I will hide you in the heart of my heart,

Your valor is beyond words.

What offends me is the silent emphasis on the citation of why the work was created. And I profess unquotability artistic meaning. True, this is only for those works that are not works applied arts, that is, in particular, they are not amplifiers of a previously known feeling. Pasternak is a big name. What one can expect from this poet is not applied art. And Lotman quotes. So the zealous spirit leaped up.

However, it’s a leap, but is there any inconsistency here in Pasternak, which is the only way to unquotely express something cherished by the author?

It seems like there is. On the one hand, something utter nonsense:

Hearing the roll of death,

You have looked into the eyes of centuries...

Meanwhile, something blind

Drunk and spinning

You were captivated...

There's a frenzy of naity...

mesmerized...

...strangers to the world

... carried away to the monastery

Thunderbolts and eagles.

And who are these "You", "strangers to the world", these supermen who communicate with eternity and know how to fall into the altered mental condition, inaccessible to ordinary people? - Little war workers: "Nameless" residents “besieged cities” “From the suburban barricades”, - busy with military routine, since the front approached their city:

You lay down on the road

And at the rutted track

Asked for help

And can’t you hear where your people are?

And then, chewing the crust,

Across the tormented fields

You walked without losing your spirit,

To the charred outbuildings.

It is uncharacteristic for the philistines to fight. But. They get used to everything and calmly overcome their ineptitude, since it happens:

You took it with a skillful hand -

Not for flattery and praise,

And with cold knowledge of the matter -

For gun barrels.

And not only the thirst for revenge,

But calm arrow eye,

Like cardboard targets

Pierced the enemy's sides.

Agree that Pasternak brought about a clear clash of contradictions: supermen are philistines. After all, it is unthinkable that these were the same people. The first are aristocrats of the spirit, despising the philistines and the crowd. The latter have no dreams of rising to those heights ( "abode of the Thunderbolts") or fall into those abysses ( "strangers to the world"), where the first ones reach.

Pasternak did not stop at the collision, which is supposed to strike a spark of the ineffable. He, it would seem, took and chewed the mixture and produced a chewed paste - a banality included in the title:

It seemed to you that everything was empty!

It's better to leave after winning[from life]

What an inglorious thing to rot in stagnation

Or get sour locked up.

Thus a winner was born...

But it only seems...

There is such an ambiguous expression by Theophan the Recluse: “Business is not the most important thing in life, the main thing is the mood of the heart”. A truly Christian expression. Covering both the origin and flowering of this faith. After all, Christianity was born as a kind of Nietzscheanism of all times (types of ideals are repeated throughout the centuries). “It was not for nothing that the Greco-Roman pagan authorities called the early Christians atheists. The true God “liberated man from moralism...” (Bibikhin. New Renaissance. M., 1998. P. 207). Don't care about anyone. We are aristocrats of the spirit, and the grass does not grow. I don’t care about death, not only about the surrounding pagans. “...strangers to the world...” Well, in the victory of Christianity - I don’t care about life. Eternal bliss in the next world and another life is coming.

And Christians honor such ascetics. Elevated to the rank of saints. Everyone has their own legend.

And what about Pasternak: couldn’t he have put in some typical, as they say, story of heroism? Or, poor thing, they didn’t take him to the front, and only in 1943 did he get there with a team of writers. In 1941, he personally couldn’t write what was unfelt? So why did you write it at all?

I'll retreat.

There are these words from Porshnev:

“The essence of world development, according to Hegel, is progress in the consciousness of freedom. At first, among prehistoric tribes, general lack of freedom and injustice reigned. With the emergence of the state, progress is embodied in a change in the state-legal foundations of society: in ancient despotism - the freedom of one with the slavery of all others, later - the freedom of the minority, then - the freedom of all, but only in Christian principle, and not in practice. Finally, the era of true freedom begins with the French Revolution. Five great historical eras, five spiritual and political formations that deny one another, and at the same time form a whole.[Then there is a fragment about Marxism as an alternative to Hegelianism. After] It is in vain that some authors attribute to Marx and Engels some kind of reverse view of primitive society. Among their various statements, the dominant motif is precisely the idea of ​​the absolute lack of freedom of the individual in prehistoric tribes and communities. They emphasized that there a person did not have the opportunity to make any decision, because every decision was predetermined in advance by clan and tribal custom<…>No matter how impressive the people of this era look in our eyes, they are indistinguishable from each other<…>At the opposite pole of progress, under communism, there is the triumph of reason and freedom.

Stalin said about Pasternak when they reported to him: “that Pasternak’s arrest is being prepared, best friend writers" suddenly recited: "The color of heaven, the color blue...", and then said: "Leave him, he is a celestial being"

Just imagine, Stalin turned out to be more sensitive to poetry than Lotman, a literary critic, cultural critic and semiotician.

The celestial being did not need to go to the front to express his ideal, which was not consistent with the war. This poem is not about war at all. And Pasternak is a genius.

Composition

As a poet, Pasternak was formed under the cross-influence of symbolists and futurists. Formally, he identified himself with the group of moderate futurists “Centrifuge”, in the 20s. was even a member of Leaf (Left Front of the Arts), i.e. the most radical and aggressive wing of proletarian literature, but in fact did not belong to either one or the other. The poet was connected with the Futurists, and then with the Lifovites, only by a common focus on the search for a new poetic language, as well as personal friendship with V. Mayakovsky and M. Aseev, who were members of these groups.

The first poetry collections, “Twin in the Clouds” (1914) and “The Barrier Floor” (1917), were student works. They still clearly show the search for one’s own poetic voice and individual style and pay tribute to the then poetic fashion - symbolist reticence and futurist linguistic shocking. Pasternak himself later skeptically assessed his first poetic attempts and, preparing them for reissue, revised them several times. But even in these collections there are many poems that have become real poetic masterpieces, such as, for example, “This February! Time for tears and poetry...” Summarizing his poetic “apprenticeship,” Pasternak later wrote: “Over the years, it was, so to speak, the concept of the “floor of barriers” that changed for me. From the title of the book it became the name of the period or manner, and under this title I subsequently combined poems written later, if they corresponded to the character of this book...”

Pasternak's wide popularity was brought by the following collection “My Sister is Life” (“My Sister is Life”, 1922), which was continued in 1923 with the collection “Themes and Variations” (“Themes and Variations”). Describing the poems of the first of these collections, Maxim Gorky noted: “When you read them, you experience surprise at the richness and picturesqueness of comparisons, a whirlwind of sonorous words, peculiar rhymes, bold drawings and depth of content. He has created an extremely important place in the history of Russian poetry of the 20th century.” In 1932, Pasternak’s new poetry collection “Vtoroe Rozhdenie” (“Second Birth”) was published, which, among other things, incorporated the poet’s veiled responses to the atmosphere of persecution and repression that was gaining momentum in the country. However, already from his first collections Pasternak emerges as a special poet, not like the others. Pasternak himself felt the complexity of his lyrics and constantly strived for the possibility of a clearer and more intelligible expression. That is why he considered (in most cases unfairly) all his lyrics written by the 40s to be imperfect. According to his own admission, the 1940s were the turning point for him. and, in particular, the collection “On Early Trains” (1943). In subsequent years, Pasternak created several more poetry collections, “Earthly Expanse” (1945), “When It Goes Wild” (1957), in which he strives for clarity and clarity of expression.

Pasternak went down in the history of Russian poetry as a poet who was emphatically unconventional, unlike others, excellent both in poetic manner and in subject matter. First of all, what criticism emphasized, contrasting Pasternak with other poets, was his lack of interest in topical, acute social themes, political and civil topics that were the focus of attention of the then “Soviet” poetry. This is both true and false. On the one hand, in Pasternak one can find examples of perhaps not entirely traditional, but entirely civil and even patriotic lyrics (these are, in particular, the historical revolutionary poems “Nine Hundred and Fifth”, “Lieutenant Schmidt”, the novel in verse “Spektorsky” ", a cycle of poems dedicated to the struggle Soviet people with the fascist invasion, etc.), on the other hand, Pasternak himself never considered them the main ones in his work, giving all his attention and poetic passion to other, closer and more understandable topics to him.

The theme of nature occupies a central place in his poetry. Nature in Pasternak's lyrics is always something more than an ordinary landscape. A. Akhmatova made the remark that “all his life nature was a single and full-fledged Muse, his innermost interlocutor, his Bride and Lover, his Wife and Widow - she was for him what Russia was for Blok.” Pasternak's landscape is no longer a passive object of the image, but the main character and active initiator of the action, the focus of the image, which concentrates around itself the main images of the work and the author's thoughts, colors them with the appropriate mood and breathes life into them. Criticism has repeatedly noted that the likening of nature to man, which is generally inherent in poetry, reaches such a limit in Pasternak that the landscape begins to act as a kind of mentor and moral model for him. Unspecified in most of his contemporary poets, Pasternak’s nature is clearly individual and unique, it has its own character and its own face.

Important topic, which Pasternak addressed throughout his life, was the theme of the poet and poetry. According to the concept that P. adhered to, art is, first of all, a detached view of life, which is not based on any previous experience or ready-made ideas, but as if perceived for the first time, with all the spontaneity, freshness and chaos of impressions. The poet does not seem to recognize reality and, when describing it, does not resort to ready-made diagrams and established logical connections between objects. With childish impartiality in perceptions and assessments, every time, as if for the first time, he discovers reality, and every time it appears before him as something hitherto unknown, surprisingly strange and unacceptable from the standpoint of generally accepted logic. Hence, in Pasternak’s poems there is a significant amount of fantastic images, extraordinary comparisons and likenings, unexpected angles of depicting the subject. One of Pasternak’s most commonly used variations on the theme of art is its origin in the depths of nature, or an explanation of its essence through images of nature (“This February! Time for tears and poetry...”, 1912; “Definition of Poetry,” 1917) :

This is a cool whistle,
This is the clicking of crushed pieces of ice.
This is the leaf-chilling night,
This is a duel between two nightingales.
This is a sweet rotten pea,
These are the tears of the universe in the shoulder blades,
This is from consoles and flutes - Figaro
Falls like hail onto the garden bed.

An equally important thematic element of Pasternak’s poetry is the philosophical, root aspects of human existence and the world - the meaning of being, the purpose of man, the essence of nature and the surrounding world, etc. In many of Pasternak’s works we find a passionate desire to reach, to “get to the bottom” of the very essentially, to the basis of the things that surround us, the nature and nature of the relationships that are established between various objects and phenomena of existence, etc. When depicting this or that object, Pasternak strives to paint not so much its “photographic” authenticity as its hidden reality, unnoticeable behind the extremeness of perception (a kind of programmatic declaration of his philosophical poetry is the verse “In everything I want to get to the very essence...”). Pasternak, as O. Sinyavsky writes, “looked at it [the object], penetrated into the depth of its properties and essence, depicting not only the first impression of the object, but also its concept, idea.

It’s not for nothing that some of Pasternak’s poems are called “Definition” (“Definition of Poetry”, “Definition of the Soul”, etc.).

Pasternak's lyrics are, as usual, difficult to understand. Even Maxim Gorky, in a review of P.’s poem “Nine Hundred and Five,” highlighted the following stylistic features of his poetry: semantic tension and uncertainty, saturation with images, associativity and under-delineation of the depicted. Another remarkable feature of Pasternak’s style is its metaphorical nature. However, Pasternak’s metaphor is not just a means of emphasizing the picturesqueness, the picturesqueness of what is depicted, or providing it with a certain emotional flavor. According to the precise remark of O. Sinyavsky, “metaphor in Pasternak’s poetics primarily performs the function of connection. It instantly, dynamically brings together disparate parts of reality into one whole and thus seems to embody the great unity of the world, the interaction and interpenetration of phenomena.”

Like Mayakovsky, Pasternak resorted to experiments with means of linguistic expression, trying to find ways to update poetic language. Unlike Mayakovsky, who tried to “democratize” the poetic language by introducing the “language of the street”, Pasternak was restrained in his choice of means: his favorite technique was to introduce prose into the poetic language, which, in his opinion, did not deform , but, on the contrary, emphasized his poetry, his aesthetic detachment from the language of everyday communication. A common feature of Pasternak’s poetic style with the futurists is “broken syntax” (grammatical disorder, inversion of words, unreasonably long non-union rows of words, repetitions, inconspicuous or verbless constructions, etc.), which were designed to recreate the natural chaos and disorder of live conversational communication.

Pasternak, with his poetic creativity, made an important contribution to the creation in the country of that atmosphere of inner freedom and spiritual emancipation of the individual, which was forcibly implanted in culture and literature.

I.V. Romanova

In letters to O. Freudenberg in 1910, B. Pasternak tries to define and formulate a new and extremely important state of inspiration, creative ecstasy, when he feels the ability to get as close as possible to the object of his attention, creativity (which can be either animate or inanimate - material or existential) and to some extent reincarnate into it, merge its consciousness with your own and gain your own life as a kind of subjective-objective unity.

«<...>Your letter struck me too much; it is...an enlarged Self.<...>I want all the time to the pain of some kind of movement dedicated to you, wearing your name; and so I want to continue, as if I were your species, a small version that cannot meet or meet halfway, but only continues, specifies the generic, what is behind it, and what is in it as native” (28.7.1910) .

«<...>I<...>told you about such an existence, when you live across the street even from your own life and look: there they lit a fire, there they want to write a prelude, because they came home in such and such a state... and then you run across the street, throw yourself at this, so or otherwise inclined, and write him his prelude; Perhaps this paroxysm of sick delight at such moments comes from the fact that this objective “across the street” ceases, and everything collapses into the subject” (28.7.1910).

This is how the idea of ​​the embodiment of the subject into an object and the mutual transition of subject and object begins to form. She definitely doesn't wear it yet religious nature, but is already understood as the basis human creativity and life. This idea changes somewhat at different stages of time, taking on new semantic shades. However, it can be considered one of the dominant artistic creativity Pasternak.

In the article “Several Propositions” (written in 1918, published in 1920), Pasternak discusses the essence and properties of art. He comes to the conclusion that creativity is a wonderful moment of tuning into the same wavelength of the creator and the object of his inspiration - until they merge into a kind of spiritual unity. This usually happens between people who are initially spiritually close. But it turns out that this miracle of the unity of the artist and his hero (and with him the prototype of the hero) is only partial evidence of the identity of life itself, which at some mental level equalizes and unites different eras and their participants. “That’s the miracle. In the unity and identity of the lives of these three [Mary Stuart, Swinburne - the author of the dramatic trilogy about Mary Stuart, and Pasternak - the translator of Swinburne. - I.R.] and a whole host of others (witnesses and eyewitnesses of three eras, persons of biography, readers).”

Poetry, according to Pasternak, is born only when a person begins to feel a certain connection and identity of all manifestations of life. In “Safety Certificate” (1930), Pasternak describes a night in Marburg when he experienced an unprecedented rush of poetic inspiration, feeling the “all-dissolution” of the world, sky and earth, flowers and stars. He enthusiastically tried to write it all down and suddenly realized that this was the beginning of his break with philosophy.

There, in the “Safety Certificate”, discussing painting and the unity of art, Pasternak again pursues the idea of ​​the identity of the depicted, the artist and the subject of the image: “I further learned what syncretism accompanies the flourishing of skill, when, with the identity of the artist and the pictorial element achieved, it becomes It is impossible to say which of the three and for whose benefit is most active on the canvas - the performer, the performed or the subject of the performance.”

Pasternak comes to the conclusion about the peculiarities of culture as a whole, starting with the Bible. It lies in historical symbolism, in the fact that people are building a world “molded” from “earth and sky, life and death and two times, present and absent. I understood that the force of adhesion, which lies in the end-to-end imagery of all its particles, prevents it from falling apart.”

The property of life to be identical to itself, to unite and equalize the most diverse phenomena, to contain in its very nature the idea of ​​unity, Pasternak later, in the poem “While we are climbing in the Caucasus...” (1931) will call “the through fabric of existence.”

Helps the artist to achieve such a higher unity with the object and subject of his work. historical memory and exclusively poetic, which is akin to inspiration and the gift of reincarnation. We will find evidence of this in Pasternak’s poem “Winter Night” (1913, 1928), where the lyrical subject and memory merge together: “Memory, don’t fret! Grow together with me! Believe / And assure me that I am one with you.”

The poem “Ballad” (“It happens that a courier on a greyhound ...”), in particular, describes the case of the unity of loved ones creative personalities that existed in different times and spaces, at a certain critical and ecstatic moment. And this feeling of unity - “the power of cohesion” - extends to the whole world, to the degree of connectedness of the lyrical subject and the earth. The underlying text of “The Ballad” contains Pasternak’s childhood impressions of his trip with his father to Astapovo after receiving news of Leo Tolstoy’s fatal illness and of the poet’s mother’s performance of Chopin’s ballads at that time. It is remarkable that Pasternak here, just as in “Safety Certificate,” uses Tolstoy’s famous expression “cohesion force.”

Even the unity of two people in love can be felt by Pasternak to some extent indirectly, through art, literature and its also united heroes:

On that day, all of you from combs to toes,
Like a tragedian in the provinces plays Shakespeare's drama,
I carried it with me and knew it by heart,
I wandered around the city and rehearsed.

In this excerpt from the poem “Marburg” (1916, 1928), the unity of the lyrical subject and his beloved, distant from him in space, is realized through the same memory, which flows from the “memory of the heart” into the “memory of art.” The above fragment of “Marburg” indirectly refers us to Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”, in Pasternak’s translation of which there are words about the unity of people prepared by fate: “We are on the same line in the book of fate” (d. 5, scene 3). The same Shakespearean line will later connect two more characters in Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” - Yuri Zhivago and Antipov-Strelnikov, united by their love for the same woman and the common role of tragic victims of history for all three.

The idea of ​​similarity and identity of the subject and object of creativity formed the basis of the cycle of poems “Theme with Variations”, which was reflected not only in the compositional technique borrowed from music (the main theme, containing a significant image, is stated several times, but with various changes in the field of form ), but also in the epigraph from the poem by Ap. Grigoriev “To the Heroes of Our Time”: “But you did not see them, did not see the mysterious connection between us / And those sphinxes.”

The feeling of a person’s unity with his time, the feeling of their same nature, interdependence requires a certain sacrifice from a person. It is akin to Christian sacrifice, which Pasternak saw, in particular, in Hamlet and with which he endowed the main character of his poem “Lieutenant Schmidt” (1926-1927). In turn, the image of the “great change of time”, which brought Schmidt to the forefront of history, correlates with the famous Shakespearean image “The connecting thread of days has broken!”

Like you, I am part of the great Time Shift....

Thus, inextricability with time, its elements, the willingness to live, feel and act according to the laws that time dictates, and the associated self-sacrifice put Christ, Hamlet, Lieutenant Schmidt (and later Yuri Zhivago) on a par in Pasternak’s artistic world.

In the poem “I realized: everything is alive.” (1935) in the foreground - a poet, a microcosm in a macrocosm. He feels organically connected with the world around him, with art, with his time, sensitively reacting to any event and embodying it in creativity.

And forever, like a collapse, bursting in from outside,
The great in the small will be reflected in me.

This unity of the poet and life is Pasternak’s spiritual principle, captured by him in the title of his outstanding book of poems, “My Sister Life,” which, in turn, was influenced by the attitude and teaching of Francis of Assisi, and the very way of life of the sister may have been borrowed at P. Verlaine. Pasternak proclaims this principle almost two decades later in the poem “All inclinations and pledges...” (1936).

It seemed like alpha and omega -
Life and I are cut the same;
AND all year round, in the snow, without snow,
She lived like an alter ego
And I called her sister.

The idea of ​​the unity of various manifestations of life extends to art and, in particular, to literature, not only in the form of the wonderful proximity of the artist and the object of creativity. It lies in the very nature of poetic language, in the fact that Yu.N. Tynyanov called “crowdedness of the verse series”, when a word in a verse is subject to powerful influence semantic shells of neighboring words, in which additional meanings of the word are updated and a new image arises. Pasternak calls this interaction of words “alloy”, “cohesion”: “In the moment when the breath of the alloy / Words are united into a word?”

In the poem “Waves” it is said about this: “I will pass as an image enters an image / And as an object cuts an object.”

For the first time in the mid-1920s, the idea of ​​the unity of subject and object in Pasternak's poetry acquired social meaning. The poem “Not Opera Villagers...” (1926), addressed to M. Tsvetaeva, conveys the idea of ​​the impossibility of true spiritual unity. True poets are alone, they are far from the ignorant and rude crowd that represents and prefers biased art.

In the 1930s, Pasternak’s lyrical subject begins to comprehend his position in relation to the common people in the poem “Happy is he who is entirely...” (1936). He is clearly aware of his alienness among the general mass of those who are commonly called “the poor.” However, he sincerely strives to merge with the people, to feel the unity of the common historical fate as personal happiness - as opposed to those hypocrites who only in words proclaim their inextricable connection with the people.

Later, the social aspect of the problem of unity will arise again in the poem “Change” (1956), which can be considered as a direct polemic with the poem “Happy is he who is entirely...” and in general his own life position 1930s.

The need to dissolve in the masses for the lyrical subject of Pasternak is an expression not so much of a civic position as creative principle. An artist can be truthful when he knows the fullness of life from his own experience. In addition, people “from the working class” turn out to be much closer to the artist due to the naturalness in the manifestations of their feelings, resistance to the blows of fate, and the simplicity of their way of life. However, many years of nationwide crookedness in relation to the people and in assessing poverty also influenced the artist - another evidence of the inextricable connection and interdependence of man and time: “And I have become spoiled since then, / As time was touched by corruption.” Disappointment in previous ideals, loss of trust in authoritative and close people, not so much personal as social loneliness, loss of a sense of unity with the “rolling sea” is felt by the lyrical subject of “Change” as a life and creative catastrophe.

It turns out that for personal happiness and creative success, the artist needs a feeling of unity with nature, his beloved, time, with all previous art and - of course - with his people, with the poor.

Somewhat apart in Pasternak’s work of the 1910s - 1930s stands a fragment from the unfinished poem “Glow,” in which the idea of ​​unity is embodied in the image of the hero’s double, appearing in a dream. The very idea of ​​a double is romantic, hence the touch of demonism in this image. But his speech reveals him to be a philistine, an opportunist, petty and insignificant. Thus, the image of a mysterious double is transformed into the inner voice of the hero, formulating very common principles of life, but not acceptable to him.

In the same sense of identifying “I” with everything that “I” does not accept and that catches the eye, manifesting itself in others, a fragment of one of the messages of the hero of “Letters from Tula” (1918) is perceived: “This is the frenzy of ignorance and the most disadvantaged impudence. It's me.<.. .>Here is their vocabulary: genius, poet, boredom, poetry, mediocrity, philistinism, tragedy, woman, me and her. How scary it is to see your own on strangers.”

Until now, the idea of ​​the unity of subject and object, with all the diversity of its incarnations, had a positive connotation. “Glow” and “Letters from Tula” are examples, first of all, of the moral, ethical unacceptability of the coexistence of the hero with his “double” - alter ego.

In the novel Doctor Zhivago, the idea of ​​unity experiences its revival and transformation. Here it is presented in all its diversity, not only at the semantic, but also at the structural levels. Here, in addition to the incarnations we have already considered, the idea of ​​unity is realized in the light of Russian religious philosophy of the early 20th century, which is reflected in the novel as a whole.

One of the main themes of religious philosophy, which received permission in Orthodox theology- this is the theme of the embodiment of subject and object, the theme of conciliarity of consciousness. It is based, in particular, on the following provisions of V. Solovyov: “Every person, if only he allows himself to be “imagined by Christ,” i.e. will be imbued with the spirit of a perfect person, determine His image as the ideal norm throughout his life and activities, and become involved in the Divine by the power of the Son of God abiding in him. For a person in this reborn state, individuality - like nationality and all other features and differences - ceases to be a boundary, but becomes the basis of a positive connection with the collective pan-humanity that replenishes it.<...>individual characteristics do not separate each from everyone, but connect with everyone, being the basis of its special meaning for everyone and positive interaction with everyone.”

In the poem “Dawn” from Zhivago’s notebook, these thoughts found their poetic embodiment, but they were also joined by a new meaning - spiritual religious revival, happiness through self-sacrifice, through the absorption of one’s “I” by the divinely blessed surrounding world, through complete dissolution in it:

I feel for them all
It's like being in their shoes...
There are people with no names with me,
Trees, children, homebodies.
I'm defeated by them all
And only in that is my victory.

During his student years, Pasternak dealt with the issue of philosophical understanding of consciousness. At the end of his life, he puts his thoughts on this topic into the mouth of Yu.A. Zhivago: “How do you remember yourself, what part of your composition were you aware of? Your kidneys, liver, blood vessels? No, no matter how much you remember, you always caught yourself in outward, active manifestation, in the works of your hands, in your family, in others.<...>Man in other people is the soul of man. This is what you are, this is what your consciousness has been breathing and feeding on all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others.<...>You were in others, and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory. It will be you, who has become part of the future.”

Later in the poem “Wedding” Zhivago will write:

Life is also only a moment,
Only dissolution
Ourselves in all others
As if as a gift to them.

“The Wedding” speaks of the ideal of human unity, union, and common aspiration loving people to perfection. A wedding and a song turn out to be images of the entire human life, full of high ethical meaning. It is important to note that the poems preceding “The Wedding” depict the difficult path of lovers to each other, and subsequent poems - with all their drama, the doom of a person to suffer, to the position of a victim - all, without exception, put at the center the heroes who have achieved this highest form of spirituality. union.

And here are the lines from the poem “Date,” which is perceived as a providential meeting of two loving and suffering souls, their highest and eternal unity in memory of earthly love:

And I cannot draw boundaries between us.
Poem “Magdalene. I":
With you, like with a tree, an escape
Grown together in my immeasurable melancholy.

The origins of such unity and interpenetration, as Pasternak puts it, lie in the essence of life itself, which acts as a constant renewal of itself in various manifestations and incarnations, thereby bringing all things in the world into identity with each other and with it - life.

If we consider that the surname Zhivago came from the word life, then, obviously, such properties of life as self-identity and constant renewal in endless incarnations and combinations should also pass to the person who bears this surname. And this is precisely what explains greatest number diverse forms expressing unity, “a sense of connectedness” of Yuri Zhivago with the surrounding people, objects, the universe, creativity, God. Characters who are spiritually close to Zhivago will experience a similar thing.

The first hint of a certain identity between the bearers of the Zhivago surname is found on the very first page of the novel, in the scene of the funeral of Yura’s mother: “The curious entered the procession and asked: “Who is being buried?” They were answered: “Zhivago.” - "That's it. Got it". - “Not him. Her". - "Doesn't matter » . Little Yura tries to comprehend his surname and finds that this word refers to a lot of things, not even people: a factory, a bank, houses, a way of tying and pinning a tie with a Zhivago pin, even a sweet pie.

The central characters of the novel - Nikolai Nikolaevich, Yuri Andreevich and their loved ones experience a conciliar feeling of togetherness and common destiny with those around them; for them, isolated happiness is not happiness. Another clearest manifestation of the unity of personalities and their consciousnesses is the internal unity of Doctor Zhivago and Lara.

However, it is precisely about the features and signs of conciliarity of consciousness that we can speak when there is a relation between the united human consciousnesses to the highest - Divine - sphere. There is such a reference in Pasternak’s text - this is a mention of the sky, the universe. “And we were definitely taught to kiss in heaven and then sent as children to live at the same time<...>. Some kind of crown of togetherness,<...>the equal value of the whole being, everything brings joy, everything has become a soul.”

In his poems, Zhivago will say “I” in the name of Christ. But this idea is embodied most clearly in the poem by Zhivago and Pasternak “Hamlet”, where five faces merge in one image. The text of the poem is structured in such a way that it can be read differently depending on who is behind the lyrical “I”: Shakespeare's Hamlet, after whose name the poem is named; an actor in the role of Hamlet, as indicated by theatrical vocabulary; Jesus Christ (the text includes an almost verbatim quotation from the Gospel of Mark from the prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the concept of “Pharisees” was initially opposed to Christ and everything connected with Him); Yuri Zhivago and Boris Pasternak - as the authors of the poem - fictional and real. This is the most convincing parallel to the words of S.N. Trubetskoy: “<...>Each of us seems to harbor several different potential personalities. And this, in turn, leads us to the ethical task, that is, the task of realizing conciliar consciousness. The ideal of conciliarity, according to S.N. Trubetskoy, can only be realized in the church’s divine-human organism.

The second level, at which the idea of ​​unity manifests itself, also consists of various shapes unity, but, unlike the previous level, they are not spoken about directly, but are highlighted on the basis of certain formal indicators. And, as a rule, these unities, to one degree or another, constitute a feature of the structure and construction of the text.

The first form of expression of unity and interpenetration of consciousnesses at this level concerns the prose part of the novel. Conventionally, this form can be characterized as “the presence of characters expressing one (author’s) consciousness.” Here we are based on the study of L. Rzhevsky “Language and style of the novel by B.L. Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago". Language central characters(Yuri Zhivago, Lara, Vedenyapin, Sima Tuntseva, Strelnikov, Alexander Aleksandrovich Gromeko, Tony, Gordon and Dudorov) in terms of vocabulary, stylistic and structural-semantic features contains much in common and is very close to the style of the author’s own, monologue speech(and we will now add - and to the author’s consciousness).

Rzhevsky makes the same observation regarding the styles and poetics of portraiture in the novel. Only portraits in Doctor Zhivago extensive gallery characters from the outer circle. The characters who form the center of the story are completely devoid of portrait appearance. The author of the article does not explain the reasons for this phenomenon. We assume that autogenous characters are mostly and highest degree realize in themselves, in their relationships with each other, first of all, and with others the idea of ​​unity. They seem to “flow” into each other in their consciousness.

The same principle forms the basis of the icon-painting tradition. E.N. Trubetskoy, in his essays on the Russian icon, explained that in icon painting we find an image of the future temple or cathedral humanity. Such an image must necessarily be symbolic, and not real, since conciliarity has not yet been realized, we see only its imperfect beginnings on earth. So in icons the idea of ​​conciliarity dominates over the human appearance.

However, the idea of ​​unity of consciousness can also be embodied in contrast to what was stated above. It, firstly, refers exclusively to the poetic part of the novel and, secondly, it is conventionally called “in one “I” there are several “faces”. Indeed, only in a few key poems from The Poems of Yuri Zhivago (namely, “Hamlet,” “August,” and “Garden of Gethsemane”) and nowhere else in the novel does the lyrical “I” connect, unite, and identify the various speakers (and therefore - and consciousness) existing in different world-contexts. The function of “I” in such texts was described in detail by S. Zolyan in the article ““Here I am all...” On the analysis of “Hamlet” by B. Pasternak.”

Each of the “faces” sheds new light on the image of the hero of the novel, Doctor Zhivago, and on the novel as a whole. However, more often than other “faces” in these poems, the “face” of Christ appears in Zhivago. Therefore, we can assume that Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” is a novel about Christ and about those on whom the reflection of Christ lies (St. George, Hamlet, Yuri Zhivago), who were born at one of the tragic moments of history, passed their godfather path and created art similar to the Revelation of John and adding to it.

Finally, the idea of ​​unity is expressed by such a construction of the novel, in which prose and poetry are interconnected, form parallel passages, echoes, on the basis of which we conclude that “The Poems of Yuri Zhivago” is another array of novel narrative. These parallels may be more obvious, especially if the text of the novel makes a direct connection with Zhivago's poems, or less obvious ones. The relationship between poetry and prose in Pasternak’s novel is covered in detail in the article by Yu.B. Orlitsky and A.N. Anisova, however, without correlation with the ideas of religious philosophy.

Other cases of embodiment of the idea of ​​unity in Pasternak's poems of the 1950s develop the meanings stated back in early work.

Thus, the idea of ​​unity is presented throughout creative path Pasternak in all the diversity of its manifestations, which include: the unity and identity of all manifestations of life; unity of life circumstances of different people; the unity of the creator, creation and subject of creativity; reality and art; ancient cultures of different peoples; the poet and the people, the poor; words, themes, images in a poetic text; man and nature; person and time; loving men and women; genetically related people repeating each other in subsequent generations; a person and his second “I”; the unity of the novel’s characters, expressing predominantly one consciousness, close to the author’s; the unity of personal incarnations (“faces”) existing in different world-contexts of a poetic text; prose and poetry in the novel.

This problem reaches its apogee in Doctor Zhivago, where it acquires a new philosophical and religious meaning - Christian conciliarity, “second birth” and the embodiment of oneself in another, the unity of all believers in God.

All these manifestations of unity, with the exception of duality as the embodiment of the worst aspects of personality, are a necessary condition for a happy, harmonious earthly existence of a person and his artistic creativity, a guarantee of immortality. The main means of achieving unity are memory, art (creativity) and faith. Pasternak’s implementation in his work and in life of the idea of ​​the unity of everything with everything, first of all, understood in a Christian way, is a step towards man’s realization of the divine principle in empirical reality. This is a step towards the theurgic art.

L-ra: Philological sciences. – 2003. – No. 5. – P. 3-14.

Keywords: Boris Pasternak, criticism of the work of Boris Pasternak, criticism of the poetry of Boris Pasternak, analysis of the work of Boris Pasternak, download criticism, download analysis, download for free, Russian literature of the 20th century, Doctor Zhivago

The hero of Pasternak’s novel “since his high school years, he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, where he could insert, in the form of hidden explosive nests, the most stunning things that he had seen and changed his mind. But he was still too young for such a book, and so he gets away with writing poetry instead, just as a painter would spend his entire life writing sketches for a large planned painting.”
This description of Yuri Zhivago’s dream, like much else in the novel, is mixed with autobiographical yeast and can be attributed to the creative experience of the author himself. The state of a “physical dream of a book,” which “is a cubic piece of a hot, steaming conscience - and nothing more,” possessed Pasternak from his first steps in literature, accompanied by a clear understanding that “the inability to find and tell the truth is a shortcoming that cannot be explained by any ability to speak.” You can’t cover up a lie...”
The experience of the past years forever taught Pasternak to “be equal to yourself” and “not to give up on your face” in any position. Loyalty to the undistorted voice of life, a sense of inner freedom and moral independence helped him maintain a sense of creative happiness, without which he could not imagine his work, in the most difficult times...
The manuscript department of the Institute of World Literature preserves the cover of a fragment of the novel proposed for publication with two crossed out titles - “When the Boys Grew Up” and “Notes of Zhivoult”.
The semantic identity of the surnames Zhivult and Zhivago is obvious and in itself indicates their undoubted emblematic nature, and not an accidental origin. More higher value to comprehend the unity of Pasternak’s entire creative path, this identity acquires if we consider that in the manuscripts of early drafts of prose from the early 10s, in a fragment bearing the title “The Death of Reliquimini”, a variant of his name is found - Purvit (from the distorted French pour Vie - For the sake of life), forming, together with two others - Zhivult and Zhivago - a triad of identical names-emblems. The triple form of this essentially single name contains the central intuition of all Pasternak’s work - the intuition of the immortality of life. His heroes - the poet Relikvimini-Purvit, who arose at the very beginning of Pasternak's creative path, and the poet Yuri Zhivago, who crowned this path - suffer and die so that the miracle of life gains immortality in their words.
(From the article “A River Wide Open.” On the creative history of Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”)
E. B. Pasternak
The novel about Doctor Zhivago and the poems written on his behalf became an expression of joy overcoming the fear of death. “By the fulfillment, by the clarity, by the absorption in one’s favorite work, life recent years almost a complete holiday of the soul for me. I am more than pleased with her, I am happy with her, and the novel is a way out and expression of this happiness,” Pasternak wrote in 1955. Post-war lonely and independent life was a daily overcoming of mortal gravity, a bright feeling of immortality, and loyalty to it. He said from his own experience that immortality is another name for life, slightly enhanced. Pasternak considered the spiritual overcoming of death to be the basis of his understanding of the new Christian history of mankind.
“Centuries and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life begin in the offspring, and a person dies not on the street under a fence, but in his own history, in the midst of work devoted to overcoming death, he dies, himself dedicated to this topic,” says Vedenyapin in the novel.
In the light of this historical tradition, the life of an individual person, not socially distinguished, not claiming privileges, not being considered more than others, moreover, socially superfluous, becomes God's story. Eternal theme art.
The creatively gifted hero of the novel strives to do his job, and his view becomes, by the force of circumstances, a measure and tragic assessment of the events of the century, and the poem becomes support and confirmation of hopes and faith in the long-awaited enlightenment and liberation, the harbinger of which is the historical content of all post-war years.
Reading and re-reading the novel, you come to the conclusion that the main thing in it is rather shown to the reader than told to him in a harsh, urgent form. Love for life, sensitivity to its voice, trust in its undistorted manifestations are the author’s primary concern. This is manifested most strongly in the speech and actions of the main - lyrical hero - Yuri Zhivago. He values ​​a sense of proportion and knows the disastrous consequences of human intervention in nature and history.
First of all, since childhood, he has hated those who selfishly introduce temptations, vulgarity, debauchery into life, who are not disgusted by the power of the strong over the weak, the humiliation of human dignity. These disgusting traits are embodied for Yuri in the lawyer Komarovsky, who played a tragic role in his fate.
Zhivago is inclined to sympathize with the moral ideals of the revolution, to admire its heroes, people of direct action, like Antipov-Strelnikov. But he clearly sees what these actions invariably lead to. Violence, according to his observations, leads to nothing but violence. The general productive course of life is disrupted, giving way to devastation and meaningless, repeating previous calls and orders. He sees how the power of an ideological scheme destroys everyone, turning into a tragedy for those who profess and apply it. There is reason to believe that it is precisely this conviction that distinguishes Doctor Zhivago from the prose on which Pasternak worked before the war.
The very idea of ​​remaking life seems wild to Yuri Andreevich, since life is not material, but an active principle, whose activity far exceeds human capabilities. The result of his actions only corresponds to his good intentions to the extent of attention and submission to her. Fanaticism is destructive.
(From the preface to “Doctor Zhivago”. M, 1989)
E. A. Evtushenko
...Pasternak, glorifying the feat of the “unnoticed,” became perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century in the world, surpassing even Mayakovsky... Pasternak always knew his worth as a master, but he was more interested in the skill itself than in mass applause...
The novel disappointed me then. We, young writers of the post-Stalin era, were then keen on the choppy, so-called “male” prose of Hemingway, Remarque’s novel “Three Comrades”, Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”. “Doctor Zhivago” seemed too traditional and even boring to me.
In 1966, after Pasternak’s death, I took the foreign edition of Doctor Zhivago with me on a trip along the Siberian Lena River and read it for the first time. I was lying on a narrow sailor's bunk, and when I turned my eyes from the pages to the Siberian nature slowly floating in the window and again from nature to the book, there was no boundary between the book and nature.
Yes, it has imperfections - the epilogue is weak, the author organizes the meetings of his heroes too naively. But this novel is a novel of the moral turning point of the twentieth century, a novel that puts the history of human feelings above history as such...
(From the article “Handwriting that looks like cranes”)
A. A. Voznesensky
Parsnip - the presence of God in our lives. A presence given not postulate, but objectively, through the sensory sensation of Life - the best, inexplicable creation of the Universe. Rain is given as the presence of God in Him, a spruce forest is given as the presence of God, God is given in details, in swifts, in drops, in cufflinks, and our feeling is, first of all, in pure form God's presence...
Pasternak’s prose is by no means an article “How to Make Poems,” no, it is a novel, the life of a poet, a novel about how to live in verse and how poetry is born from life. There have never been such novels before. Alas, “Doctor Zhivago” is now not just a book; the novel has merged with the shameful events around it. For thirty years our propaganda, without reading it, without thinking about the lyrical music of his magical Russian language, passed off the novel as a political monster, as a libel...
As a result of the all-Union war, the novel cannot be read objectively today. The reader now looks in vain for the promised “sedition” in the book. Eardrums, awaiting cannon fire, cannot perceive Brahms' music...
(From the article “The Poet’s Annunciation”)

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