The artistic originality of Boris Pasternak's lyrics. Research work by E. S. Yesenzholova “Love lyrics of B. Pasternak” Late lyrics of parsnip
PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD AND MAN. Already in Pasternak’s early poetry, the worldview concepts of his future were outlined. poetry books: the intrinsic value of the individual, the immortality of creativity, the connection of man with all things. The unity of the author's self, nature, creativity became the theme of the poem "February. Get some ink and cry!..” (1912). Creativity itself is shown as a direct, momentary sensation of the world: poems are composed “the more randomly, the more accurately.”
The lyrical situation is based on a familiar romantic poetry the motive of the hero’s escape from the city to the natural world, which is shown in Pasternak’s poem as a source of inspiration and vitality. The lyrical hero and nature (rain, thawed patches, rooks, wind) have the same life rhythm. The desire to dissolve in it is emphasized by the peculiarities of the syntax; in the sentences there is no author’s self as a subject; Pasternak resorts to an impersonal form: “get ink”, “write about February”, “get a carriage”.
The theme of a single world, the harmonies of all things, is also revealed thanks to the composition of the artistic space, the “meeting” of the top and bottom, the natural and spiritual worlds:
Where, like charred pears,
Thousands of rooks from the trees
They will fall into puddles and collapse
Dry sadness to the bottom of my eyes.
The contrasts of downpour and the poet’s “dry sadness,” spring and blackness, as well as, on the one hand, grace, the uncontrollable temperament of nature and, on the other hand, the material world (a cab hired “for six hryvnias”) do not at all express the theme of disharmony; on the contrary, they represent an image of a multidimensional and harmonious world. The prosaic detail entered organically into the artistic system of the poem. This feature is characteristic of the post-symbolist period of Russian poetry - for the work of the futurists and acmeists.
The unifying leitmotif is blackness, expressed in such images as black spring, ink, blackening thawed patches, rooks, charred pears, the bottom of eyes. The color scheme is ascetic, but at the same time the world created in the poem is dynamic and sonorous, verbs of movement and sound images are valuable in it (“cry”, “sobbing”, “the wind is torn with screams”). The literal meanings of words are combined with metaphors and metaphorical comparisons. The expression of the poem, the effect of excessiveness of being, is given by the grotesque (“thousands of rooks” will fall from the trees), and synonymous images (“cry”, “sobbing”), and alliteration (for example, on “r” in the first stanza), assonances (for example, on “y” in the last two lines of the third stanza).
In the figurative series of the poem “You are in the wind, testing a branch...” (1919) The lilac branch, the garden, traditional for works of Russian literature, and the wind and earth-renewing rain, which were also found in the previous poem, are included. These natural images characterize the picture of the world, in which there is both a lyrical hero and a material world:
The drops have the weight of cufflinks,
And the garden is blinding like a stretch,
Spattered, buried
A million blue tears.
In this poem, the artistic bonds of heterogeneous phenomena of common existence are metaphors (the garden “blinds”, “murmured”, “stuck into the window”), metonymy (“Splashed, dripped / with a million blue tears”), comparison (“like a stretch”), likening (“The wet sparrow / Lilac branch”), alliteration (in the quoted stanza - on “c”).
In general, the mood of the lyrical hero is transferred to the image of the garden; the garden is a kind of metonymy for the poet’s state, and for this conclusion there is an author’s hint: his garden is “nursed by melancholy,” it is “in thorns from you.” Through the image of the garden, the image of a lyrical hero is created, having survived the drama (“in thorns”), but emotionally transformed, renewed (“come to life this night”). This is how a hidden lyrical plot, perhaps a love one, emerges.
Pasternak was true to his idea of the interconnection and interpermeability of man and the world. His philosophical views on man went back to the teachings of Italian humanists, to their concept of man as the fifth - along with the elements of water, earth, air and fire - element of the Universe (“Several Provisions”). For example, in the collection “My Sister is Life,” Lermontov’s work is represented as a symbol of immortality. The book is dedicated to him. The Demon (“In Memory of the Demon”) is an image of Lermontov’s eternal creative spirit: he is immortal, one with nature, and therefore “swore by the ice of the peaks: / Sleep, friend, I will return as an avalanche.” The poet emphasized his internal connection with Lermontov with reminiscence. So, if in Lermontov’s poem “The Demon” there were the lines “To this day, near the cell I / I saw a stone burned through,” then in Pasternak’s poem we encounter the image of a slab that survived “behind the fence of a Georgian temple.” The Demon of sadness and love in the poet’s interpretation is in many ways similar to M. Vrubel’s Demon. In “The Second Birth,” everyday life itself became a lyrical space, and the concept of the world as a moving whole was expressed in the motif of penetration inner world person into the objective world (“The partition is thin-rib / I’ll pass right through, I’ll pass like light. / I’ll pass like an image enters an image / And like an object cuts an object”), as well as affinities with the Russian language (“But even so, not like tramp, / I will enter my native language into my native language”).
In the late period of his creativity, Pasternak presented a picture of the world in the lyrics of 1956-1959, which he united in the cycle “When it clears up.” Its themes reflected the issues he grappled with throughout life path: poet and time, life and immortality, etc.
Nature is the ideal of harmonious simplicity and perfection. Following the traditions of A.S. Pushkin (“Am I wandering along the noisy streets...”), I.S. Turgenev (“Fathers and Sons”), Pasternak created the image not of a nature-workshop, although this would correspond to the ideology of the time, the record pace of socialist construction, the thesis of a person who, like a master, walks across the planet, but of nature-a temple. In a poem “When it goes wild” (1956)“the expanse of the earth” is likened to a temple, and the poet’s life is liturgy, participation in worship:
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.
The natural world is emotional, spiritual (the sky is “festive”, “the grass is full of triumph”), multidimensional, full-blooded, which is expressed by comparisons (“A large lake is like a dish”, “a cluster of clouds” - “mountain glaciers”, “The green of the leaves shines through, / Like painting in colored glass”), multi-colored (the forest is sometimes on fire, sometimes as if covered with soot, blueness peeks out from behind the clouds, images of the sun and greenery are introduced).
The attitude towards life as the continuity of “solstice days”, the infinity of “single days”, the plurality of the individual and the unity of the many is expressed in the poem “Only Days” (1959). The philosophy of time comes down to the following: the individual and unique are connected with a series of the same individual and unique, forming an endless chain. The day is an image of eternity and its component: “And the day lasts longer than a century.”
The poet writes about the value of every day. Day is a measure human life. It has its own figurative content. For example, Pasternak lists the images winter day: “The roads get wet, the roofs leak, / And the sun warms itself on the ice floe.”
But in addition to the natural, the day has an emotional content: those who love “are drawn to each other more quickly.” The poem reveals the theme of subjective, personal perception of time. For lovers, a day lasts longer than a century; in their perception, the embrace “does not end” and time has slowed down: “And the half-asleep hands are too lazy / Toss and turn on the dial.” The first three lines of the last stanza of the poem are metonymy; they convey the feelings of the lovers through the image of time. The lines “and on the trees above / Sweat from the warmth of the birdhouse” are also metonymic; the motif of the feelings of lovers is also associated with them.
LYRICAL HERO, PEOPLE, COUNTRY. In the book “On Early Trains,” the poet expressed his perception of his homeland. His Russia is not just a Soviet state. Trying to comprehend the “unique features” of Russia, he peers into the life of the people and experiences the same feeling of kinship with them as with nature:
Overcoming adoration
I watched, idolizing
There were women, Sloboda residents,
Students, mechanics.
(“On the early trains...”, 1941)
The picture of a single world, in addition to the poet, objects and other material entities, nature, creativity, also included the people. Pasternak created an image of Russia as a chosen one with a special destiny, similar to Blok’s:
And Russian fate is boundless,
What can you dream about in a dream?
And always remains the same
With unprecedented novelty.
(“Extremeness”, 1944).
He views the Patriotic War as a conflict between “murderers” and “Russian boundless fate.” The theme of sacrifice and immortality of the soul is one of the main ones in the “Poems about War” cycle included in the book. In the poem “Courage” (1941), nameless heroes, not counted among the living, took their feat “to the abode of thunderers and eagles”; in the poem “Winner” (1944), all of Leningrad received an “immortal lot.”
The theme of man and country took on a special meaning in creative destiny poet in the winter of 1945/46, when he began writing the novel “Doctor Zhivago”. The hero of the novel, Doctor Yuri Zhivago, strives to preserve internal freedom in conditions of class confrontation. Zhivago dies in a terrible people's Russia the year of dispossession was 1929. The lives of his loved ones are tragic, their fate is emigration, Stalin's camps.
Lyrics from the novel “Doctor Zhivago”. Pasternak wrote that in Zhivago he sought to capture himself, and Blok, and Yesenin, and Mayakovsky. Subject creative personality became one of the central ones in Zhivago’s twenty-five poems that made up the final chapter of the novel. One of them - “Hamlet” (1946). The poem decides high topic duty and self-denial, the question is raised: is it possible or not for a person to be independent of cruel necessity, from participation in the life of humanity that is destructive for him? Three destinies are united in the lyrical hero - Zhivago, Hamlet, Christ.
The poet imagines himself in the role of Hamlet (“The noise died down. I stepped onto the stage”). Hamlet's fate is correlated with the fate of Christ. Hamlet, like Christ, has no right to choose, his fate is accomplished against his will, he knows that he is fulfilling the “stubborn plan” of the Lord. In Hamlet’s prayer (“If only it is possible, Abba Father, / Carry this cup past”) a gospel motif sounds. In chapter 14 of the Gospel of Mark we read: “Abba Father! All things are possible for You; Pass this cup past Me.” In chapter 26 of the Gospel of Matthew: “My Father! If possible, let this cup pass from Me.” In chapter 22 of the Gospel of Luke: “Father! Oh, that You would deign to carry this cup past Me!” Pasternak brings his text as close as possible to the text of the Gospel. With these words, Christ turned to God the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, knowing that he would face a painful death. Hamlet, like Christ, has a presentiment that he cannot avoid trials. Just as Christ added to his request: “Nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done,” so Pasternak’s Hamlet, who is also the lyrical hero, realizes his fate is dependent on a higher will.
The drama of personality, its complex relationship with the era is expressed in the motif of pharisaism. Modernity is a “distant echo” of New Testament times, “another drama.” About himself and modernity, Pasternak writes: “I am alone, everything is drowning in pharisaism.”
The theme of “Hamlet” corresponds to the theme of the poem “Garden of Gethsemane”, which concludes the novel. The Way of the Cross is inevitable as a guarantee of immortality, and Christ, having accepted the cup of trials and having experienced the torment of a mortal, says: “To me for judgment, like the barges of a caravan, / Centuries will float out of the darkness.”
The theme of “Hamlet” is also developed in the poem "Dawn" (1947). The lyrical hero takes on the burden of other people’s worries: “I feel for them all, / As if I had been in their shoes.” The merging of the destinies of the lyrical hero and the people is a covenant from above: “All night I read your covenant.” Obviously, we are talking about Christ's love for people. The motive of immersion in everyday life also has evangelical roots. Doctor Zhivago expressed the idea that the spirit of the Gospel in the time of the apostles was to present truths through everyday life, which was expressed in parables. Accordingly, Pasternak believed that everyday life itself, worldly vanity, daily human worries are symbolic, the highest truths are hidden in them. In “Dawn,” the soul of the lyrical hero responds to the little things in life: “There are lights and comfort everywhere, / They drink tea, hurry to the trams...”
After war and devastation, a “fainting” life, the poet, inspired by the “testament,” is again in love with life, it’s as if he was born again:
And I'm running up the stairs
It's like I'm going out for the first time
To these streets in the snow
And extinct pavements.
The poem also contains literary allusions. Pasternak called him “bad Blok.” Thus, in the words “you”, “your covenant” is the image of Blok. In A. Blok’s “Second Baptism” there are lines similar to those quoted above: “And in new world, entering, I know / That there are people and there are things to do.” The second baptism is initiation into the life of the people. In Pasternak’s poem, the theme of renewal of the poet’s life is also connected with the theme of the people: “I want to join people, to join the crowd, / To their inner revival.” This is how Blok’s “trilogy of incarnation” sounded in his poetry, and “Second Baptism” was a kind of “testament”.
The theme of earthly and heavenly paths, the correlation of human life with the heavenly world is revealed in the poem “August” (1953). In it, the figurative series shows a synthesis of everyday life (“a slightly damp pillow”, curtains, a sofa, “the edge of the wall behind the bookshelf”, rooster voices), sensory states (“the wingspan is spread out”, a woman, creativity) and the gospel story (Transfiguration Christ, the light of Mount Tabor, who revealed to the apostles divine essence Christ, “transformed azure”, “gold of the second Savior”).
The sun - both a concrete landscape image and a symbol of life - contrasts with the dream motif. Just as in the dream of the lyrical hero M. Lermontov, premonitions of his death were expressed (“Dream”), so the lyrical hero of “August” sees a dream about his own burial. Pasternak paints a situation in which both everyday details and mystical imagery are combined: “In the forest, as a government land surveyor, / Death stood in the middle of the graveyard, / Looking into my dead face.” But the dream passes, the images of the sun and the Transfiguration (and the burial takes place at the Transfiguration of the Lord) mark the hero’s return to life. The very life of the lyrical hero is depicted by images of a woman who challenges the “abyss of humiliation,” a ginger-red forest, and acquaintances (they are going to the poet’s funeral). All these are the values of his life, opposite to the era of “timelessness” in which the poet lives.
The theme of the eternity of creativity is also developed in the poem. The poet's voice, called visionary, is not touched by the collapse. The concept of creativity comes closer to the concept of miracles. Continuing the Pushkin and Lermontov theme of the power of the poetic word, Pasternak writes about its colossal possibilities: “And the image of the world revealed in the word.”
Faith in overcoming worries and blizzards of the outside world was expressed in love lyrics novel. In a poem “Winter Night” (1946) two worlds are opposed - the vast (universal snow haze) and the local (home, the meeting place of him and her). The symbols of what is happening in these worlds are the images of a blizzard and a candle. The world of home for the lyrical hero, as well as for Doctor Zhivago, is a valuable space in itself, it is in it that he experiences carnal and spiritual joy. The everyday image of “and two shoes fell / With a thud on the floor” complements the non-domestic, emotional plan of the poem, which, in turn, is transformed into a supersensual, unearthly one: “And the heat of temptation / Raised, like an angel, two wings / Crosswise.” The flesh, as Pasternak believed, is not sinful. In his autobiographical prose “Safety Certificate” (1930), he wrote about the purity and sanctity of nudity and intimacy, about their protection from debauchery. In “Winter Night” the flesh seems to receive a blessing from above. That is why the image of a candle appears in the poem. This image, which usually expresses the idea of holiness, purity, peace of mind, is accompanied by a prosaic detail that speaks of nudity and intimacy: “And the wax dripped from the night light with tears / onto the dress...”
ABOUT POETIC CREATIVITY. The theme of creative intuition, the possibilities of language, the essence of poetry, its eternity was discussed above in poems "February. Get some ink and cry!..”, “August”.
In a number lyrical works Pasternak expressed his understanding of the poet's purpose. Yes, in the poem “It's not nice to be famous...” (1956) true poetry was opposed to vanity literary life. For a poet, as Pasternak believed, it is contraindicated to be famous, to start archives, success and hype are destructive for his talent, “to be a byword on everyone’s lips” is a shame and imposture. He formulates the maxim: “The goal of creativity is dedication.” In “Hamlet” the lyrical hero tried to predict what would happen in his lifetime; in the poem “It’s not beautiful to be famous...” he tries to live in such a way as to “hear the call of the future.” The poet should preserve his individuality, which is equivalent to life:
And should not a single slice
Don't give up on your face
But to be alive, alive and nothing more.
Alive and only until the end.
In a poem “I want to achieve everything...” (1956) the lyrical hero is a maximalist, he talks about his passion for understanding the essence of phenomena, comprehending the fullness of life (“Live, think, feel, love, / Make discoveries”). Among the concepts and phenomena listed by Pasternak there are no speculative or rational ones. His lyrical hero perceives the world simply and naturally, as L. Tolstoy’s favorite heroes do. The truth of life is, as Pasternak believes, the material for creativity. The nature of creativity is adequate to the surrounding world:
I would bring the breath of roses into poetry,
Breath of mint
Meadows, sedge, hayfields,
Thunderstorms rumble.
The last line of the quoted stanza refers us to Pushkin’s poem “Echo,” which says that the poet is the echo of the world, poetry reflects both the high and the low: both “the roar of thunder” and “the cries of rural shepherds.”
If V. Mayakovsky, who gave poetry a utilitarian, social meaning, compared creativity with a Mauser, a formidable weapon, and likened rhyme to a barrel of dynamite, then Pasternak associates poetry with a garden (“I would break poetry like a garden”).
Due to numerous enumerations of heterogeneous concepts, a psychological subtext is created: before us is the ecstasy of creativity, conveyed in the metonymic image of a “stretched bowstring / Tight bow.” This is facilitated by both lexical and syntactic repetitions.
Pasternak’s understanding of man as the fifth element of the Universe and creativity as his spiritual work correlates with the theme of time and eternity. Constant movement, aspiration to other limits constitute the essence of creative life, which Pasternak wrote about in a poem “Night” (1956). An artist, an artistic nature, is compared to a pilot in the night sky: he, like the lyrical hero of many of Pasternak’s works, belongs to earthly space, specific time - and eternity; it hovers over the planet, over night bars, barracks, train stations, in other words, over what is measured by time, has its own temporal characteristics, and “goes into the clouds.” The pilot is an image that reveals the theme of the unity of earth and sky. Unlike the romantic poets, Pasternak does not oppose one to the other; his poetic consciousness is aimed at the synthesis of worlds. Therefore, here we encounter a technique, widespread in Pasternak’s poetry, of likening “high” to “low”, spiritual things: the pilot disappeared into the fog, “becoming a cross on the fabric / And a mark on the linen,” and the motif of turns is given a parallel image of the Milky Way:
And with a terrible, terrible roll
To some other
To unknown universes
The Milky Way is rotated.
The last two stanzas of the poem are an appeal to creative nature, in it the call “don’t sleep” sounds five times; The spiritual efforts of the creator connect time as something meaningful by man, concrete, in which earthly existence is manifested and to which the artist himself belongs, and eternity, to which he again belongs: “You are a hostage to eternity / Captured by time.”
Already in Pasternak’s first poems his artistic and musical abilities were revealed, so the verbal texts were enriched with sounds and melody, plasticity and relief of colors. For example, in his most famous early poem, Pasternak writes:
February. Get some ink and cry!
Write about February sobbingly,
While the rumbling slush
In spring it burns black.
Notice the color contrast in the first line: white and black, snow and ink. Spring comes to the city, the snowy streets turn into slush under the roar of carts and carriages - the city is filled with a loud, joyful symphony of spring. A waterfall of feelings and a surge of creative inspiration (“cry” - “write sobbing”) merge with the black earth breathing life and the ringing spring air. In early poetry, Pasternak often uses the technique of metonymy, in which the transfer of features of the depicted objects is carried out not according to the principle of similarity, as in metaphor, but according to the principle of contiguity. For example, in the expression “rumbling slush”, it is not the slush that rumbles, it is the sound of wheels passing along the street, which is, as it were, transmitted to the snowy slurry they grind.
A characteristic feature of Pasternak's poetry is the combination of images from different spheres of reality. For example, the poem “Improvisation” (1916) begins with the interweaving of two figurative rows: a flock of seagulls and black and white piano keys, an inspired hand touching the keys and feeding birds:
I fed the flock with a key by hand
Under the flapping of wings, splashing and squealing.
This comparison is developed in the poem in the night landscape, in which material and mental images are combined.
Pasternak's love lyrics are always full of strong feelings and visible, tangible images. There is a lot of original, almost primitive passion for life in it, as, for example, in the poem from the collection “My Sister is Life”:
Favorite - horror! When a poet loves,
The restless god falls in love
And chaos creeps into the light again,
Like in the time of fossils.
A mature attitude to love appears in the collection “The Second Birth.” In one of his most famous poems, Pasternak argues that true love should perhaps be simple, that a miracle is the feeling itself, which cannot be explained, but which contains the mystery of existence. The poem may seem witty and humorous, but the poet’s thought is quite serious:
Loving others is a heavy cross,
And you are beautiful without gyrations,
And your beauty is a secret
It is tantamount to the solution to life.
The theme of creativity occupies an important place in Pasternak's lyrics. The poet is primarily concerned with the relationship between the creative personality and the world, the artist’s responsibility for his word, and the poet’s duty to people and society. This topic is philosophical and social in nature. Such, for example, is the poem “Hamlet”, in which the theme of a person - a poet, an actor, Hamlet - goes through his thorny path on earth. In the collection “Second Birth,” the poem “Oh, if only I knew that this happens...” about the destructive power of poetic inspiration stands out.
One of the central poems in Pasternak’s latest collection, “When It Goes Wild,” was the poem “It’s Ugly to Be Famous...”, which expresses the ethical essence of the relationship between the poet and society. The collection ends with the poem “The Only Days,” and its last two lines can serve as the motto of all of Pasternak’s poetry. The first line speaks about the eternity of life, the second about the eternity of love:
And the day lasts longer than a century,
And the hug never ends.
Music
The house rose like a tower.
Along the narrow coal stairs
The piano was carried by two strong men,
Like a bell on a bell tower.
They were dragging up the piano
Over the vastness of the city sea,
Like a tablet with commandments
On a stone plateau.
And there's an instrument in the living room,
And the city is in whistling, noise, din,
Like underwater at the bottom of legends,
Below remained underfoot.
Sixth floor tenant
I looked at the ground from the balcony,
As if holding it in your hands
And ruling over it legally.
Back inside he started playing
Not someone else's play
But my own thought, chorale,
The hum of the mass, the rustle of the forest.
The boom of improvisations carried
Boulevard in the rain, the sound of wheels,
The life of the streets, the fate of loners.
So at night, by candlelight, in return
The simple naivety of the past,
Chopin wrote down his dream
On the black cutting of the music stand.
Or, ahead of the world
For generations four,
On the roofs of city apartments
The flight of the Valkyries thundered like a thunderstorm.
Or conservatory hall
With hellish roar and shaking
Tchaikovsky shocked me to tears
The fate of Paolo and Francesco.
Features of the late lyrics of Boris Pasternak
In many studies related in one way or another to Pasternak’s work, I have come across the judgment that the poet’s “early” work is complex, while his “later” work is simpler; The “early” Pasternak was looking for himself, the “late” one found himself; In his early work there is a lot that is incomprehensible, deliberately complicated, but later it is filled with “unheard-of simplicity.”
The creative path of writers, poets, and artists passes through several stages. And this is not always the path from simple to complex, from superficial
to the deep or vice versa.
“Late” Pasternak (“On Early Trains” - “When It Goes Wild”) is Pasternak who found new means of creating expression. If in early creativity imagery was largely created through the use of individual linguistic means, then in the late period the poet uses general linguistic units to a greater extent.
The stanza of the verses is very diverse: a stanza can include from four (which is most typical, up to ten verses. The originality of the stanzas lies not only in the number, but also in the combinations of long and shortened verses. United by a common idea, the stanza is not necessarily complete and sometimes has syntactic and semantic the duration is in the following. For example, I noticed this in the poems “Waltz with Devilry,” “Spring Again,” “Christmas Star.” The size of the stanzas and their combinations are different here: in “Waltz with Devilry” - -6-8-6-. 7-10 verses. The most interesting thing is that it is extremely difficult to trace the connection between the size of the stanzas and the theme of the poem. It is also difficult to derive any pattern in correlating the size of the stanza with the syntactic structure of the sentences filling it. For example, the second part of the poem “Waltz with Devilry” is. an octave consisting of two sentences, each of which is “situated” on four verses:
Magnificence beyond strength
Ink, and sickles, and whitewash,
Blue, crimson and gold
Lions and dancers, lionesses and dandies.
The fluttering of blouses, the singing of doors,
The roar of toddlers, the laughter of mothers,
Dates, books, games, nougat,
Needles, tricks, jumps, runs.
This passage provides an example of one of the features of the late Pasternak's syntax: the use of a long chain of one-part sentences. Here the author uses an interesting stylistic device: a combination of polyunion and non-union in one stanza. The entire stanza imitates the rhythm of a waltz (the musical meter is “three quarters”), and if in the first half of the stanza (due to the polyunion) the tempo is calm, then in the second – non-union – half of the stanza the “waltzing” accelerates, reaching a maximum in the last two verses. In the third stanza:
In this ominous sweet taiga
People and things are on an equal footing.
This boron is a delicious candied fruit
The hats are selling like hot cakes.
Stifling from delicacies. Christmas tree in sweat
He drinks the darkness with glue and varnish, -
The first and fourth sentences are two-part, the second is indefinitely personal, the third is impersonal.
The syntax of late Pasternak is characterized by enumeration constructions homogeneous members offers. The latter have an external resemblance to the mentioned names. For example:
Here he is with extreme secrecy
The bend has gone beyond the streets,
Lifting up stone cubes
Blocks lying on top of each other,
Posters, niches, roofs, chimneys,
Hotels, theaters, clubs,
Boulevards, squares, clumps of linden trees,
Courtyards, gates, rooms,
Entrances, stairs, apartments,
Where all passions are played
In the name of remaking the world.
("Drive").
In my opinion, this example of sustained non-union is similar to the technique of enumeration used by the poet to create expression. Externally, a multifunctional technique is internally subject to one pattern: the combination of things of different orders in one row.
The boom of improvisations carried
Night, flames, thunder of fire barrels,
Boulevard under the rain the sound of wheels,
The life of the streets, the fate of loners.
(" Music").
Various concepts combined in one row create a multifaceted picture of reality, activate different types perception.
A similar effect of increasing expression and semantic diversity is observed not only when using (stringing together) dissimilar concepts in one row, but also with the appearance of anaphora, which is one of the leading stylistic figures in Pasternak’s late lyrics. For example:
All the thoughts of centuries, all dreams, all worlds,
The whole future of galleries and museums,
All the pranks of fairies, all the deeds of sorcerers,
All the Christmas trees in the world, all the dreams of children.
(“Christmas Star”).
In the poetry of the “late” Pasternak one also encounters the use of isolations, introductory and inserted constructions, which is so characteristic of early lyric poetry:
When your feet, Jesus,
Lean on your knees,
Maybe I'm learning to hug
Cross tetrahedral beam
And, losing my senses, I rush to the body,
Preparing you for burial.
(“Magdalene I”).
The syntactic construction can be complicated by an extended comparison or metaphor:
The sun goes down and the drunkard
From afar, for transparent purposes
Reaching through the window
With bread and a glass of cognac.
(" Winter holidays").
This is a typical stanza for Pasternak. The metaphorical nature in it is distributed unevenly. In the first sentence - The sun is setting - designation of reality, in the second - an expanded metaphor. The result of this trope organization is a cumbersome syntactic construction. The first sentence is a designation of the object of metaphorization; it sets the theme of the metaphor.
But neither the stanza nor the syntax are self-sufficient in Pasternak, which is confirmed by the lack of patterns in the construction of stanzas and sentences.
Central theme, which has passed through the entire work of B. Pasternak, is real world objects, phenomena, feelings, surrounding reality. The poet was not an outside observer of this world. He thought of the world and himself as a single whole. The author's “I” is the most active part of this indissoluble whole. Therefore, in Pasternak’s work, internal experiences are often given through an external picture of the world, and the landscape-objective world - through subjective perception. These are interdependent types of expression of the author’s “I”. Hence the personification so characteristic of Pasternak’s work, which permeates most metaphors and comparisons.
The “early” Pasternak was reproached for the complexity of metaphors and syntax; in late creativity the complexity is primarily semantic.
Pasternak's poetry has not become simpler, but has become more filigree. In such poems, when attention is not hampered by multi-stage paths, it is important not to miss the metaphors that are “hidden” behind the outwardly familiar language.
In the lyrics of the late period, phraseological units, colloquial everyday vocabulary and colloquial syntax are often found. This is especially typical for the cycle “On Early Trains,” with which, according to researchers, the “new,” “simple” Pasternak began.
In the early period of creativity, the use of colloquial everyday vocabulary in a poetic context against the general background of cross-style and book vocabulary enhanced expressiveness and unexpectedness of perception; in the later cycles, the use of colloquial and everyday vocabulary is determined thematically, most often to recreate the realities of the situation or the speech characteristics of the hero.
Phraseological phrases, used by Pasternak in his late lyrics, can be divided into two groups: changed and unchanged. Both groups include phraseological units of different stylistic layers.
Modified phraseological units according to Shansky
| Phraseologisms with updated semantics and unchanged lexical and grammatical composition | She secretly suspects that winter is full of miracles in the sieve at the extreme dacha... |
| Phraseologisms with preserved main features of semantics and structure and updated lexical and grammatical side | Separation will eat them both, Melancholy will devour the bones. I would live in it this year to the fullest. |
| Phraseologisms given as a free combination of words | You reach out to him from the ground, Like in the days when you haven’t yet been summed up on it. |
| Individual arts. Turns of phrase created according to the model of existing phraseological units. | And the fire of sunset did not cool down, Just as the evening of death hastily nailed it to the wall of the Manege. |
| Merger of two phraseological units | Once in the twilight of Tiflis I raised my foot in the winter... |
| Combining semantically similar phraseological units in one context | Suddenly the enthusiasm and noise of the game, the tramp of the round dance, falling into tartarar, disappeared as if into water... |
Pasternak individualizes phraseological units as much as possible, which is expressed in a significant change in their lexico-grammatical and syntactic structure in accordance with certain artistic goals.
“When it clears up” - a book of poems as a whole
The book of poems “When it clears up” (1956-1959) completes the work of B.L. Pasternak. The more important and interesting is its linguistic understanding in terms of the work of the poet, his predecessors and contemporaries.
In connection with the problem posed, I will be interested in two factors: the compositional orderliness and thematic unity of the book, as well as the unity of the poetic world and its artistic system.
In November 1957, B. Pasternak determined the order of the poems and added an epigraph. This is direct evidence that the poet viewed the book as an independent organism. For an organizing role three verses the poet himself indicated: this is the initial credo poem “In everything I want to achieve...”; then the culminating “When it clears up...”, the title of which is used to name the entire book, reflecting a turning point in the life of both the poet and the country, and in which the worldview of the late Pasternak is revealed; the final one is “The Only Days,” in which the theme of time, one of Pasternak’s main ones, is dominant. In the first poem, all the themes of the book are pulled together into one nerve knot; it is connected figuratively, lexically with each of the poems in the book.
The sequence of all other poems is also significant. In the complex multi-level composition of the book, there is an obvious symmetrical division into such combinations of verses, in each of which any part of the dual unity “creativity - time” is actualized. In the center are 6 poems, united by the theme “creativity”: “Grass and Stones”, “Night”, “Wind”, “Road”, “In the Hospital”, “Music”. These 6 poems are framed by landscape cycles: non-winter and winter. They, in turn, are surrounded by poems where the future is brought to the fore in the theme of time, and the last 9, the theme of which is formulated by the poet himself: “I think, despite the familiarity of everything that continues to stand before our eyes and that we continue to hear and read, there is nothing more of this, it has already passed and happened, a huge, unprecedented period that cost unheard of forces has ended and passed. An immeasurably large, currently empty and unoccupied place has been freed up for something new and not yet experienced...”
Each of these cycles has internal structure, internal dynamics of themes, images. And this whole complex structure obviously reflects a certain real sequence of biographical events.
Two principles seem to us to be the main ones that organize Pasternak’s poetic world and the figurative and linguistic system of the book. Both of them are indirectly formulated by the poet. The first principle is the bifurcation of a phenomenon, image, word; the second principle is connection, bringing together different, distant, dissimilar things.
A phenomenon, event, thing, object bifurcates. They may have contrasting, sometimes mutually exclusive properties. Time moves non-stop ( Maybe year after year follows like snow falls, or like words in a poem), and even a moment can stretch to eternity ( And the day lasts longer than a century). Space, like time, is limitless and infinite ( This is how they look into eternity from the inside In the flickering crowns of insomnia, Saints, schema-monks, kings...), but it is also enclosed within certain boundaries, frames, and has a form.
The image bifurcates either visually or verbally: the same thing is called twice, as if dividing, and to achieve this effect the trope can be duplicated, either expressively or stylistically.
A word or phrase is bifurcated, used in two or more meanings at the same time.
The word form is bifurcated, which can simultaneously have two grammatical meanings.
The second principle is manifested in “convergence”:
Divorced in everyday consciousness of the phenomena of reality (which underlies the construction of tropes) Divorced in ordinary consciousness of linguistic phenomena (prosaic and poetic speech; various stylistic layers) Divorced in ordinary consciousness of poetic phenomena.I. Man and the world in Pasternak’s paths are brought together not only traditionally, but also in a special way: personified phenomena, like people, wear clothes, experience the same physical or psychological state as a person; Moreover, this may be a condition that the phenomenon itself usually causes in a person. Phenomena enter into human relationships not only with each other, but also with a person, sometimes starting a direct dialogue with him, evaluating a person, and this can be a mutual assessment, and a person feels the state of nature from the inside. The ethereal materializes, takes shape, or becomes unsteady and viscous. Poems also materialize, acquiring the status natural phenomenon or buildings. The rapprochement is especially acute if it is based on a feature that is not inherent in the object, but is initially attributed to it and then only serves as a basis for comparison.
II. The rapprochement of prose and poetry in Pasternak is mutual: “His poetry is directed towards prose, just as prose is towards poetry” (Likhachev)
The utmost intensity of feeling in prose comes from the lyrics, the reliability of details, the simplicity of syntactic structures comes from narrative prose.
The rapprochement with prose is manifested, in particular, in the fact that lyrical verse freely includes colloquial vocabulary, vernacular, obsolete or regional words. All these reduced layers do not contrast with bookish, poetic or highly expressive vocabulary, but “are placed in one general layer of lyrical utterance,” with a clear predominance of “not high” vocabulary.
Behind the simplicity and “intelligibility” lie the most skillful language “errors” that seem to have gone unnoticed by the poet. However, the fact that they literally permeate the poems indicates that for Pasternak they were a conscious device. These are “mistakes” associated primarily with a violation of the usual compatibility.
Violation of semantic compatibility is most constant in cases of replacement of a dependent word with a phraseologically related meaning of another word, and the substitute word is freely selected from words of both the same semantic series with the one being replaced, and from other series. There is also such a construction of a homogeneous series when, with a word with a phraseologically related meaning, one dependent word meets the norm, the other violates it.
Violation of syntactic compatibility is most consistently associated with the omission of a dependent noun or the placement of a dependent noun with a word that usually does not have such control.
III. The convergence of traditional and non-traditional poetic phenomena can be traced through examples of poetic images and ways of connecting words in a poetic line. Pasternak continued the tradition of constructing a poetic line based on the usual or associative connection words However, an asemantic connection also becomes active, which can be considered as figurative: each of the words in the line, not connected by a seme with the others, “works” on the image.
Thus, the unity of the book grows from its compositional integrity, from the unity of the principles considered. It is also based on the unity of the actual visual techniques. Literary studies have noted the kinship of Pasternak's poetics with the plastic arts: sculpture, architecture, painting. Pasternak’s creative workshop is a dyehouse; the laws of perspective are reflected in the movement; the point of movement, the direction of which is usually oblique, at an angle, is precisely indicated. Visual detail is drawn: a separate gnarled maple branch bows, one acorn dangles on a branch, one bird chirps at a branch, rings of yarn crawl and curl. Recording a fact and detail is significant. The visual picture also includes theatrical associations: scenery, costumes, poses.
In contrast to the way the world is presented, the lyrical hero is not visually represented, his presence is conveyed through an assessment of events, situations, landscape, expressed by the prevailing vocabulary of high intensity, particles, conjunctions, introductory constructions with modal-evaluative meanings, syntactic elements indicating causal event connections. Jacobson called Pasternak’s poetry “the kingdom of metonymy, awakened to independent existence.” And we find an essential explanation of the metonymic structure of the image of the lyrical hero from Pasternak himself: Never, never, even in moments of the most giftful, unmemorable happiness, the highest and most exciting things left them: the pleasure of the overall sculpting of the world, the sense of responsibility they themselves had for the whole picture, the feeling of belonging to the beauty of the whole spectacle, to the whole universe. ("Doctor Zhivago").
Brief biographical information.
February 10, 1890 - birth into the family of the artist L. O. Pasternak. Mother – pianist R.I. Kaufman. In childhood - music lessons, acquaintance with the composer Scriabin.
1909 – admission to the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Moscow University.
1908-1909 - takes part in the poetry group of the poet and artist Yu. P. Anisimov. During these years, there was serious communication with circles that were grouped around the Musaget publishing house.
1912 spring – a trip for one semester to Germany, to the University of Marburg to study philosophy with Professor Hermann Cohen.
Anyone who is familiar with the poetry of Boris Pasternak has probably noticed that his early poems are noticeably different in style and rhythm, and even in meaning, from his later ones. How? Probably because they have become lighter and simpler. Those who read his early poems said that they were complex, overly filled with metaphors and various turns of phrase. Boris Pasternak wrote his later poems in a language more accessible to the reader, using colloquial and everyday vocabulary.
Here it is famous poem, like "Spring in the Forest". Here is a description of some courtyard, frozen in anticipation of spring. Yes, it's still cold. But already in the morning the rooster is busy - flirting with the hen. The sun is starting to get hot in the sky, but the ice has not melted yet. Easy and sweetly written, with love and bright hope.
Spring in the forest
Desperate cold
Delays melting.
Spring is later than usual
But also more unexpected.
The rooster is amorous in the morning
And there is no way for the chicken.
Turning your face to the south,
The pine tree squints in the sun.
This is one of the later poems of the talented and romantic Boris. It is permeated with freshness and anticipation of spring, simple and understandable, it can be read by both a person from the upper class of society and a commoner. If in his early works Boris could fit the Universe into a small piece of nature, then here an ordinary spring is described in an ordinary rural courtyard.
This is how Pasternak expressed his feelings at the early stage of his work:
And gardens, and ponds, and fences,
And boiling with white screams
The universe is just discharges of passions,
accumulated by the human heart.
A little difficult to hear and understand, isn't it? Something is boiling in my soul, it’s yearning to go somewhere! He is looking for shelter not on Earth, but somewhere out there, high and far away!
And here are the poems of the late Pasternak:
It is snowing
It's snowing, it's snowing.
To the white stars in a snowstorm
Geranium flowers stretch
For the window frame.
It's snowing and everyone is in confusion,
Everything takes flight, -
Black staircase steps,
Crossroads turn.
Yes, there is no longer any Universe here. Here snow is simply falling on the ground, a geranium flower is reaching for the light, and all nature is frozen in winter confusion. The poem is simple and rhythmic, pleasant and affectionate. And if you are an attentive reader of this wonderful, talented poet, you will notice in the poet’s early work a bit of youthful bragging and ardor, a frantic craving for some higher level of development, but in later poems this is no longer present. It's simple here usual life. Her beauty and her sadness. And the understanding that this is precisely what is dear to the human soul most of all!