Introduction
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak is a poet for the thinking reader. I would say - for the reader with a thinking heart. As you know, he strove to “get to the very essence” in everything and, of course, from the very beginning he was not just a poet, but also a philosopher. Yes, if Pasternak had not been a philosopher, we would not have learned so many deep poetic revelations. And his prose is also the fruit of philosophical thoughts about the meaning of existence. Many poets have a predilection for defining their work. This basically gives rise to a lot of poems about poems that are uninteresting to the reader. In Pasternak, this theme “plays” and is capable of bewitching, like love lyrics. Already at the very beginning of his poetic work, with all his craving for “involuntarily originality,” Pasternak, writing the poems that made up the book “Twin in the Clouds,” looked for content in poetry, first of all. In his autobiography, in a half-joking, almost mischievous form, he himself expressed the peculiarity of his poetic work of that time: “I did not express anything, did not reflect, did not display, did not depict.”
Lyrics by B. L. Pasternak
The central place in Pasternak's lyrics belongs to the theme of nature. The content of these poems is much broader than ordinary landscape sketches. Talking about springs and winters, about rains and sunrises, Pasternak talks about the nature of life itself and professes faith in the moral foundations of life. The landscape in Pasternak’s work is not just depicted, but lives and acts. The entire fullness of life in the diversity of its manifestations fits into a piece of nature, which seems to be capable of feeling, thinking and suffering.
Poem “February. Get some ink and cry!” refers to Pasternak's early lyrics. Written in 1912, it was published in the collection Lyrics in 1914, and later opened the collection Over Barriers, which included poems from different years. Imbued with the sad mood of farewell to winter, the poem amazes with the accuracy of its landscape sketches. The lyrical hero, a poet, wants to write about February, when the thawed patches turn black and the first puddles appear. He wants to rush off on a cab for six hryvnia to “... where the downpour is even noisier than ink and tears.” Thousands of rooks, looking like charred pears, “will fall into puddles and bring dry sadness to the bottom of your eyes.” The picture of awakening nature creates a special mood for the poet: “Write about February sobbing.” Pasternak's early poems are characterized by an amazing selection of vocabulary and associative series of images.
Metaphorical richness is also one of the distinctive features of Pasternak’s artistic system. This includes “rumbling slush”, “click of wheels”, “the wind is torn with screams”. The abundance of fresh, new comparisons, metaphors, epithets attracts attention, makes the poet’s language special and unique, but at the same time difficult to perceive.
The poems “Pines” and “Rime” were included in the collection “Peredelkino”. They were written in 1941 while living at the dacha in the village of Peredelkino near Moscow. The beauty of the nature of the surrounding world evokes in the poet a feeling of awe and admiration:
And so, immortal for a while, We are numbered among the pine trees And freed from pain and epidemics and death.
(“Pines”)
The poem “Rime” sounds the same theme of boundless gratitude to the natural world, which gives a person the opportunity to see the world in all its diversity. The days of late autumn, marked by the first frosts and the first snow, are especially dear to the poet:
And to the white dead kingdom, which mentally made me tremble, I quietly whisper: “Give thanks, you give more than they ask.”
Pasternak's lyrical hero is a passionate person. He never ceases to be surprised and rejoice at the world, because it is in simplicity that its beauty lies, you just need to understand this and be able to find it in everything. Pasternak sees the spontaneity of the world, and the complexity in the intertwining of human destinies, and at the same time simplicity, because people cannot live without each other. The theme of love appears in many of Pasternak's poems. Having experienced this great and all-consuming feeling more than once, Pasternak wrote a lot about love.
The poem “Loving others is a heavy cross...” was written in 1931 and was included in the cycle of poems “Second Birth”. It was dedicated to his wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna Neuhaus, a famous pianist. Imbued with great love, tenderness and admiration, it involuntarily evokes the best lines of love poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev. The image of your beloved is beautiful and unique:
Loving others is a heavy cross, But you are beautiful without convolutions, And the secret of your charm is tantamount to the solution to life.
In the same collection there was a poem “There will be no one in the house...”. The date of writing is the same - it is 1931. The theme of waiting for a loved one, who should suddenly appear at dusk, is revealed against the backdrop of a fading winter day. The lyrical hero is in harmony with nature. Signs of winter are reminiscent of the brush strokes of an impressionist artist: “...white wet clods // A quick glimpse of a flywheel,” “Winter day in a through doorway // Undrawn curtains.” The poet's soul lives in anticipation of the meeting:
You will appear at the door in something white without quirks, in something really from those materials from which flakes are sewn.
The topic of Russia always worried Pasternak. The fate of the writer was inseparable from the fate of his homeland. For him there was no question: stay after the revolution in Russia or emigrate to the West. Europe meant material well-being and peace, and Soviet Russia opened up unclear horizons unprecedented in world history. And Pasternak made his choice - he stayed in his homeland. In the second half of the 30s, when several waves of severe repression swept through the USSR, Pasternak realized that “unity with time turned into resistance to it.” But even in the most difficult moments of trials, Pasternak retained his love for the fatherland. This can be seen in the example of the short poem “On Early Trains,” written in 1941 and included in the “Peredelkino” cycle of poems. This is a little rhyming story. His hero is an intellectual tormented by the most complex questions of existence. “In the hot stuffiness of the carriage” of an electric train near Moscow, the truth about the beautiful and invincible people is revealed to him.
Through the vicissitudes of the past and the years of wars and poverty, I silently recognized Russia's unique features. Overcoming adoration, I watched, idolizing. There were women, Sloboda residents, students, mechanics. This is how the poet discovered “Russia’s unique features.” And he saw what only “the eyes of the prophet” could see. People's faces seem to be illuminated by the reflection of future battles, cleared of everyday husks. The turn of the forties separated two periods of Pasternak’s creative path. Late Pasternak is characterized by classical simplicity and clarity. His poems are inspired by the presence of the “huge image of Russia” revealed to the poet.
Throughout Pasternak’s entire career, he was concerned with the question of the poet’s position. In the cycle of poems “Theme with Variations” (1918), he searches in the artist, in creativity, for a source of strength capable of resisting the elements of destruction raging in the modern world. Trying to come to an understanding of the essence of the world, life, the laws of its movement, development, the poet asserted the creative nature of art:
Poetry, do not compromise on breadth, Preserve living precision: the precision of secrets. Don't make dots on the dotted line, And don't count the grains in the measure of bread.
In the poem “It’s Ugly to Be Famous...”, written in 1956, Pasternak defines his creative credo:
The goal of creativity is dedication, not hype, not success. It’s shameful, meaning nothing, to be a byword on everyone’s lips.
The will to overcome one’s limits was combined with constant concern for preserving one’s own style, with the desire to “not give up on one’s face.” The first line of the poem sets the tone for the entire poem:
Being famous is not nice. This is not what lifts you up. There is no need to start an archive, to tremble over manuscripts.
The true greatness of the poet lies not in gaining fame for himself, but in “attracting to himself the love of space, // Hearing the call of the future.”
The poem “In everything I want to get to the very essence ...” became a kind of poetic manifesto. It was written in 1955 and was included in the collection of poems “When it clears up” (1956-1959). The poem is imbued with a sense of belonging to everything living on earth, the desire to comprehend the complexity of life phenomena “to the foundations, to the roots, to the core.” Approaching Pushkin’s philosophical understanding of life: “I want to live so that I can think and suffer,” Pasternak writes:
All the time grasping the thread of Fates, events, Live, think, feel, love, Make discoveries.
Pasternak again equates poetry with the miracle of miracles - nature. In his poems, “the breath of roses, the breath of mint, meadows, sedge, haymaking, thunderstorms” come to life. And the guiding star on this path to the future, to the ideal, becomes for him immortal music, born of everyday life for eternity:
So Chopin once put the Living miracle of the farms, parks, groves, and graves into his sketches.
“The lyrics of the late Pasternak reveal to us the poet’s position - in relation to the world and time - from a slightly different perspective compared to his work of previous years. The idea of moral service here prevails over everything else... The meaning of being, the purpose of man, the essence of the world - these are the questions that worried Pasternak for many years, especially at the end of his life, when he, one might say, completely devotes his lyrics to the search for foundations, to unraveling the ultimate goals and root causes” (A. Sinyavsky).
An important place in Pasternak's lyrics is occupied by the poems included in the novel Doctor Zhivago (1956). They were written by the main character of this work - Yuri Zhivago. These are poems that were found in his papers after the death of the hero; they represent Yuri Zhivago’s testimony about his time and about himself. In the novel, poems are separated into a separate part. What we have before us is not just a small collection of poems, but a whole book with its own, strictly thought-out composition. It opens with a poem about Hamlet, which in world culture has become an image symbolizing reflection on the character of one’s own era. The lyrical hero of this poem, carrying within himself the thoughts and ideas of his generation, entering the stage of life, understands that he will have to “drink his cup” of deprivation, grief, suffering, and prays to God: “Abba Father, carry this cup past.” But he knows that you can achieve immortality only after you pass all the tests sent to you by fate. The lyrical hero realizes that he, like every person, must go through his own path in life, no matter how difficult it may be: Material from the site //iEssay.ru
But the schedule of actions has been thought out, And the end of the path is inevitable, I am alone, all the tone is in pharisaism. Living life is not a field to cross.
In the novel there are indications of the circumstances in which the idea of certain poems originated. One of the most famous poems of Doctor Zhivago is “Winter Night”. The image of a candle appearing on the pages of the novel becomes symbolic. On Christmas Eve, Yura and Tonya were driving along Kamergersky. “Suddenly he noticed a black, thawed hole in the ice build-up of one of the windows. Through this hole the fire of a candle shone through, penetrating into the street almost with the consciousness of a glance...” At this time, poems took shape in the mind of Yuri Zhivago: “The candle was burning on the table. The candle was burning..." like the beginning of something vague, unformed, in the hope that the continuation would come by itself. Thus, the image of a candle becomes a symbol of Yuri Zhivago’s poetic gift and his love for Lara, which he carried in his soul throughout his life:
Chalk, chalk all over the earth, to all limits. The candle was burning on the table, The candle was burning.
In the cycle of poems by Doctor Zhivago there are several poems dedicated to Orthodox holidays. One of them is called "Christmas Star". Talking about the birth of Christ, the poet describes the Star of Bethlehem, which lit up over the baby’s cradle:
She blazed like a haystack, away from heaven and God, like the reflection of arson, like a farm on fire and a fire on a threshing floor.
We see a beautiful baby, “shining in an oak manger, like a moon’s ray in the hollow of a hollow,” his mother, the Virgin Mary, who was admiring the Christmas star.
This poetic book ends with a poem called “The Garden of Gethsemane.” It contains the words of Christ addressed to the Apostle Peter, who defended Jesus with the sword from those who came to seize him and put him to a painful death. He says that “a dispute cannot be decided with iron,” and therefore orders Peter: “Put your sword in its place, man.” And in this poem there is a motive of voluntary self-sacrifice in the name of atonement for human suffering and a motive of the future Resurrection:
I will go to my grave and on the third day I will rise, And, like rafts being floated down the river, Centuries will sail from the darkness to me for judgment, like the barges of a caravan.
Thus, the book of poems opens with the theme of upcoming suffering and the awareness of its inevitability (“Hamlet”) and ends with the theme of its voluntary acceptance and atoning sacrifice.
“The legacy of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak is legitimately included in the treasury of Russian and world culture of our century. It has won the love and recognition of the most demanding and strict connoisseurs of poetry. Knowledge of this heritage becomes an urgent necessity, delightful reading and a reason for thinking about the fundamental issues of human existence” (A. Ozerov).
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