About the work of B. Pasternak

Pasternak began writing poetry in 1909. At the end of 1914, the first book, Twin in the Clouds, was published. The early Pasternak perceives the world through the obvious, the objective. The image is built on the associative convergence of phenomena. The artist does not invent images, he draws them from everywhere - in nature, at home, in the city. Each item appears updated by the vision of the poet. Characteristic of the early period of creativity is the poem "Marburg". Brilliant lines have become the standard of poetic declaration of love:

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

The love plot develops into a plot of peace. The things surrounding a person are both part of the world in themselves, and accomplices of the changes taking place in the hero.

In 1922, the collection My Sister My Life was published, which introduced Pasternak into great poetry. The main themes of the collection are nature, love, art. They do not exist separately from each other, but in an alloy, in solidarity. Nature is the closest synonym for life, but not something exclusive. An open feeling of love is also an expression of life. Life is wider than any of the figurative-thematic series. The poet's trust in life is the main quality of his worldview in these years

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

Later, under the influence of social events, Pasternak begins to perceive life differently, he sees the difference between natural and social life, which were previously perceived in harmony. The book "Themes and Variations" is more dramatic and tense than "My Sister Life". There are more crisis situations here, which is enshrined in the names of the cycles - “Illness”, “Rupture”. The poet's attitude to life becomes more complex, more contradictory. He is repelled by the servility of the new poetry, its topicality and purposefulness. He feels his dissimilarity, even some kind of detachment from others. In the poem “Drugu”, dedicated to B. Pilnyak, Pasternak does not separate himself from the social transformations of the country and its life, but he realizes that his poetic feeling is not aimed at the chanting of an era that builds future happiness for millions and pays no attention to individual people today:

Or do I not know that poking into the darkness, The darkness would never come out to the light, And I am a freak, and the happiness of hundreds of thousands Is not closer to me than the empty happiness of a hundred? And don't I measure the five-year-old, I don't fall, I don't rise with it? But how can I be with my chest And with the fact that any inertness is more inert? ..

Pasternak nowhere openly writes about his rejection of time, but his voice is not capable of singing the praises of five-year-olds. He cannot give up some moral poetic law that makes him independent of the topicality and opinions of the majority.

In the 1930s, one way or another, the era penetrates into poetry, coloring the most subjective situations in dramatic tones. A vivid example is the poem "The trembling piano". The history of misunderstanding and rupture of two lovers always carries a personal drama. Here this drama is included in the context of the tragic era:

I do not hold. Go do good. Go to others. Werther has already been written, And in our days the air smells of death: Open a window that open the veins.

The hero compares his drama with Werther's love drama. But Goethe's Werther has already been written, and there will be no other murder for love. Now there are hundreds of murders for other reasons.

Since 1940, a new stage in Pasternak's work begins. The poetic style is being updated: the verse becomes simpler, more accessible, focuses on the general, understandable to everyone. The war brought the poet a sense of community with everyone. The poems are filled with civic motifs ("Scouts", "Death of a sapper", "Pursuit"). They flow into the mainstream of official poetry and are published in Pravda. The poem "Spring" is permeated with a premonition of a close victory: material from the site

The spring breath of the motherland Washes away the trace of winter from space, And blackened by tears from tears From the tear-stained eyes of the Slavs.

Post-war poems are presented in the collection “When it is walking around”. Its name is symbolic: "to roam" - to clear up after bad weather. This is a clarification of public consciousness after the gloomy atmosphere of the Stalinist era, this is a “thaw” that brought a breath of fresh air of freedom. In the poems “Spring in the forest”, “After the blizzard”, “Around the bend”, a feeling of a turn in history, a renewal of life is conveyed. At the same time, there are a lot of “winter” poems in the collection (“Frosts”, “First Snow”, “Footprints in the Snow”, “It is Snowing”), where Pasternak hints through a “natural” metaphor that winter has not passed without a trace. The state of the era is drawn through the movements of nature and the soul, through the signs of everyday life. The poet did not really believe in the "thaw", foreseeing that the frosts would return. In his fate, these “freezes” were the story with the novel “Doctor Zhivago” (“I disappeared like a beast in a pen ...”).

Pasternak's poetry is devoid of vanity and pettiness. It is addressed to eternity, universal concepts, to comprehending the meaning of creativity, art. The poet seeks to comprehend life philosophically, to learn the secret of life. His credo is captured in the poem “In everything I want to get to the very essence ...”:

In everything I want to get to the very essence. In work, in search of a way, In heart trouble. To the essence of the past days, To their cause, To the foundations, to the roots, To the core.

Pasternak turns to biblical themes and images, not only emphasizing their universal significance, but also filling them with modern content. The Poems of Yuri Zhivago poses the problems of the temporal and the eternal, choice and predestination (Gethsemane), life and destiny (Hamlet).

Pasternak's poetry, never directly responding to the actual problems of the era, was in tune with the times. The poet was "for eternity a hostage of time in captivity."

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early lyrics

The first poems of B. Pasternak were published in 1913, his the first poetic book "Twin in the Clouds" (1914) . The poet reacted to the February Revolution with inspiration: “This is not a night, not a rain and not a chorus / The tearing: “Kerensky, cheers!”, / This is a blinding exit to the forum / From the catacombs, hopeless yesterday” (“Spring rain”, 1917 ). In the summer of 1917, Pasternak wrote poems that formed the basis collection who brought the poet true fame, "My sister is life" (1922) . The poetry of the "early" Pasternak is not an easy read. The complex associativity of thinking, musicality and metaphorical style give rise to unusual, bizarre images. His lyrical hero does not seem to necessarily strive to be understood, it is more important for him to throw out his overwhelming feelings. In one of Pasternak's first poems "February" (1912) , There is lines, exactly expressing the nature of the early lyrics of Boris Pasternak: "And the more random, the more true / The verses are composed sobbing". The lyrical impulse, the extreme emotional intensity of feelings are the most characteristic features that distinguish the poetry of the "early" Pasternak. His lyrical hero has a kinship with the outside world.. He experiences sunrises and sunsets, snowfalls and thunderstorms as the most important events of his own life. In turn, nature itself lives in his poems as a human life: it does things, suffers and rejoices, falls in love, looks at the poet, explains on his behalf. Indicative in this respect are such verses as " After the rain", "Crying garden", "Waving a fragrant branch..." and many others.

mature poetry

In the 30s - 50s, Pasternak's style changes. The poet consciously strives for crystal clearness and simplicity. However, in his own words, this is an "unheard of simplicity" into which one falls "like into heresy" ("Waves"). It does not imply public access. It is unexpected, anti-dogmatic. In Pasternak's poems, the world is seen as if for the first time, outside of patterns and stereotypes.. As a result, the familiar appears from an unusual angle, the everyday reveals its significance. Yes, in a poem "It is snowing" in the snow going outside the window, the poet sees the movement of time. And in the poem "Wedding" ordinary household painting ("Having crossed the edge of the yard, / Guests for a party / To the bride's house until morning / Passed with talyanka ...") ends with a deep philosophical conclusion, which expresses the idea of ​​memory as a pledge of immortality:

Life is also just a moment

Only dissolution

of ourselves in all others

As if they were a gift.

Thus, the simplicity of the style of the "late" Pasternak is combined with the depth of the philosophical content of his works. . This is evidenced by many verses from his poetry collections and cycles: "On early trains" (1936 - 1944), "Poems by Yuri Zhivago" (1946 - 1953), "When it clears up" (1956 - 1959) .

The late work of B. Pasternak is closely connected with the early. In his lyrics of the 40-50s, the same poetic themes as in the poetry of the 10-20s: nature, love, art and the vocation of the artist: it also contains an understanding of the relationship of a person with the natural world around him, the same delight of being. And yet, some of the peculiarities of Pasternak's perception of the world in his later work appear more clearly. The world around is perceived by the poet, first of all, as the world of God. This explains the presence of religious motifs, plots and images in many of his poems : "Hamlet", "August", "Christmas Star", "Dawn", "Garden of Gethsemane" ", "In the hospital" etc. This is also connected with reverence for the miracle of life, a sense of the hidden value of all living things, which is so vivid in his later lyrics. A typical example of this is the poem "When it clears up" (1956) . In him landscape sketch becomes an expression of the philosophy of life, a reflection on the happiness of existence, O the miracle of the divine presence in the world. "The expanse of the earth" is compared by the poet with the "inside of the cathedral", and the "greenness of the leaves" - with "painting in colored glass", with "church window painting". A person is a part of the beautiful, mysterious world of God, and the consciousness of this gives him a feeling of happiness:

Nature, the world, the secret of the universe,

I serve your long

Embraced by the secret trembling,

I'm in tears of happiness.

This poem manifested the inherent poetic style of Pasternak a combination of lyrical penetration and pictorial concreteness, plasticity . The poet seems to paint a picture with a word, outlining its composition from the very first lines. ("The big lake is like a dish, / Behind it - the osprey - the laziness of the clouds...").

Religious motifs permeate many works of the cycle "Poems by Yuri Zhivago "So, in "Dawn" (1947) expressed the idea of ​​the significance of the precepts of Christ in the life of the poet. It is already in the title of the poem. Faith in God allows a person to overcome the darkness of life and be reborn spiritually ("I read your testament all night / And how I came to life from a faint").

The creative and civic positions of the poet are defined in the poem "Hamlet" (1946), opening the cycle "Poems of Yuri Zhivago". It was written shortly after B. Pasternak translated Shakespeare's drama of the same name. The interpretation of the image of Hamlet acquires from him autobiographical meaning . The lyrical hero of the poem feels like an actor on the stage of life in the midst of the general "twilight of the night." ". In "Hamlet" Pasternak realized the inevitability of his moral opposition to the power of lies and darkness.

Thus, in the mature work of Pasternak:

• plastic poetics appears - the image of everyday specifics.
• the biographical beginning is strengthened
• there is a change in the subject-object organization: from the lyrical hero as an eyewitness to history to its participant.

Main themes:

• The theme of the "thaw" (after the 20th congress). There is hope for social change. climate, and on the other hand - the emancipation of man as a creative person.
• Tragic theme and participation in being; salutary natural harmony. " In the hospital», « Nobel Prize».
• New image of nature: lyre. the hero constantly feels the joy of discovery. " By mushrooms"- spiritual kinship with nature. " Silence» - access to the timeless and a sense of immortality.
• The problem of the meaning of human existence and its purpose. According to Pasternak, the meaning of human life is very simple. A person is a ring in the chain of generations => a person's life is a connection of the past with the future. In this regard, it is important memory theme. In many verses there is idea of ​​entering the future. Thus, the meaning of life is to experience everything and go through everything. Metaphors of life become: road, trip, time ("It's snowing"). "The only days" - this oxymoron is Pasternak's idea of ​​​​life.
• The theme of creativity. There is an evolution of the theme of creativity in the mature books of Pasternak. The nature of artistic creativity: creativity is a tense interaction, it is a poet's intense contact with reality. Contact metaphor: voltaic arc, spark, charge.

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The formation of the creative personality of B. Pasternak - a poet, translator, prose writer took place under the influence of painting, music, philosophy. The son of the artist Leonid Osipovich Pasternak and the famous pianist Rosalia Kaufman, he loved to draw from childhood, studied music professionally, dreamed of composing, wrote three piano pieces. In his youth, B. Pasternak was fond of philosophy, in 1913 he graduated from the philosophical department of the history - philology faculty of Moscow University. And although neither painting, nor music, nor philosophy eventually became the subject of his professional studies, they did not leave his life, but, having united in a new quality, determined the originality of his poetic style, the peculiarities of his worldview.

B. Pasternak's first poems were published in 1913, but the collection My Sister Life (1922) brought him real fame. The poetry of the "early" Pasternak is not an easy read. The complex associativity of thinking, musicality and metaphorical style give rise to unusual, bizarre images. The poetic speech of the "early" Pasternak is often confused and chaotic. It is similar to the speech of something shocked, choking with excitement of a person. His lyrical hero does not seem to necessarily strive to be understood, it is more important for him to throw out his overwhelming feelings. In one of Pasternak's first poems "February" (1912), there are lines that accurately express the nature of his early lyrics: "And the more accidental, the more true / The verses are composed sobbing." The lyrical impulse, the extreme emotional intensity of feelings - these are, perhaps, the most characteristic features that distinguish the poetry of the "early" Pasternak. His lyrical hero has a kindred relationship with the outside world. He experiences sunrises and sunsets, snowfalls and thunderstorms as the most important events of his own life. In turn, nature itself lives in his poems as a human life: it does things, suffers and rejoices, falls in love, looks at the poet, explains on his behalf. Indicative in this respect are such verses as "After the Rain", "Weeping Garden", "Sweet Branches Mushing..." and many others.

In the 1930s and 1950s, Pasternak's style changed. The poet consciously strives for crystal clearness and simplicity. However, in his own words, this is an "unheard of simplicity" into which one falls "like into heresy" ("Waves"). It does not imply public access. It is unexpected, anti-dogmatic. In Pasternak's poetry, the world is seen as if for the first time, outside of patterns and stereotypes. As a result, the familiar appears from an unusual angle, the everyday reveals its significance. So, in the poem "It's snowing" in the snow going outside the window, the poet sees the movement of time. And in the poem "Wedding" the usual everyday sketch ("Having crossed the edge of the yard, / Guests for a party / To the bride's house until morning / Passed with talyanka ...") ends with a deep philosophical conclusion, which expresses the idea of ​​memory as a guarantee of immortality:

After all, life is also only a moment, Only the dissolution of ourselves in all others As if they were a gift.

Thus, the simplicity of the style of the "late" Pasternak is combined with the depth of the philosophical content of his works. This is evidenced by many poems from his poetry collections and cycles: "On the early trains" (1936 - 1944), "Poems by Yuri Zhivago" (1946 - 1953), "When it clears up" (1956 - 1959). The later work of B. Pasternak is closely connected with the early one. In his lyrics of the 40-50s, the same poetic themes as in the poetry of the 10-20s: nature, love, art and the vocation of the artist: it also contains an understanding of the relationship of a person with the natural world around him, the same delight of being . And yet, some of the peculiarities of Pasternak's perception of the world in his later work appear more clearly. The surrounding world is realized by the poet first of all as the world of God. This explains the presence of religious motifs, plots and images in many of his poems: "Hamlet", "August", "Christmas Star", "Dawn", "Gethsemane Garden", "In the Hospital" and others. 14 n-7b 209

a miracle of life, a sense of the hidden value of all living things, which is so vivid in his late lyrics. A characteristic example of this is the poem "When it clears up" (1956). In it, a landscape sketch becomes an expression of the philosophy of life, a reflection on the happiness of existence, on the miracle of the divine presence in the world. "The expanse of the earth" is compared by the poet with the "inside of the cathedral", and the "greenness of the leaves" - with "painting in colored glass", with "church window painting". A person is a part of the beautiful, mysterious world of God, and the consciousness of this gives him a feeling of happiness:

Nature, the world, the secret of the universe, I serve you for a long time, Embraced by a secret trembling, In tears of happiness, I lay down.

In this poem, the combination of lyrical penetration and pictorial concreteness, plasticity inherent in Pasternak's poetic style, manifested itself. The poet seems to paint a picture with a word, outlining its composition from the very first lines ("The big lake as a dish, / Behind it - a crowd - the laziness of clouds ..."). Pasternak's color and light palettes are colorful and multicolored. "White pile" of clouds, reminiscent of mountain glaciers; the blue of the sky peeping "between the clouds"; "green leaves"; sunlight poured over the earth - all this is intended to create a feeling of a holiday of nature and express the happiness of merging with it.

Religious motifs permeate many works of the cycle "Poems of Yuri Zhivago". Thus, in "Dawn" (1947) the idea of ​​the significance of the precepts of Christ in the life of the poet is expressed. It is already in the title of the poem. Faith in God allows a person to overcome the darkness of life and be reborn spiritually ("I read your testament all night / And how I came to life from a faint"). The dawn that has come in the soul of the poet awakens in him love for people, a keen sense of his unity with the world: "In a doubt, people without names, / Trees, children, homebodies, / I am defeated by all of them / And only in this is my victory" ". just as the images and plots of the Gospel are built on a combination of miracle and everyday life, so in the gospel themes of B. Pasternak's works, including in the poem "Dawn", the prosaic details only emphasize the lofty and spiritual meaning of what is happening.

The creative and civil positions of the poet are defined in the poem "Hamlet" (1946), which opens the cycle "Poems of Yuri Zhivago". It was written shortly after B. Pasternak translated Shakespeare's drama of the same name. His interpretation of the image of Hamlet acquires an autobiographical meaning. The lyrical hero of the poem feels like an actor on the stage of life in the midst of the universal "twilight of the night." In "Hamlet" the inevitability of his moral opposition to the power of lies and darkness, realized by Pasternak, is expressed. But this decision is not easy: "I am alone, everything is drowning in hypocrisy. / Life to live is not a field to cross." Pasternak's understanding of the vocation of the artist is connected with the Christian theme of sacrifice and self-denial. This is evidenced by the quotation from the Gospel included in the text of the poem ("Prayer for the Cup"). Christ, knowing of the approaching torments of his cross and experiencing mortal anguish from this, came to the Garden of Gethsemane and turned to the Lord with a supplication: "AbbaFather 1 ...), I carried it past me, but not what I want, but what You." Pasternak almost verbatim quotes these lines in Hamlet: "If you can, Abba Father, take this Cup past." His hero experiences a completely understandable feeling of fear of a cruel fate, and at the same time he is clearly aware of the "inevitability of the end of the road." A quote from the Gospel allows us to correlate the poem "Hamlet" with the "Garden of Gethsemane", which crowns the cycle. They are united by a common theme of duty and the fulfillment of a high destiny, the inevitability of the way of the cross as a guarantee of immortality. The poet's duty is to save the world through art.

Seeing the poet's destiny in serving a higher spiritual principle, realizing that he is responsible for his deeds before his conscience and God, Pasternak in the poem "Night"(1956) calls the poet "a hostage of eternity", being "a prisoner of time". He compares it with a star, with a pilot, soaring in the night sky and protecting the planet's sleep, "as if the sky were the subject of his nightly concerns." Like him, the artist should not indulge in sleep: "Don't sleep, don't sleep, work, / Don't interrupt your work, / Don't sleep, fight drowsiness, / Like a pilot, like a star." In "Night" one can observe such a characteristic

a feature of Pasternak's poetic manner, as the widespread use of colloquial expressions and set phrases, which often side by side with high cosmic concepts on an equal footing: "The night goes without delay and melts ..."; "Wandering, huddled together, celestial bodies ...", etc. Poetry, in Pasternak's view, is an echo of life, it "rolls in the grass, underfoot, so you just have to bend down to see it and pick it up from the ground." Therefore, in his poems there is no division of images into poetic and non-poetic, just as there is no hard line between living life and a work of art.

In the poem "In everything I want to get to the very essence ..." (1956), the openness to the world so characteristic of Pasternak, the feeling of fusion with it, is expressed. Only under this condition can the poet know the secret of life, reach "in everything (..,1 to the very essence", "to the foundation, to the roots, to the core". Only under this condition can the "living miracle" of the birth of art take place:

I would break poetry like a garden. With all the trembling of the veins, the lindens would bloom in them in a row, in single file, in the back of the head.

In a poem "Being famous is ugly..."(1956) Pasternak defines the goal of creativity as "self-giving, not hype, not success." Therefore, it is ugly for an artist to be famous, because only creativity itself can be famous. The poet must "live in such a way that in the end / Attract the love of space to himself, / Hear the call of the future." Fuss, noisy success with the crowd - all these are imaginary values. Anyone who recognizes himself as a "hostage of eternity" feels responsibility, first of all, to the future. He is the discoverer of new roads. Plunging into the unknown, the artist creates new worlds. At the same time, it is important for him to preserve himself as a person and "not a single slice / Do not deviate from the face, / But be alive, alive and only, / Alive and only to the end."

The most intimate work of B. Pasternak, in which he put his understanding of the most important life problems, is "Doctor Zhivago"(1956). K.A. Fedin called this novel "an autobiography of the great Pastsrak". Of course, these words should not be taken literally, in the sense that "Doctor /Ki Nago" reflects specific facts from the writer's life. The novel about Doctor Zhivago is B. Pasternak's spiritual autobiography. In a letter to O. M. Freidenberg dated October 13, 1946, the writer defined the idea of ​​his work as follows: “I want to give a historical image of Russia over the past forty-five years, and at the same time (...] this thing will be an expression of my views on art, on the Gospel, on the life of a person in history, and on many other things 1 ... 1. The atmosphere of a thing is my Christianity. "This "my Christianity" ultimately determined not only the "atmosphere of a thing", but also constituted the essence, the soul of the novel. Christianity is understood by Pasternak and his heroes as the apotheosis of a free personality: "the power of quantity has ended (...]. Leaders and peoples have become a thing of the past. Personality, the preaching of freedom have replaced them." Therefore, reflections on human destinies are correlated in romance primarily with concepts " personality" and "freedom". "Doctor Zhivago" gives a wide coverage of historical events from the beginning of the 20th century to the 40s, if we keep in mind the events of the epilogue of the novel. The author focuses on the revolution, civil war and how they reflected in the souls and destinies of people.

The protagonist of the novel, the doctor and poet Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, at first feels a sense of admiration for the revolution as a "historical miracle": it "burst against its will, like a breath held for too long. Everyone came to life. was reborn, everyone has transformations, upheavals. but two revolutions happened to each, one of his own, personal, and the other general. Revolution is understood by Yuri Zhivago not as a political, social phenomenon, but as a natural, cosmic element. It seems to him that "socialism is a sea, into which all these separate revolutions, a sea of ​​life, a sea of ​​identity, must flow in streams."

For the hero of the novel, and at the same time for the author, history is a living organism, on which it is unacceptable to impose one's will. But the main misfortune of the post-revolutionary era was an attempt to drive living life into a pre-prepared scheme. The "historical miracle" turned into a diabolical experiment on people, into violence against a person. Zhivago cannot accept the poetry of those "masters" of the fate of the revolution, who saw their task in "remaking life." “When I hear about the remaking of life, I lose power over myself and fall into despair,” he exclaims. “Life is never a material, a substance. { .]". Yuri Zhivago's position in life may seem passive. But it was precisely in his unwillingness to take part in the bloody deed that the moral, worthy of a person, truly free life choice of the hero was expressed.

A kind of antipode of Zhivago in the novel is Antipov-Strelnikov, whose position in relation to the revolution is very active. The son of a railroad worker, an honest and noble man, he decides to "become a judge between life and the dark principles that distort it, come to its defense and avenge it." However, he paves the road to a beautiful "tomorrow" with the lives and blood of people who do not agree to follow the path he has drawn. No wonder the people called him Rasstrelnikov. Soon Antipov himself becomes a victim of the revolution. Persecuted and persecuted by the "champions of justice" who came to replace him, he will be forced to commit suicide.

The only island of spirituality that allows a person to remain a person in the world of political passions and violence is love. "Doctor Zhivago" can be read as a novel about love, because it is with it that the idea of ​​the meaning of life and its immortality is connected. Love is perceived by the writer and his characters as "the highest form of living energy." "Man in other people is the soul of man", and if this is so, then there is no death and life is eternal.

Fate gave Yuri Zhivago a meeting with two women - with Tonya Gromeko and Lara Antipova, each of whom he loved in his own way. Tonya was his close friend, wife, mother of his children. With Lara, the poetry of love is connected, and at the same time her tragedy, the consciousness of her doom on earth. Love for Lara raised Zhivago to an unprecedented height of the human spirit. But she also ruined him. Separation from her was for Yuri Andreevich tantamount to death. And although Marina also appears in the last part of the novel, Zhivago is no longer able to love anyone, for his soul has completely dissolved in Lara. Separation from Lara leads the hero to spiritual death, and time, epoch leads to physical death.

In 1929, Yuri Andreevich dies of a heart attack, unable to withstand the closeness of the tram in which he was traveling to work. This tram, constantly breaking down, full of embittered people, is perceived as a metaphorical image of a society in which a living person has nothing to breathe. And in this sense, the death of the hero in the novel is natural. His ideas about life and its values ​​did not correspond to the new historical era that was coming into its own. There could be no compromise between the new government and this type of personality. And yet the ending of the novel is bright. The most important idea of ​​immortality in Pasternak's religious and philosophical concept allows dispelling the gloom of death and the gloom of life. Yuri Zhivago's life continued in his poems, for "art," as the novel says, "always [...] is occupied with two things. It relentlessly meditates on death and relentlessly creates life with it."

The fate of the novel "Doctor Zhivago" is dramatic. Contemporaries perceived it as a libel on the revolution, as a political confession of the author, so B. Pasternak was denied publication of the work. However, the novel attracted the attention of foreign publishers, and already in 195? In a year it was published abroad, and a year later B. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize "for outstanding achievements in modern lyric poetry and in the traditional field of great Russian prose." The awarding of this international prize was regarded by us as a political action and led to a real persecution of the writer. As a result, B. Pasternak was forced to refuse a well-deserved high award. The experiences of these years did not go unnoticed for him. Pasternak fell seriously ill, and on May 30, 1960 he died. However, until the end of his days, he retained faith in the final triumph of goodness and justice. In the poem "The Nobel Prize" (1959), created shortly before his death, he wrote:

But even so, almost at the tomb I believe, the time will come, The strength of meanness and malice Will overcome the spirit of good.

Time has confirmed the correctness of the poet. In 1988, the novel Doctor Zhivago was finally published in Pasternak's homeland, which has since gone through many different editions. And in 1990, the son of Boris Leonidovich was awarded the Nobel medal of his father.

1. Alfonsov V. Poetry of Boris Pasternak. - L., 1990. - 368 p.

2. Likhachev D. S. Reflections on the novel by B. A. Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago" // Rereading again: Lit. - critical articles. - L., 1989. -S. 135-146.

3. Discussing the novel by Boris Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago": [Selection of materials] // Questions of Literature. - 1988. - N 9.

4. Ozerov L. About Boris Pasternak. - M „ 1990. - 64 p.

5. Pasternak E. Life of an artist: On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of B. Pasternak // Literature at school. - 1989. -N 6.- S. 3-19.

If it is true that the artist creates in order to make people fall in love with him, and this is hinted at by the line that sets the poet the task of “attracting the love of space to himself,” then Pasternak, not only in literature, but in life, was all such creativity.

There is something in common between the work of his father, the wonderful Russian painter Leonid Pasternak, and his own. The artist Leonid Pasternak captured the moment: he painted everywhere - at concerts, at a party, at home, on the street - making instant sketches. His drawings seemed to stop time. His famous portraits are alive to the extraordinary. And after all, in fact, his eldest son, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, did the same in poetry - he created a chain of metaphors, as if stopping and surveying the phenomenon in its diversity. But a lot was also passed on from her mother: her complete dedication, her ability to live only by art.

At the very beginning of his poetic path, in 1912, Pasternak found very capacious words to express his poetry:

And, as in unheard-of faith,

I'm moving on this night

Where the poplar is dilapidated - gray

He hung the moon boundary.

Where is labor as a revealed mystery,

Where the surf whispers apple trees,

Where the garden hangs like a piling

And holds the sky before him.

(“Like a brazier with bronze ash”).

In order to get involved in the poetic life of Moscow, Pasternak joined the group of poets headed by Yulian Anisimov. This group was called "Lyric". And the first printed poems were those that were included in the collection "Lyrics", published in 1913. These poems were not included by the author in any of his books and were not reprinted during his lifetime.

I dreamed of autumn in the half-light of glass,

Friends and you in their clownish crowd,

And, like a falcon that has extracted blood from heaven,

The heart descended into your hand.

But time passed, and grew old, and deafened,

And a silver frame of canvas,

Dawn from the garden doused the glass

Bloody tears of September.

But time passed and got old. And loose

Like ice, the silk armchairs cracked and melted.

Suddenly, loud, you stumbled and fell silent,

And the dream, like the echo of a bell, fell silent.

I woke up. It was dark like autumn.

Dawn, and the wind, moving away, carried,

Like straw running after a cart,

A ridge of birch trees running across the sky.

("Dream ")

In 1914, his already independent collection was published, which he called “Twin in the Clouds”. The collection did not attract much attention. Only Valery Bryusov spoke of him approvingly. Pasternak himself said: “I tried to avoid romantic tunes, extraneous interest. I did not need to rumble them from the stage ... I did not achieve a distinct rhythm, dance and song, from the action of which, almost without the participation of words, legs and arms begin to move by themselves. My constant concern was for the content. It was my constant dream that the poem itself should contain something, that it should contain “a new thought or a new picture”.

The poems written in those years were then partially included by Pasternak in the cycle “The Beginning Time” - the cycle with which his collections of poems usually began to open.

I grew up. Me like Ganimera

They carried bad weather, they carried dreams.

Troubles grew like wings

And separated from the earth.

I grew up. And Compline woven

The veil wrapped around me.

We admonish with wine in glasses,

The game of sad glass ...

(“I grew up. Me, like Ganimera…)

In 1917, even before the October Revolution, the second book of poems “Over the Barriers” was published with censored exceptions. These books constituted the first period of Pasternak's work, the period of searching for his own poetic face.

The early Pasternak strove for “material expressiveness” within the framework of “objective thematism”, and this was primarily carried out in the structure of the image. The poetic image corresponds to reality, but this correspondence is of a special nature. The image is built on the associative convergence of objects, phenomena, states. It is concrete within the local limits of the theme and at the same time conveys the inner integrity, indivisibility of life. The early period ends with the poem "Marburg".

... some were blinded by it all. Others-

That darkness seemed to gouge out an eye.

The chickens were digging in the dahlia bushes,

Crickets and dragonflies ticked like teacups.

Tiles floated, and noon watched,

Without blinking, on the bucket. And in Marburg

Who, whistling loudly, made a crossbow,

Who silently prepared for the Trinity Fair ...

It can be said, without belittling a number of other, perhaps even more perfect poems for that time, that it was in Marburg that Pasternak saw life “in a new way and, as it were, for the first time,” that is, he achieved a mature originality of poetic thought.

In 1922, a collection of poems “My sister is life” was published. And it was written mainly in 1917, at the beginning of the revolutionary era. “Summer of 1917” is its subtitle. This book brought Pasternak wide fame and put him among the famous Russian poets of the post-revolutionary period. Pasternak himself was perceived as a statement of his own creative poetry. He wrote about this collection of his poems in the following way: "... I was completely indifferent to the name of the force that gave the book, because it was immeasurably larger than me and the poetic concepts that surrounded me."

In the summer of 1917, Pasternak, “on a personal occasion, traveled and observed the seething Russia with his own eyes. Later, in 1956, in a manuscript entitled “My sister is life,” intended for the essay “People and Conditions,” he recalled: “Forty years have passed. From such a distance and prescription, voices are no longer heard from the crowds, day and night conferring on summer venues in the open air, as at a daytime meeting. But even at this distance I continue to see these meetings as silent spectacles or as frozen living pictures.

Many startled and alert souls stopped each other, flocked, crowded, thought aloud. People from the people averted their souls and talked about the most important things, about how and why to live and what ways to arrange the only conceivable and worthy existence.

The contagious universality of their rise blurred the boundary between man and nature. In that famous summer of 1917, in the interval between two revolutionary periods, roads, trees and stars held meetings and orated together with the people. The air from end to end was engulfed in a hot thousand-mile inspiration and seemed like a person with a name, seemed clairvoyant and animated.

Poetry was for him an inner, spiritual need. But money was needed. He began to earn money by translations already in 1918-1921. During this period, he translated five verse dramas by Kleist and Ben Jonson, intercomedies by Hans Sachs, lyrics by Goethe, S. van Lerbarg and the German pressionists.

Already in the 1920s, Pasternak felt an attraction to epic forms - more precisely, to epic forms with a lyrical, very subjective content. History and his own life in the past become for him the main themes of his great works.

In 1925, Pasternak began to write a poetic novel - the poem "Spektorsky", largely autobiographical. A poetic cycle “The High Illness”, the poems “Nine Hundred and Fifth Years” and “Lieutenant Schmidt” are being created. In the fateful year 1937, the Soviet Writer publishing house published Pasternak's revolutionary poems Lieutenant Schmidt and 1905. The design of the book attracts attention: a uniform, red star on a gray one, like an overcoat of an NKVD officer on the cover. Obviously, this book was supposed to serve as "the poet's safe-conduct, something like a document certifying his" revolutionary consciousness, civic loyalty ". In 1928, the idea of ​​his prose book “Guaranteed Safeguard” appeared, which he completed only two years later. According to Pasternak himself, these are autobiographical passages about how my ideas about art developed and what they are rooted in.”

In 1931, Pasternak went to the Caucasus and wrote poems that were included in the “Waves” cycle, in which his impressions of the Caucasus and Georgia were reflected.

Everything will be here: experienced

And what I still live

My aspirations and principles

And seen in reality.

The waves of the sea are in front of me.

A lot of them. They can't count

Their darkness. They make noise in a minor key.

The surf, like waffles, bakes them.

(“Waves”).

The rebirth of Pasternak is connected with the impressions of a trip to the Urals in the summer of 1932. Much later, Pasternak recalled: “In the early thirties there was such a movement among writers - they began to travel to collective farms, collect materials for books about the new village. I wanted to be with everyone and also went on such a trip with the idea of ​​writing a book. What I saw there cannot be expressed in words. It was such an inhuman, unimaginable grief, such a terrible disaster that it ... did not fit into the boundaries of consciousness. I got sick, I couldn’t sleep for a whole year.”

When the poet regained the gift of creative speech, his style changed beyond recognition. The outlook, the feeling of life has changed. He changed himself.

The new book was called On the Early Trains, after a poem written in January 1941. Here is how and this is what Pasternak now wrote about:

In the hot stuffiness of the car

I gave myself completely

A rush of innate weakness

And sucked in with milk

Through the past drinking

And the years of wars and poverty

I silently recognized Russia

Unique features.

Overcoming admiration,

I watched, idolizing

There were women, Slobozhans,

Locksmith students.

Amazing verses! Purely free from everything "chaotic and heaped" that came from the aesthetics of modernism. And these lines are not only marked by unheard-of simplicity. They are imbued with living warmth, love for the poet's morning companions. Where did the aloofness of the early poems go!

But not just a hot feeling for the “locksmiths” inspired poems. The poet, who quite recently was fascinated by peering into the "grass under his feet" in search of poetry, was discovered "Russia's unique features." And he saw what only “prophetic eyes” can see through. The faces of people are as if illuminated by the reflection of future battles. Cleaned from daily husks. Inscribed in history.

The turn of the forties separates two periods of Pasternak's creative path. The late Pasternak is characterized by classical simplicity and clarity. His poems are inspired by the presence of the “huge image of Russia” that opened up to the poet.

In 1943, Pasternak made a trip to the front in a brigade of writers, to the army that liberated Oryol. The trip resulted in the essays "The Liberated City" and "A Trip to the Army", as well as poems depicting episodes of the battle - "The Death of a Sapper", "Pursuit", "Scouts".

In a frenzy, as if prayerful

From the corpse of a poor child

We flew over ditches and potholes

After the murderers in pursuit.

Clouds drifted at intervals

And themselves, formidable, like a cloud,

We are with the devil and jokes

They crushed their viper nests.

("The pursuit").

The poetry of Pasternak during the war is unfinished, carrying questions and possibilities that have not been fully identified.

Pasternak paid much attention to love lyrics. According to Yevtushenko to Ambassador Pushkin, perhaps no one felt a woman like Pasternak:

And since from early childhood

I am wounded by the female share.

And the trace of the poet is only a trace

Her ways are no more...

And that's why all this night in the snow doubles,

And I can't draw a line between us...

Farewell, abyss of humiliation

A challenging woman!

I am your battlefield.

If there are such beautiful verses, there are also women to whom these verses are dedicated. And they were.

The love of others is a heavy cross,

And you are beautiful without convolutions,

And the charms of your secret

The solution to life is tantamount to.

In the spring, the rustle of dreams is heard

And the rustle of news and truths.

You are from a family of such foundations.

Your meaning, like air, is disinterested.

Easy to wake up and see

Straighten verbal rubbish from the heart

And live without clogging in the future. All this is not a big trick.

(“To love others is a heavy cross”).

This is how Boris Pasternak wrote about his wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna. With great love, tenderness, admiration.

Pasternak also wrote his lyrical poems about his great friend O. V. Ivinskaya. She was very dear and close to him. He was afraid to lose her.

… You also throw off your dress,

Like a grove sheds its leaves

When you fall into an embrace

In a dressing gown with a silk tassel.

You are the blessing of a disastrous step,

When life is sicker than sickness,

And the root of beauty is courage,

And it draws us to each other.

("Autumn").

It was 1946. The famous novel “Doctor Zhivago”, which was regarded by its author almost as the final one, began long before it took on its novel form. Form was ahead of ideas.

The war is over and there is new hope. Pasternak wanted to do something big, significant - then the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe novel arose. He began his essay on the old manor. There clearly appeared a large estate, which different generations re-planned according to their tastes, and the earth keeps barely visible traces of flower beds and paths.
Doctor Zhivago is not a novel at all, but a kind of autobiography of Pasternak himself - an autobiography in which, surprisingly, there are no external facts that coincide with the real life of the author. And yet Pasternak, as it were, writes for another about himself. This is Pasternak's spiritual autobiography, confusing the inexperienced reader with its attraction to lyric poetry.

The main character - Yuri Zhivago, a doctor, thinking, with searches, creativity, dies in 1929. After him, there are notes and, among other papers, written in his younger years, individual poems ... which in their entirety constitute the last, final chapter of the novel.

Farewell, spread wing frames,

Flight of free perseverance,

And the image of the world, revealed in the word,

And creativity, and wonderworking.

These lines end the poem "August", written by Pasternak in 1953 and included in the text of "Doctor Zhivago". Lines - farewell to the novel, work on which is completed. It went on for a long time, seven years.

In fact, Doctor Zhivago is an outstanding work, neither "right" nor "left", but simply a novel from the revolutionary era, written by a poet - straightforward, pure and truthful, full of Christian humanism, with an elevated idea of ​​\u200b\u200bman - not so popular, of course, as in Gorky: "A man - it sounds proud." - there is no bad taste in Pasternak, just as there is no pose and cheap stiltedness. A novel that depicts the era of the revolution very faithfully, but not propaganda. And real art has never been a propaganda leaflet.

B.L. Pasternak, like any poet, more than once indulged in reflections about the purpose of his poetry, the purpose of its existence. Pasternak began to think about this at the very beginning of his literary career. Both in the period of symbolism and in the period of futurism, this theme did not leave the poet. It is clear that at different stages of the literary path, Pasternak regarded the meaning of his activity in different ways.

The early work of Pasternak is colored by symbolistic tendencies, with metaphors and figurativeness inherent in this direction. But pretty soon the poet joins the futuristic group "Centrifuge". In 1917, he wrote an article for her about the work of V. Mayakovsky, where he expresses two requirements that, in his opinion, apply to a real poet. Mayakovsky's poetry met both requirements. First, the poet must have the clarity of creativity; secondly, to be responsible before time, eternity, which is the true judge of a true poet. The work of the poet, according to Pasternak, is measured and evaluated by the categories of eternity, only the works of a true master can be immortal. Such an understanding of creativity will be characteristic of Pasternak throughout his entire literary and life path.

After some time, Pasternak decides that he does not want to follow any literary trend, declaring himself as an original poet. The framework of the aesthetic rules of one direction or another was tight for him, and he began to go beyond them in his poems. Analyzing the work of this period, we can say that Pasternak began to focus his talent on simplicity and clarity of presentation, clarity of images, closeness to the reader.

With the publication of a new collection of poems, My Sister Life, Pasternak's theme of the poet and poetry sounded differently. In the cycle "Engaging in Philosophy" the reader sees the poet's attempts to give a philosophical definition to creativity. Such, for example, are the poems "Definition of Poetry", "Definition of the Soul", "Definition of Creativity". But again, Pasternak returns to considering the relationship of creativity with eternity - with the universe.

Time passed, and the poet's worldview changed. By the time Doctor Zhivago was published, Pasternak's reflections on the role and purpose of creativity had reached their apogee. The protagonist of the novel, Yuri Zhivago, almost identically reproduces the views of the author himself. Undoubtedly, Zhivago is a creative person; in one of his letters, Pasternak even wrote: "This hero will have to represent something between me, Blok, Yesenin and Mayakovsky." The verses discovered after Zhivago's death, which he wrote a long time ago, prove the author's idea of ​​the poet's immortality.

To understand how this topic was revealed in later works, it is worth analyzing the poems from Pasternak's last collection "When it clears up."

"Being famous is ugly" contains a clear definition of what a true poet should be. According to Pasternak, he simply cannot be famous, "shake over manuscripts", he should not know success. "The goal of creativity is self-giving," and this is the main goal of poetry for him. Here he again formulates the two requirements of the poet, but in a slightly different way: clarity and simplicity are necessary, and also the poet's work must be original, individual. He adds that the poet should be close to real life problems.

And owe not a single slice

Don't back away from your face

But to be alive, alive and only,

Alive and only until the end.

In the poem "Night" the hero is the pilot, identified here with the poet. The pilot flies over the world, contemplating and being at the same time a part of this world, inextricably linked with it:

Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist

Don't give in to sleep.

You are a hostage of eternity

Time is a prisoner.

Constant repetitions create the effect of constant movement; Pasternak urges poets to keep up with the times.

In addition to all of the above, Pasternak is also a very Christian poet, and, accordingly, creativity for him is a gift from God; he accepts life as it is, and at the same time promotes the absolute freedom of creativity. And Pasternak resolved the eternal conflict between the poet and the crowd by bringing them closer - this is the essence of creativity, poetry should reflect both serious conflicts and the little things of life.