Article

Name: Mayakovsky and Tyutchev in B. L. Pasternak’s “My Sister Is Life and Today in Flood...”

Authors: Mariya M. Gelfond

National Research University Higher School of Economics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Federation

In the section On the Occasion of the Centenary of Yury Chumakov

Abstract: The article attempts to read the title poem of the third book of B. L. Pasternak against the background of two poems – “Could you?” by V. V. Mayakovsky and “Spring Thunderstorm” by F. I. Tyutchev. The poem of V. V. Mayakovsky seems to be the object of B. L. Pasternak’s discussion. In the first stanzas of his poem B. L. Pasternak sets the most important for the early lyrics of V. V. Mayakovsky, the opposition «poet» VS «philistines», about the categorical rejection of which he then writes in his later autobiographical prose. In the poem “My sister is life and today in flood...” this opposition is consistently overcome through a series of points that are equally significant for Mayakovsky and Pasternak. The action of both poems takes place in an emphatically anti-poetic space (a cheap cafe at Mayakovsky’s, a train car on a provincial railway line at Pasternak’s). An act of interaction with the world becomes the reading of purely utilitarian texts by lyrical heroes – Mayakovsky’s menu (“maps of everyday life”), Pasternak’s train schedules. It is precisely this that reveals the deep dissimilarity of poetic attitudes: if Mayakovsky’s lyrical person comes into the world with the goal of radically transforming it, then Pasternak’s hero comes to read the world like a book and realize it in its entirety. Further, the controversy moves to the cosmogonic level: the setting sun sympathizes with the lyrical hero Pasternak and, a year later, accepts the challenge of the lyrical hero Mayakovsky (“An Extraordinary Adventure...”). Multiple points of convergence are also found between B. L. Pasternak and “Spring Thunderstorm” by F. I. Tyutchev. They concern practically all levels of the poetic text: phonetic, lexical, motive. It is the focus on the “Spring Thunderstorm” that allows you to remove the contradiction inherent in the poem, associated with the time of its action. Interaction with the poems of Tyutchev and Mayakovsky makes it possible, it seems to us, to embed the key poem of the early Pasternak into that worldview dynamics.

Keywords: Pasternak, “My sister is life”, Mayakovsky, Tyutchev, intertext, dialogue in lyrics

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