|
THE DYNAMICS OF ADAPTATION: PASTERNAK'S SECOND BIRTH
Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
The textual intercourse we will now examine is, on the surface, different from the Bulgakov-Olesha "duet," but, in a deeper sense, similar to it. Focusing on just one author, one period of his work, and one poem, we will be able to envision that poem as a product of the poet's "triadic" interaction with the environment. To spell out the underlying similarity with the Bulgakov-Olesha-Bulgakov exchange, we could say that Pasternak's 1920s persona became aware of the 'feedback' it received from the prevailing Soviet culture circa 1930 and 'responded' with the 1931 text. But the emphasis here, unlike in Chapter 7, will fall on the third, 'synthetic,' stage of the process: the results of the poet's internal change triggered by outsidepressure.
1. Pasternak and the early thirties A conversation about apartments.
Pasternak's dialogue with the times and with himself did not occur in a vacuum. His 1931 'response' can be better understood as position-taking vis-a-vis not only the official establishment but other fellow-travelers as well, in particular Mandelstam.
When in the fall of 1933 the Mandelstams finally moved into the writers' condominium, Pasternak was one of the first to visit.
"As he was leaving, he lingered..., saying how wonderful it was: 'Now you have an apartment, you will be able to write poetry'... 'Did you hear what he said?' M. asked me. He was furious," the poet's widow remembers. It is "in response to [this] almost casual remark by Pasternak" that Mandelstam wrote his poem "beginning 'The apartment is quiet as paper'."[1]
Developing her idea of the two poets as "antipodes," Nadezhda Mandelstam argues that their different attitudes toward apartments (and desks) were emblematic of more profound professional differences.
"Pasternak could not do without his writing table--he could only work with his pen in hand. M. composed his verse in his head, while walking, and only nded to sit down briefly to copy out the result."
"Seeking for a stable life, particularly in the material sense, Pasternak knew that the path to it lay through literature, membership in the literary community... M. always shied away." "[Pasternak] was a domesticated creature... attached to the comforts of home and his dacha... [O]ur literary bigwigs understoood him quite well and they would be glad to come to terms with him... M. was a nomad, a wanderer, shunned by the very walls of Moscow houses..."
"Moscow had belonged to Pasternak from the time of his birth... and he remained in possession of his heritage..." "Pasternak would have liked to erect a protective wall of the State between the intelligentsia and the people.[2] It was simply not in M.'s nature to bank... on the State with its miracles... he placed no hopes in its patronage."
"The world of literature treated them accordingly, smiling on Pasternak... and sking... to destroy M...." "As early as 1927 I... sa[id] to Pasternak: 'Watch out, or they'll adopt you.'... At the end of their lives both of them acted in ways quite at variance with... their previous stands. While Pasternak... put himself in open conflict with the Soviet literary world, M. was ready to seek rapprochement with it--only... too late."
But in the early 1930s, the two still found themselves in very different relations to Soviet reality. A grotesque variation on this triangle of forces was the famous telephone conversation (in June, 1934) between Stalin and Pasternak about the arrested Mandelstam; incidentally, it began with Pasternak's complaints about the noise in his communal apartment (N. Mandelstam 1976: 146; Fleishman 1990: 180).
According to his widow, Mandelstam's "The Apartment..." was a "rejoinder... occasioned only by... [the] unfinished conversation in the hallway"--unlike another poem, "occasioned by some lines of Pasternak's" in his book of verse Second Birth (1931-1932).[3] But that same collection contained a text that could, indeed, have served as the starting point of the two poets' dialogue about apartments. The third fragment of the longer poem Waves,[4] "I Want [To Go] Home, Into the Hugeness...," read as follows:
I 1 Mne khochetsia domoi, v ogromnost'
Kvartiry, navodiashchei grust'.
Voidu, snimu pal'to, opomnius',
Ogniami ulits ozarius'.
2 Peregorodok tonkorebrost'
Proidu naskvoz', proidu, kak svet.
Proidu, kak obraz vkhodit v obraz,
I kak predmet sechet predmet.
3 Puskai pozhiznennost' zadachi,
Vrastaiushchei v zavety dnei,
Zovetsia zhizniiu sidiachei,--
I po takoi grushchu po nei.
II 4 Opiat' znakomost'iu napeva
Pakhnut derev'ia i doma.
Opiat' napravo i nalevo
Poidet khoziainichat' zima.
5 Opiat' k obedu na progulke
Nastupit temen', prosto strast'.
Opiat' nauchit pereulki
Okhulki na ruki ne klast'.
6 Opiat' povaliat s neba vziatki,
Opiat' ukroet k utru vikhr'
Osin podsledstvennykh desiatki
Suknom sugrobov snegovykh.
III 7 Opiat' opavshei serdtsa myshtsei
Uslyshu i vlozhu v slova,
Kak ty polzesh' i kak dymish'sia,
Vstaesh' i stroish'sia, Moskva.
8 I ia primu tebia, kak upriazh',
Tekh radi budushchikh bezumstv,
C╖to ty, kak stikh, menia zazubrish',
Kak byl', zapomnish' naizust'.
I 1 I want [to go] home, into the hugeness
Of the apartment inducing sadness.
I will go in, take off my coat, come to,/
Become illuminated by the lights of the streets.
2 The thin-ribbedness of the partitions
I will pass all through, pass, like light.
I will pass, as an image penetrates an image
And as an object cuts [cross-sects] an object.
3 Let the lifetimeness of the task
Growing into the testaments of the days
Be called a sedentary life,--
I long after it even the way it is.
II 4 Again, of the familiarity of their song
The trs and houses will give off a smell.
Again, right and left,
Winter will start bossing around.
5 Again, during a walk before dinner,
Darkness will fall, real scary.
Again it will teach the side-streets
To be no fools with their hands.
6 Again, from the sky, bribes will start falling,
Again, the whirlwind will cover, towards morning,
Tens of asp-trs under investigation
With the cloth of snowdrifts.
III 7 Again, with [my] heart's slumped/collapsed muscle
I will hear and put into words
How you crawl and how you send up smoke,
Rise up and build yourself, Moscow.
8 And I will accept you like a harness,
For the sake of those future madnesses,
That you will cram me, like a verse,
Will learn me by heart like a true story.
The third fragment of Waves (hereafter abbreviated as IWH) instantiates with remarkable completeness the 'adoptive complex' imputed to Pasternak by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Beneath his love for his apartment (albeit communal), the desk, and the Moscow cityscape, one discerns an acceptance of strict socialist discipline in exchange for the recognition of contemporaries and history. Pasternak's stance becomes especially clear when compared with Mandelstam's, which latter underlies that poet's another possible "rejoinder" to IWH: "Leningrad."[5] Compare:
Pasternak (IWH)
Mandelstam ("Leningrad,"
"The Apartment...")
home, into the hugeness of
the apartment inducing
sadness; again... the smell
of familiarity
I came back to my city,
familiar to the point of tears;
hurry up, recognize; the
apartment's... quiet
I will go in,... pass through
I will find the dead men's addresses
the lights of the streets
Leningrad river lamps
the thin-ribbedness of the partitions
I live on a black back staircase;
the damned walls are thin
the lifetimeness... sedentary life
there's nowhere left to run to
growing into the testaments
of the days; you... rise up
and build yourself, Moscow
ration-books; some honest
traitor; comber of collective-
farm flax
a walk before dinner
get busy and gulp down the
fish-oil... egg-yolk
darkness... real scary, will
teach the side-streets to be
no fools with their hands
a bell ripped from its meat;
a stream of old fear
winter; from the sky, bribes
will start falling; the cloth
of snowdrifts
this December day
thin-ribbedness; [my] heart's
slumped muscle
stabs at my temple; such
tortuous malice; stream of...fear
I will hear and put into
words... for the sake of...
that you will cram me, like a
verse
teaching executioners how to
chirp
Moscow,... for the sake of
those future...
Petersburg! I don't want to
die, not yet; I will find the
dead men's addresses
lifetimeness; under
investigation; I will accept
you like a harness
clanking the fetters of my door
chains; and I, like an idiot, am
forced to play tunes on a comb;
it's time to stamp [your] boots
Pasternak does sound conciliatory vis-a-vis the 'harness/fetters' imposed by Stalinist dictatorship, but his tone is hardly that of "some honest traitor," "some comber of collective-farm flax" of the kind scornfully dismissed by Mandelstam. Rather, IWH offers a poetic expression of a deliberately ambiguous position. Ambiguity, however dubious morally, has always been a staple fare of poetry. In what follows, we will see how IWH, remaining within the bounds of Pasternakian poetics, succeeds in reconciling the contradictory ideological demands of the moment and thus functions as Pasternak's response to new realities.
Temptation.
The Second Birth collection marked, as heralded by its title, a profound change in Pasternak's poetic self-image. Following the early period, characterized by the young persona's ecstatic fusion with the universe, and anticipating the self-sacrificial Christian tenor of his later poetry, the 1931 book reads in retrospect as a bridge between the two.[6] It implements a fellow-traveler's honest endeavor to join the socialist process[7] and his newly found readiness to lower his esthetic standards. All this, the poet admits, is dictated by "the power of the same old temptation:/ In the hope of glory and [common] good,/ To look at things without fear".[8]
"For a while I am going to write badly--from my previous point of view-- until I get accustomed to the novelty of the themes and propositions... [F]or a while I shall write like a cobbler. Solely... in mediocrity's distorting mirror,... am [I] obliged... to reject Demyan Bedny... I prefer him to most of you..." (Pasternak 1990b: 176-78).[9]
Indeed, paving the way from pagan worship of earthly existence (characteristic of his first period) to the somewhat otherworldly emphasis on spiritual and ethical values (typical of the third), in the early 1930s, Pasternak programmatically embraced the socio-political and cultural dictates of the times, in a gesture combining a Realpolitik interest in the affairs of
this world with an emphasis on ideology. He simultaneously underwent a formal evolution from what he would later perceive as a whimsically modernist earlier style to the mature simplicity of his post-war poetry.
In his 1956 autobiography, Pasternak disowned his early poetics; he declared that his first autobiography, Safe Conduct (1929), "unfortunately,... is spoilt by unnecessary mannerisms, the common fault of those years" and that "I do not like my style up to 1940" (1959b: 19, 81).
The period of transition--indeed, of dialectical antithesis--was far from being unproblematically optimistic. Rather, the "change" in the persona's "strivings and mainstays," symbolized by the ebb and flow of the sea, "is sounded in a minor key" (Oni shumiat v minore).[10]
In 1925, responding to the questionnaire about the Party's still relatively liberal resolution concerning literature, Pasternak had written: "The presence of the proletarian dictatorship is not sufficient to affect culture. That would require a real organic domination that would speak through me... even against my will. I do not feel that. That that [condition] is not there objectively either is clear from the fact that the resolution has to call on me to resolve the themes it outlines" (1990b: 259-60).[11] The concept of "organic domination" invoked by the poet, i. e. of the miraculous power exercised by the whole of creation over "every last trifle," is an invariant theme in Pasternak and one of the keystones of his philosophy and esthetics, whose sources lie in, among others, Tolstoy and Goethe.[12] Pasternak's world is one of a magnificent play of forces, natural, yet miraculous, in which everything is in unity with everything else: small and great, home and the outdoors, this instant and eternity.[13] The confrontation of this harmonious worldview with the realities of ascendant Stalinist socialism was bound to produce controversial results.
The dictatorship's "organic domination," still disputable in the mid-1920s, had to be recognized as a compelling fact of life by the early thirties. The consolidation of Stalin's totalitarian regime spelled the end of all pluralism, political or literary, to the accompaniment of noisy propaganda of socialist construction and the new, collectivist morality. Sadly, the dictatorship's combination of repressive stick with ideological carrot succeeded in favorably impressing many an honest intellectual of the thirties, inside as well as outside the Soviet Union. Pasternak's texts of the time offer an instructive testimony to the internal workings of these ideological processes.
Pivotal to Pasternak's poetic acceptance of the emerging "Socialist" reality were several new strategies rooted in his previous stances. To outline these strategies, underlying Second Birth, I use Andrey Bely's method of 'composite quotation': a semi-prosaic summary of poems (with additional explanatory comments in brackets).
1. Voluntary and even enthusiastic submission to power:
The distant horizons (dal') of Socialism--or is it "up-closeness" [bliz', a Futurist-style neologism]?--are inevitably moving in, they are right here; the [Party's] General Plan resembles the steep Caucasus Ridge, whose heel tramples over the poet's prophesies; the strong New Man has already ridden over us in the Project's horse-cart. The revolutionary will, ongoing executions, and a historical parallel with the inexorable but creative violence done [a century earlier] to the Caucasus by czarist troops, who took it the way one takes a woman (i. e. by a force mixed with love and independently of imperial Petersburg,[14])--all these suggest succumbing to power before one turns into a [saint's] relic and an object of pity.
2. Hope for positive changes and trust in collectivism:
One is witnessing a change of all the mainstays--a resettling, a transfiguration of the world: one can hope for glory and common good, and should restrain one's own temporary caprices (vremennuiu blazh'). In spring one can hear the rustle of news and truths, ahead there lies an impregnable novelty, a life beyond gossip and slander; the future itself, along with the poet's beloved, invades his room. The [proletarian holiday of] May Day heralds the blossoming of songs, living mores [zhivye nravy], tilled land, various crafts and industries, and a spirit that has ripened and undergone a new fermentation and thus cannot help manifesting itself. The Soul is leaving the West, revolutionary will spells a relief in women's lot, a delivery from the pains of jealousy, and a happy future for children. The new way of life will involve the poet in the desired and legitimate collective labor (so vsemi soobshcha i zaodno s pravoporiadkom), it promises to eliminate the falsity of a literateur's life and endow the poet with supernatural vision, unheard-of stylistic simplicity, accessibility to the people, and an ability to merge with the native tongue and landscape in the manner of Pushkin and Lermontov.
3. Reliance on tradition, with the new passed-off as the familiar old:
Accounts of the generations that served a hundred years before us inspire the revision of our mainstays; the experience of great artists, in particular Pushkin (author of semi-collaborationist "Stanzas" to Czar Nicholas I[15] and of A Feast in the Time of the Plague) and Chopin (who miraculously holds off the mob raping/crucifying him and his piano[16]); the consoling analogy with the beginnings of Peter the Great's glorious days; and the uninterrupted chain of vernal holidays, going from May Day back to Trinity's birchtrees and the lights of Panathenaic festivals [in ancient Greece] and forward to the eventual blossoming of the Commune.
4. Socialism as part of the landscape:[17]
A master metaphor for the change is the succession of waves (smena voln) foaming/singing along the way [in a Pasternakian paronomasia of pena/pen'e]. The account of the previous generations is narrated by the woods; the novelty of the future is a sort of echo, the General Plan is likened to the Caucasus Mountains, Socialism is seen as distance (dal'), and it is there that the Second Five-Year Plan proffers the theses of the soul. The new mores and songs lie down quite literally "into" the space of the meadows, fields, and industries (v luga i pashni i na promysla), while the rushing streams receive the outskirts of construction sites "into" their creeks.
All four strategies for accepting the new are organically rooted in Pasternak's poetic world. 'Submission to power' is one of his favorite motifs. 'Hope...' is in accord with the poet's ecstatic outlook, 'changes and transfigurations' are a recurrent manifestation of the world's magnificent intensity, while 'collectivism' easily comes under the heading of unity and contact. In its turn, 'reliance on tradition...' means equating the everyday (the present) with the great (the past and the future),[18] which results in fling 'at home in the future.'[19] Finally, the treatment of 'socialism as landscape' relies on the Pasternakian 'contact with nature.'
Adaptation to the new encompasses also the sphere of poetic language, resulting in
5. Stylistic simplification:
Pasternak streamlines his syntax and renounces lexical rarities and convoluted tropes; he also lets the 'I' of the speaker (and the human shape in general) emerge more distinctly from the background, with which it had bn programmatically blended.[20]
Pasternak's search for poetic accessibility (which was to continue in later years), too, came from his general belief in the magnificence of all things trivial, lowly, and provincial, manifested through a liberal mixing of stylistic registers, use of dialectisms, officialese, etc. Paradoxically, in his earlier verse this tendency had resulted in density and obscurity; one wonders, therefore, what shape the striving for unheard-of simplicity (i. e. the art "of writing badly") would ultimately have taken, were it not for the populist pressure exerted by the cultural situation of the thirties.
Sabotage.
The 'acceptance of the new' in Second Birth was, of course, far from wholehearted. Instead of embracing the extremes of the ruling ideology, Pasternak opted for compromise, welcoming Socialism on universal humanitarian grounds rather than those of class struggle; accordingly, his tone is tinged with reservations. I will isolate three of his self-subversive strategies.
6. Qualified assertion of the new, premised on such modalities as suppositions, questions, reservations etc.:
The meaning of the recent experience is not yet complete, in this book there will be arguments and litigations. Oh, would that the issue of socialism were as graphic as the Caucasus Ridge!--in that case one could...; please, do correct me, [you,] the distance/closeness of socialism, but only you yourself--rather than the hollow verbosity (pustozvonstvo) of flatterers. The distance, however, is only vaguely visible through the smoke of theories (Ty kurish'sia skvoz' dym teorii); "Caucasus, oh, Caucasus, what shall I do?!"; "Oh, had I known that this is what happens...!" So far one can talk only of an eve's bud (buton kanuna): the May Day spirit will only manifest itself in the remote future; optimistic hopes are a temptation that can lead one to a dead-end, and to succumb to it, one would need the consolation of historical parallels.
7. Accumulation of negative images:
The waves sound in a minor key, number dark myriads [t'ma means both "darkness" and "myriad"], and envelop the entire range of the poet's nostalgia. The decline of the West is similar to a manor house without owners and spells the decline of living merits [zhivykh dostoinstv]. The Caucasus landscape is rife with excesses of figurative and literal evil (pain, fear, ruthlessness, anger, back-biting, stutterer scared by the wet-nurse, defeats, captivities, ineluctable violence, brigandry, clangor of daggers, [poisoned] gas attack, salvoes of shooting, throats of beheaded). The scenes of Moscow life abound in images of
--hardship: consolidation (uplotnenie) of apartments, fuel shortages, decline of domestic comforts;[21]
--emotional disarray: sterility, deception, cerebral fictions resembling rotten fishheads, the hour of sadness; something in us is wping: oh, have mercy;
last year's despondency and guilt will again sting the poet; --pain: the heavy heaviness of illness, with all my weakness, fling like a cripple, ripping the soft flesh [of the finger-tips] until it bleeds [i miakot' v krov' poria...,--about Chopin's piano playing]);
--death: mutinies and executions, death of a poet (Mayakovsky), completely perishing in earnest, the passing of a major musician, a dead city; the road heading, with an absolute straightforwardness, for the crematorium; to freeze as a crucifix of pianofortes; verses will gush through the throat and kill the poet, a pill will not save one from death, the sequence of days has snapped, we are at Plato's symposium/feast in the time of the plague ("... i poniali my,/ Chto my na piru v vekovom prototipe--/ Na pire Platona vo vremia chumy" ("Leto" ["Irpen'..."]).
Stylistically, these forms of ideological sabotage are seconded by a characteristic Aesopian device:
8. Exaggerated use of political officialese, dry to the point of absurdity, e. g.:
"I tak kak s malykh detskikh let/ Ia ranen zhenskoi dolei/.../ I tak kak ia lish' ei zadet/ I ei u nas razdol'e,/ To ves' ia rad soiti na net/ V revoliuts'onnoi vole," lit. "And since from my tender childhood years/ I have been wounded by the plight of women/.../ And since I am affected only by it/ And in our country it is in full swing,/ Therefore, I am glad to shrink away completely/ In the revolutionary will."
The strategies of sabotage, too, proceed from Pasternak's invariants. His 'qualifications' regarding Socialism thrive on the rich rhetorical soil of his poetic discourse, as he literalizes his tropes and thus restores them to their full face value. As a result, his favorite similes, interrogative and conditional moods, subjunctive constructions with by, and other non-factual modalities become the tools of questioning the allegedly unquestionable 'new.'
Compare, for instance, the questions that genuinely torment the speaker of the Second Birth ("The distance...? or is it the upcloseness?... Oh, only if... then... I would...") with the similarly structured, but purely rhetorical questions in My Sister Life, brimming with enthusiastic assurance ("Where shall I put my joy? ... When else did...? When, if not: In the Beginning...?).
The 'negative motifs' (pain, destruction, etc.) undergo a similar reinterpretatation:
If previously they were used as the rhetorical reverse of the world's overwhelming magnificence, in Second Birth they tend to become the focus of attention, threatening to topple the magnificent balance of 'overwhelming power' and 'overwhelmed powerlessness'; s, for instance, the tell-tale line "Velikolepie vyshe sil..." in "Val's s chertovshchinoi" (1941).
Finally, the 'use of dry officialese,' pushing as it were to its logical extreme the democratization of poetic language, brings Pasternak full circle back to obscurity, this time of the Soviet-bureaucratic, rather than subjective-lyrical sort. The deliberate arduousness of these flights of quasi-official rhetoric iconizes the jarring difficulty of the new reality and thus both celebrates it (in a Futurist vein) and subverts it by exposing its unnaturalness.
Such deviations from the Party line on how a fellow-traveler should go about becoming one with socialism did not pass unnoticed. Suffice it to say that Pasternak's ambiguous rewrite of Pushkin's "Stanzas" was barred from the Second Birth for three decades after 1934, the year the First Congress of Soviet Writers inaugurated the reign of Socialist Realism.
2. I Want To Go Home...": themes and strategies.
Theme: a polyvalent cluster.
The core of IWH's message is informed by an interplay of several thematic complexes.
Firstly, and in the most immediate sense, IWH expresses the speaker's 'nostalgia for his Moscow home.' Openly stated from the start, this theme defines the fragment's place within the longer poem: the anticipated return to the familiar apartment interrupts the poet's impressions of the Caucasus.[22]
Secondly, as a representative of Second Birth, IWH implements the 'acceptance of the Socialist new' and to do so, deploys the contrasting strategies of 'adaptation' and 'sabotage.'
Thirdly, IWH is, in a widening circle, an instance of the all-Pasternakian magnificence and unity of existence. Even a cursory glance at the text yields a wealth of "Pasternakisms," for instance:
Importance of the small ("the hugeness of the apartment," risks of a pre-dinner walk); extreme states ("right and left," "by heart"); intense motions ("pass all through," "cuts [cross-sects]," "rise up," zazubrish' [a punning combination of "cramming" and "denting"]); powerful/ sinister emotions ("darkness real scary,"[23] slumping of the heart's muscle, "future madnesses"); and the grand scale of the categories involved ("like light," "lifetimeness, "testaments," the future).
As usual, these 'magnificent' motifs are combined with manifestations of the world's 'unity':
Itineraries connecting the in- and outdoors; situations of illuminating, passing through, growing into, covering, enveloping, exchanging (of favors: "I will accept you... for the sake of... that you will..."), and strong emotional reactions (verging on a heart attack).
Fourthly, in still wider--extra-Pasternakian--intertextual terms, IWH is a poem on the time-hallowed topic of the 'role of art,' in the tradition inaugurated in Russia by Pushkin's "Prophet." That poem is a major presence in IWH, and not just in the sense of 'genre memory.'
Both texts are about the rebirth of the poet. The transformation is accompanied by returning from another place (the desert in Pushkin; the Caucasus in Pasternak) and assuming an important social responsibility (to stride over the earth, searing human hearts with words, in Pushkin; to put into words Moscow's growth, in Pasternak).
In Pushkin's poem, the rebirth follows a symbolic death ("Like a corpse, in the desert did I lie") and magical surgery, performed by the six-winged seraph on the eyes, ears, mouth (lips + tongue), and heart of the nascent prophet. In IWH, the upsurge of poetic energy (in stanza VII) is preceded by the snow-shrouded landscape and begins, paradoxically, with another deadening downward move, the slumping/collapse of the heart.
As the heart's muscle, together with the speaker's hearing, eyesight, and speech, proceeds to create poetry, it seems to hark back to "The Prophet" in
(i) its synesthetic magic, partly foreshadowewd in stanza IV, where the speaker smells the song of the visible landscape; and
(ii) its spatial organization: Pasternak's triadic image of Moscow crawling, sending up smoke, and vertically growing replicates the Prophet's alertness to the goings-on in the air, on land, and under water ("And I took in.../ The on-high flight of the angels,/ The growing of the valley vine,/ and the underwater movement of sea monsters").
The image of cutting/cross-secting (sechet, in II) recalls the seraph's cleaving/cutting up (rassek) of the prophet's breast. Such an anatomic literalization of Pasternak's Cubist image is reinforced by the lexically ambiguous "thin-ribbedness of the partitions, passed through as if by light," overtly referring to the partitions installed in consolidated apartments to accommodate additional tenants, but also connoting X-ray pictures. This double exposure of the 'apartment/rib cage' anticipates the eventual harnessing of the sick heart (in VII-VIII) and echoes the painful imagery elsewhere in Second Birth,[24] while X-rays offer a technological counterpart to Pushkin's image of the world magically penetrable to the prophet.
All this is in tune with Pasternak's reorientation, in Second Birth, from the Romantic tradition of Lermontov (which was so important for My Sister--Life) to that of Pushkin qua national poet. In fact, Pushkin, thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity by the Futurists, would be touted, from the 1930s on, as the great forebear of the official culture and quite earnestly used as a literary model by such disparate figures as Pasternak and, say, Zoshchenko.[25]
In 1923 Pasternak wrote an overt--and pointedly Romantic/Futurist--variation on "Prophet" ("Mchalis' zvezdy, v more mylis' mysy..."), focusing on the poet's supernatural contact with the entire world, at whose center it placed the writing of the Pushkin poem. Eight years later, Pasternak's acce