Boris Pasternak as Revolutionary Narrator in the 1927 Anniversary of the October Revolution

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics I: Poetry as/and Political Action

Abstract

The year 1927 was eventful in the artistic life of Boris Pasternak. The poet completed the narrative poem of the 1905 Revolution Lieutenant Schmidt. He also composed and published one of his few occasional poems: “K oktiabr’skoi godovshchine” (“On the October Anniversary”). In 1927 he also withdrew from LEF and thus was distanced from its extensive participation in commemoration of the anniversary. Nonetheless, Pasternak’s poetic output in 1927 reflects the anniversary context of its composition. Its narration of revolutionary history overlaps in part with narrative norms coalescing in 1927, but also conceptualizes revolution and its meaning in ways that did not conform to official representations of Soviet history in 1927, just as the progenitors and supporters of those understandings of revolution were also under attack from the Soviet political right.

Author

• Zachary Rewinski, College of Wooster