Pasternak’s Work with Images: The Fate of the Last Russian Tsar

• In Event: New Perspectives on Canonized Poets: Boris Pasternak

Abstract

In Doctor Zhivago, there are three carefully drawn profiles of Russian leaders that begin not with the fictional Gintz or Strelnikov, but with an emphatically non-sublime historical figure trapped in an inherited sublime role—namely, the tired and embarrassed Tsar Nikolai II. The Tsar’s portrayal is much briefer and more compressed than those of the other two, but Pasternak ensures its importance by permitting himself the unusual gesture of praising Yuri’s account of the Tsar: “He told it well” (Zhivago 141:). On the surface, there seems to be nothing extraordinary in the Tsar’s visit, and it is not immediately clear why the location of his address to the troops is so carefully emphasized. The natural landscape of the scene anticipates the inevitability of future historical events: nature here is not an addendum to history; it is history itself. By comparing this portrayal with depictions of the Tsar in Pasternak’s earlier prose, this paper articulates a new approach to the symbolism of Pasternak’s late prose.

Author

• Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Emory U