How Artists Shall Treat Birds: B. Pasternak’s Scenes of Creating

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

Abstract

In this presentation, I will explore the scenes of writing and creating in Pasternak’s meta-poetic poems, with a focus on a specific question—how Pasternak imagines the relationship between poets/artists and birds. While Romanticism established the tradition of portraying birds as the embodiment of poetic inspiration and transcendence due to their melodious songs and ability to soar above the human realm, Pasternak offers a fresh way of imagining birds, and consequently, on the concept of poetry itself. The voice of birds as natural objects is in a constant struggle with the poet as the human subject. This dynamic results in a poetic coalesce of natural and human voices, without the reliance on divine intervention. This battle for voice is far from easy; it involves the dimension of death, as evidenced by the line—the birds “would kill rather than die” (“скорей умертвят, чем умрут”). Through this unsettling discourse on the notion of the “killing” bird, Pasternak engages in a dialogue with A. Blok’s poetry and Hegel’s concept of the “life-death struggle,” thereby conveys his own perspectives on the act of creation.

Author

• Yazhe Yang, Princeton U