'I Reject Mayakovsky': Late Pasternak and the Historical Avant-Garde

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

Abstract

In this presentation, rather than viewing Pasternak’s late “simplicity” as part of a larger neo-traditionalist paradigm, I indicate its continuity with the poet’s Futurist roots, reading Pasternak’s late style as metonym of the contradictions within Russian Futurism itself. As a model for understanding Pasternak’s creative evolution, I employ the metaphor of editing: the poet’s late style not as a definitive break, nor a kind of “organic decay,” but merely a self-conscious intensification of the processes of re-writing and re-visioning that constituted his careerlong concerns. Just as Pasternak edited his early poems, he re-visioned his own poetic biography, distancing himself from erstwhile friend Vladimir Mayakovsky and emphasizing his continuity with Aleksandr Blok and the 19th-century Russian canon. However, Pasternak’s rejection of Russian Futurism, I argue, is largely rhetorical—in fact, rhetorical in a way that echoes the avant-garde’s own “break with tradition.

Author

• Veniamin Vadimovich Gushchin, Columbia U