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  • «Doktor Zhivago» and Leonid Pasternak
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    137

    In this article, we analyze the transformation of values in the literature and art of the first half of the 20th century through the creative strategies of two closely linked people: the poet Boris Pasternak and his father, the painter Leonid Pasternak. An academician of painting, Leonid Pasternak renewed the traditions of realism, being in close contact with Leo Tolstoy while working on the illustrations for Tolstoy’s novel “The Resurrection”. Having made a creative journey from the movement of “peredvizhniki” (“the Itinerants”) toward Impressionism, he did not accept the newest trends, as opposed to his son who had undergone a long period of fascination with Futurism, as well as the influence of Modernism. This conflict of aesthetics lost its poignancy with the passing of the years and with the geographical distance (Pasternak the father having emigrated in the beginning of the 20s). Thus, Boris Pasternak returned to the poetics of the classical Russian prose in his novel “Doctor Zhivago.” But the Christian values on which the conceptual basis of the novel rests, remained unknown to the father, who had passed away just before his son began working on the novel. The result was the novel itself with its covert subtextual influence and the polemics of the son and the father, the poet and the artist.

  • About the Translation of Poetry
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    124

    It is basically impossible to translate poetry into other languages – this follows from the very essence of poetry. But it is impossible not to translate poetry into other languages --this is required by the need to exchange cultural values between different national communities. The translator has to find a compromise between these two mutually exclusive provisions. One of the ways (if not the only one) to achieve this goal is to abandon the requirement of literal accuracy, in order to create an aesthetic effect in a specific cultural and national environment.

  • «Chekhov’s Stage Set»: «The Cherry Orchard» in the Russian Poetry of the 20th – Early 21st Century
    8 p.
    Views:
    232

    Chekhov’s text is one of the most significant constituents of the Russian poetry of the 20th – early 21st centuries. The one most frequently alluded to is the play by Chekhov – «The Cherry Orchard». The play written at the break of historical epochs turns out to be in tunes with the times of another turning-point. This fact conditions the allusion to the Chekhov’s text in a poem «The Young Poetry» by V. Kornilov. The main feature of the crucial time period in the poem is the category of freedom, unexpectedly granted during the historical turn and change. The key theme, which determines the historiosophical sense of the text, is a quotation from «The Cherry Orchard», a dialogue between Gaev and Fiers. I. Kabysh perceives the Chekhov’s play both mythopoetically and symbolically in such poems as «How Niveous-White Everything Is in Russia Today! » and «The Snow Started to Fall Without Delays». She introduces a different time into the text, models the reality after the events described in «The Cherry Orchard» and interpreted by the author of the poem in the lower clef (as in «crumbled estate»). The loss of the Garden, its disintegration, the loss of entity, is a gradual, step by step, process – into dachas, then into dust; that is the way the motif of vanishing space and culture appears.