Publication Date
2012
Description
In this study I consider the role of poetic description in Pasternak’s ‘Deviat’sot piatyi god’ (‘1905’) in the context of the genre of the poema. Descriptive passages in poetic narratives, as a rule, provide a static setting for a protagonist’s actions. In the absence of any single hero in Pasternak’s poema, topography itself begins to move. I examine the categories of stasis and motion, central to ‘1905’, at the intersection of the visual and the verbal. The idea of reanimating the events of the first Russian revolution twenty years after the fact borders on the ekphrastic in places, where the poet transposes techniques and genres from the visual arts into a verse epic. Finally, I suggest that aesthetic perception itself is the dominant principle in the poema, as opposed to documentary faithfulness, which is traditionally emphasized in the scholarship on this work.
Journal
Russian Literature
Volume
71
Issue
1
First Page
75
Last Page
99
Department
Languages, Cultures & Linguistics
Link to Published Version
Recommended Citation
Lavine, Ludmila. "The Visual, the Epic, and Pasternak’s ‘Devjat’son pjatyj god’." Russian Literature (2012) : 75-99.
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Slavic Languages and Societies Commons