BORIS PASTERNAK
545
tional, by forcing it to be both things at once. One could say that
he succeeded where the Cubo-Futurists had failed, by using, instead
of nonsense language, a highly complex linguistic mosaic, made of an
interplay of denotative and connotative values; or, more simply, a
diction ruled at once by mental balance and emotional stress. It is
only
in such a context that one might define his style as a modern
Baroque, reducing to sense and order a verbal matter apparently in–
congruous and absurd.
Pasternak's poetry, to quote a line from his favorite foreign
master and friend, Rainer Maria Rilke, seems thus to lead
zum
.4.rsenal der unbedingten Dinge.
Yet in the process
it
changes all
the nondescript objects cluttering the world of experience not into
abstract symbols but into living, suffering, human-like creatures. The
anthropomorphic pathos of Pasternak's imagination brings
him
closer
to
the Romantics than any of his immediate predecessors with the
exclusion of Blok. The poet must have been aware of this, since,
unlike his great and distant contemporary, Khodasevich, who found
a master in Pushkin, he sought a model in Lermontov, the Russian
poet who felt and understood better than any other the tears of
things,
and who would perhaps have approved of Pasternak's claim
that "one composes verses with sobs." It is equally significant that
in
recent times Pasternak has shown some interest in Shelley, whose
vision he finds akin to that of Blok. Yet Pasternak's neo-romanticism
is
strange and novel,
so
much so that it can be compared only to
some of the most extreme works of modern art.
The artistic game of Pasternak consists in a sort of balancing
act: or in the attempt to fix in a precarious, and yet firm equilibrium,
a congeries of heterogeneous objects, of vibrant and labile things. His
poetry seems to pass, almost at the same time, through two different
and even opposite phases. The first is a moment of eruption and
irruption, of frenzy and paroxysm; the second, which often overlaps
the first, is the moment when matter seems to harden and freeze.
Burning rivers of lava congeal at a nod. The sound and fury of
lightning suddenly become, as in the poem so named, "a thunder
eternally instantaneous." Fires are extinguished at a breath. Showers
and thunderstorms abruptly stop; floods suddenly dry up. Often the
same poem seems to be written now in hot, now in cold blood. This
dualism may perhaps
be
traced in, or symbolized by, the early edu-
