Boris Leonidovič Pasternak
Poesie

And you? What are your escamotages to rekindle your energies?

I have several, colorful and diverse ones, but, sparing you the tortuous dissertations on each of them, allow me to talk about the one infallible: the Bar Italia.

Patron saint of all the prodigal sons of my town! An indispensable and (I hope) unwavering social institution that dispenses hearty welfare in the form of cheap Bonarda! Philanthropist and mother! Sanctuary and den!

Is it perhaps for the quality of the wine? (well, not really). Is it because of the pleasantness of the location? (I don't think so). Then it could be for the young ladies who frequent it? (mmmh, let's skip that). No! What makes it the free port of stormy consciences is the quality of the patrons and the quantity of styles, interests, and stories it harbors in its embrace.

At the Bar Italia, everything mingles (and is served). The oral tradition of the prophets, the charlatans, the saints, and the local apostles (past, deceased, and present) passes from mouth to mouth, from glass to glass without interruption and every Enlightened who spends a bit of their time within the sacred walls of the temple, becomes, almost involuntarily, an influencer and a follower (just to use some horrendous contemporary neologism).

In short, a crossroads of lives and contaminations where it is not rare to find twenty-year-olds with a Marxist-Leninist demeanor or seventy-year-olds keen on the latest apps.

Pasrtenak's fame in the West is mainly due to his first (and only) novel: that "Doctor Zhivago" which, in 1958, earned him a controversial Nobel Prize and which is part of that great Russian tradition that narrates the adventures of fictional characters set in real historical architectures (think of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" for example, but also Dostoevsky's "Demons" or any novel by Solzhenitsyn).

But Pasternak was, above all, a poet.

These "Poems" published by Einaudi, constitute an anthology that embraces and sifts through his vast lyrical production whose boundaries encompass a period that stretches from the pseudo-symbolist beginnings of the second decade of the 20th century up to the twilight ballads composed near his death (1960).

First and foremost, it must be said that the roots of the Pasternak-poet are to be found in that Futurism, in that linguistic avant-garde that so prominently characterized Russian literature in the early 20th century thanks especially to figures like Mayakovsky (with his overflowing vehemence closely linked to oratory art) or Khlebnikov (with his marvelous "dishevelment" and brilliant carelessness).

It can be said that Pasternak constitutes another facet of Russian experimentation with decidedly characteristic traits: poems inspired by the micro-events that nature offers (the dew on the grass, the reddish sunset, the wind ruffling the wheat fields), sensations suspended in mid-air and captivated attention to (apparently) insignificant details, primordial astonishments of a newborn Adam wandering in a still virgin Eden which he restores to us through olfactory, tactile, auditory (even before visual) startles, tracking shots on the horizon ravaged by downpours and the star-studded sky, reflections on human existence inextricably fused to atmospheric events (mirror of its throbbings and changes) and to the immensity of the cosmos (metaphor of its intelligibility).

If this spasmodic tension toward the natural world is not new in the field of Russian poetry, it is new, however, the way Pasternak talks about it: chipped, rough, creased lyrics, where words weigh like lead and surprising metaphors unnerve the reader abruptly leading them to other perceptive levels.

The importance that metaphor holds in the pasternakian production is central, so much so that he himself declared that "Metaphorism is the natural consequence of the contrast between human transience and the immensity of its tasks, conceived as for a very long period of time. Nevertheless, man is forced to look at things with the keenness of an eagle and to explain himself with sudden illuminations, understandable on the fly. Poetry is all here."

Futurist in form, yet undoubtedly bound to the romantics (to Tyutchev for example) and Imaginism (thus to the more bucolic Yesenin) in content. Pasternak is a bit like Bar Italia: a crossroads of styles, a critical junction, a receiver of traditions, and a broadcaster of novelties (in this sense we could almost say he is the Russian Apollinaire).

How not to mention Blok's Symbolism among his main influences of the early period when Pasternak's poems were decidedly more fluid and the words melted into the musicality of the verse.

How not to cite Mandelstam's Acmeism with its precise and completely in-focus images, but, while the words Mandelstam uses chisel figures that have static sharpness and almost no weight, Pasternak's produce a tangible, material sonority, and like stones thrown into a pond, create a buzz of sensations on the water's surface, a multi-cellular dynamism triggered by propagating waves. If he were a musician, Pasternak would be the earliest Robert Rich with his "organic" electronics, with his sound microcosms that remingle and spread from a definite center.

Pasternak, in my opinion, also has something of Verlaine at least regarding the ability to build a universe starting from nothing, from a flash of light, from a sensation perhaps only imagined. Nevertheless, if Verlaine's verses had the merit of reaching the reader instantly, in the Russian poet one often finds a bookish patina, a cultural breath that sometimes enriches his compositions but sometimes penalizes them. The worlds that Pasternak communicates to us are made of primal sensations (precious in themselves, crystalline, almost naïve), and the cultured citation (or reference) enriches the lyrics when they are a bit longer, thus fitting into them like a refined dissonance, while it penalizes the shorter pieces making them too heavy and sometimes appearing as a flat dissonance.

But now I'm thirsty! Chattering away I've remembered that it has been too long since I've gone to Bar Italia.