Marburg: Boris Pasternak’s turn to Igor Severyanin’s poetics

Abstract

In many of Boris Pasternak’s early poems, the influence of Igor Severyanin (I. V. Lotarev) can be detected. Even their contemporaries noted that Pasternak used themes, motifs and stylistic features of the older poet. Nevertheless, as is known, Pasternak very often rewrote his poems. While reworking the early texts, Pasternak tried to partially free them from Severyanin’s imagery and style or to incorporate Severyanin’s individual techniques into his own poetics. This article shows how Pasternak changed his approaches to Severyanin’s works in two versions of Marburg — from 1916 and from 1928. In the poem’s later redaction, Pasternak, striving for “simplification”, rejected Severyanin’s “bourgeois” words and “salon” imagery that were present in the earlier version. The article classifies the ways Pasternak drew on Severyanin according to the methodology of philologist Natalia Fateeva. In the early redaction of the poem, one can notice the use of such types of intertextuality as metatextuality, borrowing of a device, sound-syllabic and morphemic types of intertext, as well as poetic paradigm. Examination of “traces” of Severyanin’s poetics in Pasternak’s work requires further study, which could provide a unified understanding of the evolution of Pasternak’s poetry in general and the topic “Pasternak and Severyanin” in particular.