Boris Pasternak and the tradition of German Romanticism.

Abstract

The dissertation addresses a key problem in Pasternak scholarship: Pasternak's paradoxical attitude toward Romanticism. While proudly proclaiming his ties to Romantic writers, Pasternak claims to reject the "romantic manner". The focus of this study is Pasternak's relationship to the work of representatives of three generations within German Romanticism, seen as a paradigm for his relationship to the Romantic movement as a whole. Analysis of Pasternak's reception of the early Romanticism of Novalis, the "second-generation" Romanticism of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the late- or post-Romanticism of Heinrich Heine, using the methods of subtextual analysis developed by Taranovsky, Ronen, and Smirnov, reveals that a coherent, if complex, understanding of Romanticism underlies the apparent contradiction. Though he never mentions Novalis in his work, Pasternak frequently makes use of subtexts from this Jena Circle writer on a variety of themes in his prose and verse, both directly and indirectly--through quotations and translations by his contemporaries. In Safe Conduct, Pasternak rejects what he considers the excesses of Romanticism, and in his late correspondence he directs his criticism explicitly toward Hoffmann. Yet Pasternak's image of Hoffmann is shaped by Decadent-era exaggerations of Hoffmann's depictions of artists; analysis of several Pasternak texts reveals his use of paired subtexts from Hoffmann and the Polish Decadent Przybyszewski. This distortion of Hoffmann is the Romanticism which Pasternak rejects. Pasternak's rejection of Romanticism has a Romantic-era precedent--in the late- or post-Romantic Heinrich Heine, whom Pasternak tends to quote directly, without intermediary subtexts. Indeed, so much did Pasternak identify with Heine's struggle against Romanticism that he quotes Heine extensively in his autobiographical texts. Articles and translations by other writers and critics in the first two decades of the twentieth century set Pasternak's reception of these three writers in context; they show that Pasternak's dual conception of German Romanticism, with its positive assessment of both poles of the Romantic era--the "classic" Jena Circle Romanticism and the end of Romanticism in Heine--and its distorted image of the middle Romantic Hoffmannian artist, is typical of Pasternak's era.