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О чеховском фоне «Стихотворений Юрия Живаго» Б.Л. Пастернака
The article is devoted to the reception of Anton Chekhov’s short stories
“Holy Night”, “Student” and “Bishop” in Boris Pasternak’s cycle “Poems of Yuri
Zhivago”. The testimonies of contemporaries about Pasternak’s attention to them is an
important, but not yet sufficient, basis for asserting an interconnection. The article attempts
to read Yuri Zhivago’s cycle on the background of three Chekhov’s stories united
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by the Easter story and the chronotope. In the first part of the article, the concept of the
“terrible gap” (Pasternak), the existence of the earth without Christ, is examined in the
stories by Chekhov and the poems by Pasternak. Here the similarities of particular moments
are noted: the feeling of emptiness experienced by nature, the touch that returns
faith in possibility to overcome death. Next, Pasternak’s poem “Holy week” is considered
in comparison with Chekhov’s story “Holy Night”. It is shown that their common
motifs – night gloom, stars, anxiety, sleep and the awakening of the earth, bell ringing,
tears – are caused not so much by the unity of realities as by Pasternak’s deliberate address
to Chekhov. The poem “The Garden of Gethsemane” is compared with the story
“Student” on the basis of the general subject of the image – Jesus’ last night on earth,
and is shown that the impact on Chekhov’s story in Pasternak’s poem turns out to be
more significant than the original Gospel. It is possible to speak about the influence of
Nicholas image in the “Holy Night”’s characters on Yuri Zhivago and his uncle Nikolai
Vedenyapin but with a somewhat lesser degree of confidence. A lot of particular
coincidences between the poems in Yuri Zhivago’s cycle and Chekhov’s stories testify
to the proximity of Chekhov’s and Pasternak’s worldview, in particular, the system of
historiosophical views, in which the Gospel is the starting point of human existence,
and immortality is seen as the ultimate goal.