Pasternak’s poetry is undeniably introspective, asking the viability of choice and progress and challenging the notion that we have complete agency over our lives. He asks this through metaphors, namely those of an actor on a stage and of a train on the tracks, likening them to life. His Hamlet poem has an actor explaining how he felt during the play; acting out a character that someone else had laid out for him, yet being happy to play the role. He laments that the play will go on in a preordained sequence, with the ending set in stone and the path just as unchangeable and apparent. These lamentations relate to the narrator’s view of life; that we are born in order to play a role in our society, and our end and means of reaching the end is laid bare and inevitable. This notion is reinforced with the closing line “to live is not like walking through a field,” meaning that you don’t have complete mobility to decide how you live, but you’re following a set of tracks.
The idea of a track for an end destination is especially apparent in his work My Sister Life, which takes place on a train. The train is meant to represent this set course of life, as trains have to follow an unmoving track in order to get to their destination. In this train is a multitude of passengers, each asking “is this my station” when they are awakened by the howling of the breaks. This is meant to represent how we all have different endings, but we are all headed there on the same set of paths, and we’re just waiting for our turn to reach our destinations. The narrator of My Sister Life chases after the train, but it’s too fast, leaving him behind. I may be reading into this too much, but with the rampant metaphors regarding fate, I read this as a commentary that some people are on a different path in life, and sometimes people aren’t meant to share the same fate, and are destined to be apart. That being said, I also believe this poem alludes to industrialization and political changes, but in the context of Hamlet, I also read My Sister Life as an allegory for predefined fate.
This was a very interesting reappearing element you have discovered here: the pervasive and inescapable sense of destiny in the works you examined. I find this interesting in the context of some of the pieces of art and music we have examined so far. Boris Godunov is a story about a monk who tries to defy the tracks before him to become the Tsar. The results of deviating from such a set path are catastrophic. I wonder if Russian culture sees “destiny” as has something that must be followed due to inescapability or necessity.
I definitely agree that these poems convey a message of the inevitability of destiny. Once aspect of the poem “March” that I felt particularly illustrated this was the final stanza in which the visceral image of “dung” from which “all life and causes flow”. I believe the natural imagery and the unexpected evocation of “dung” shows how all life is rooted in nature and has a natural process and cycle. I think that this imagery is an interesting example of destiny as a part of the inescapable flow of life.
The idea of following a set pathway (or set of tracks) rather than having complete mobility is interesting. This touches on the age-old question of whether humans have free will, or if everything is pre-ordained. Are our lives set up where every action is destiny, or is destiny the end goal and not what’s in between? This piece is interesting in how it looks at destiny.
After class and learning that Pasternak composes his works in a cubo futurist style, the poems seemed to make a little more sense. I have always found the artistic movement of cubism confusing and I think cube futurism is very similar. I found “Spring Rainstorm” fascinating as is compared a rainstorm to the audience of a theatrical show. I thought this was a neat comparison.