Sui treni del mattino

by Boris Pasternak, Elisa Baglioni (Editor)

Quel che per i contemporanei era evidente e ancora oggi costituisce il nucleo irriducibile dell'opera di Boris Pasternak è una prodigiosa e taumaturgica forza sorgiva che egli riesce a liberare persino nei momenti più bui della storia del suo Paese. Si può dire che Pasternak sia sempre interno al flusso della vita, viaggi con esso e catturi i momenti del giorno che meglio la animano e la risvegliano, come indica il titolo della poesia che dà il nome a questa raccolta: Sui treni del mattino. Non soltanto il treno sarà un tropo ricorrente nei suoi versi, uno strumento della modernità attraverso cui penetrare le ampiezze della Russia e conoscerne gli abitanti dalla periferia, ma sarà anche un treno rannij, equivalente in italiano di "prime ore del giorno", "mattino presto", quando si avverte il passaggio da uno stato assopito all'ipersensibilità percettiva. È cruciale per il poeta cogliere lo stato liminare dei fenomeni... A differenza di Majakovskij, Achmatova, Cvetaeva, Blok, a dispetto di ogni affiato romantico, l'io lirico del poeta è secondario, è dissolto nei versi, non sappiamo quasi nulla di lui, sebbene le poesie siano piene di corporeità, di impulsi sensoriali e sensuali. La natura è presente nel suo essere materia, acquista un corpo, mentre l'io cerca una fuga all'infuori di sé.

Genres: Poetry

187 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow to talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy's works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Though his parents were both Jewish, they became Christianized, first as Russian Orthodox and later as Tolstoyan Christians. Pasternak's education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer Scriabin, Pasternak took up the study of musical composition for six years from 1904 to 1910. By 1912 he had renounced music as his calling in life and went to the University of Marburg, Germany, to study philosophy. After four months there and a trip to Italy, he returned to Russia and decided to dedicate himself to literature.

Pasternak's first books of verse went unnoticed. With My Sister Life, 1922, and Themes and Variations, 1923, the latter marked by an extreme, though sober style, Pasternak first gained a place as a leading poet among his Russian contemporaries. In 1924 he published Sublime Malady, which portrayed the 1905 revolt as he saw it, and The Childhood of Luvers, a lyrical and psychological depiction of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood. A collection of four short stories was published the following year under the title Aerial Ways. In 1927 Pasternak again returned to the revolution of 1905 as a subject for two long works: "Lieutenant Schmidt", a poem expressing threnodic sorrow for the fate of the Lieutenant, the leader of the mutiny at Sevastopol, and "The Year 1905", a powerful but diffuse poem which concentrates on the events related to the revolution of 1905. Pasternak's reticent autobiography, Safe Conduct, appeared in 1931, and was followed the next year by a collection of lyrics, Second Birth, 1932. In 1935 he published translations of some Georgian poets and subsequently translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and Ben Jonson, and poems by Petöfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley, and others. In Early Trains, a collection of poems written since 1936, was published in 1943 and enlarged and reissued in 1945 as Wide Spaces of the Earth. In 1957 Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak's only novel - except for the earlier "novel in verse", Spektorsky (1926) - first appeared in an Italian translation and has been acclaimed by some critics as a successful attempt at combining lyrical-descriptive and epic-dramatic styles.

Pasternak lived in Peredelkino, near Moscow, until his death in 1960.