Textbook categories are comfortingly simple: prose is one thing, poetry another. Nevertheless, the difference between a poet's prose and that of a prose writer, or between the poems of a prose writer and those of a poet, is very striking. A mountaineer walking in the plains can find no foothold and stumbles over the level ground. He moves either with touching awkwardness or with overemphatic artistry; in either case it is not his natural gait, but involves obvious effort and looks too much like the steps of a dancer. It is easy to distinguish a language that has been learnt, however perfect its command, from one that has been naturally acquired. Cases of complete bilingualism are, of course, undeniable, and when we read the prose of Puškin or Mácha, of Lermontov or Heine, of Pasternak or Mallarmé, we cannot help being amazed at the command these writers have of the other language; but at the same time we are bound to pick out a foreign note, as it were, in the accent and inner form of their speech. Their achievements in this second language are brilliant sallies from the mountains of poetry into the plains of prose.

It is not only a poet's prose that has a particular stamp; there is also the prose peculiar to an age of poetry, the prose of a literary current oriented towards poetry, as distinct from those literary epochs and schools that are prose-oriented. The major achievements of Russian literature in the first decades of our century belong to poetry; it is poetry that is felt to be the pure canonical voice of literature, its perfect incarnation. Both Symbolism and the later literary fermentation often summed up under the heading of "Futurism" are almost exclusively represented by poets, and if many of these occasionally try an excursion into prose, it is a conscious deviation, an experimental digression by a virtuoso of verse. With but a few exceptions the standard literary prose of this period is a typical epigone product, a more or less successful reproduction of classic models: the interest of this hackwork lies either in its successful imitation of the old or in its grotesque brutalisation of the canon, or else its novelty consists in cunningly adapting new themes to traditional forms. In contrast to the great internal tension of the poetry of the time, this prose can claim to be distinguished only in the first place because Gogol' and after him Tolstoj have lifted the qualitative norm to such a high level, and in the second place because the requirements of modern reality are themselves so exacting. In the history of artistic prose this hundredth province of Russian classic realism has little evolutionary significance, whereas the prose of Brjusov, Belyj, Xlebnikov, Majakovskij and Pasternak—that remarkable colony of modern poets—opens up hidden paths to a revival of Russian prose. In the same way the prose of Puškin and Lermontov heralded the approach of the great festival of prose that was opened by Gogol'. Pasternak's prose is the characteristic prose of a poet in a great age of poetry.

The prose of a writer in a literary movement primarily concerned with poetry is very clearly defined both in those places where it is influenced by the dominant, that is, the poetic, element, and in those where it breaks free from that influence by an intense and conscious effort. No less essential is the general context of literary activity, its role in the whole concert of the arts. The hierarchy of artistic values changes for individual artists and artistic movements: for Classicism it is the plastic arts, for Romanticism music, and for Realism literature that is the highest, the most extreme and exemplary, expression of art possible. Romantic verse is required to sing and to merge into music; in the age of Realism, on the contrary, music—in musical drama and in program music—seeks to ally itself with literature. The Romantic's slogan of art gravitating toward music was adopted to a significant degree by Symbolism. The foundations of Symbolism first begin to be undermined in painting, and in the early days of Futurist art it is painting that holds the dominant positions. And then, as plastic art is stripped of its emblematic character, poetry becomes the model of artistic innovation. A tendency to identify art with poetry is manifested by all the poets of the Futurist generation. "Art as a whole, in other words—poetry," says Pasternak. But the origin of this hierarchy of values differs from poet to poet; different paths lead them to poetry, and they start from different points. Pasternak, a convinced pupil of "the art of Scrjabin, Blok, Kommissar evskaja and Belyj," that is, of the Symbolist school, comes to poetry from music, to which he is connected by a cult relationship characteristic of the Symbolists. Majakovskij's springboard to poetry is painting. For all the variety of the artistic tasks that Xlebnikov sets himself, the written word is his sole and unchanging material. We could say that, in the development of Russian post-Symbolist poetry, Majakovskij embodies the "Storm and Stress," Xlebnikov provides its most characteristic and remarkable achievement, while Pasternak's work is, as it were, the link between Symbolism and the school that follows it. And granted that Xlebnikov reached poetic maturity earlier than Majakovskij, and Majakovskij earlier than Pasternak, nonetheless it can be said that when the reader whose starting point is Symbolism comes to tackle Pasternak, he will inevitably stumble over Majakovskij and finally, after overcoming the latter, be faced with laying a long siege to the strongholds of Xlebnikov. However, any attempt to see writers of one and the same period as individual links in a chain of uniform literary development, and to establish the sequence of these links, is always conventionally one-sided. While in certain respects the individual poet continues a tradition, in many others he breaks away from it all the more decisively; the tradition is likewise never entirely negated; the elements of negation always appear only in conjunction with persisting traditional elements. Thus Pasternak, who conceives as his literary task the continuing of Symbolist tradition, is aware that out of his efforts to recreate and perpetuate the old a new art is always arising. The imitations turn out to be "more swift and fervent" than the model, and this quantitative difference evolves naturally into a qualitative one. According to the poet's own self-observation, "the new came into being not as a substitute for the old . . . on the contrary, it arose as an enraptured reproduction of the existing model." By contrast, Majakovskij is consciously out to abolish the old poetry: nevertheless Pasternak, with his acute awareness of Symbolism, senses in Majakovskij's "romantic manner," and the sense of life underlying it, the condensed heritage of the very school of poetry that the aggressive Futurist repudiates. What then is at issue? Pasternak's and Majakovskij's innovations are just as partial as is their connection with the literary past. Suppose we imagine two related languages which differ not only in their neologisms but also in their original vocabulary: what the one has retained from the common source, the other has often rejected, and vice versa. These two languages are the poetic worlds of Majakovskij and Pasternak respectively, while the common linguistic source is the poetic system of Symbolism. The theme of the remarks that follow is that unusual element in Pasternak's work which sets him apart from his predecessors, which is in part alien and in part strikingly akin to his contemporaries, and which is most clearly to be seen in the telltale awkwardness of his prose.

I

The textbooks confidently draw a firm line between lyric and epic poetry. If we reduce the question to a simple grammatical formula, we can say that the point of departure and the main theme are, for the lyric, invariably the first person of the present tense; for the epic, the third person of the past tense. Whatever subject matter the lyric narrative may have, it is never more than an appendage and accessory, a mere background to the first person; and if the past is involved, then the lyric past always presupposes a reminiscing first-person subject. In the epic, on the contrary, the present refers expressly back to the past, and if the "I" of the narrator does find expression, it is solely as one of the characters in the action. This objectified "I" thus appears as a variant of the third person; the poet is, as it were, looking at himself from outside. So that the first person may be emphasized as the point of reception but that point never fuses with the main subject of the epic poem itself; in other words, the poet as "subject of the lyric that looks at the world through the first person" is profoundly alien to the epic.

Russian Symbolism is lyrical through and through; its excursions into the epic vein are typical attempts by lyric poets to masquerade as poets of epic. In post-Symbolist poetry the two genres diverge: while the persisting lyric strain clearly predominates, reaching its most extreme expression in the work of Majakovskij, the purely epic element finds an outlet, too, in the quite unparalleled poetry and prose of Xlebnikov. Pasternak's work is emphatically lyrical; his prose, especially, is the characteristic prose of a lyric poet, nor are his historical poems essentially different from his cycles of intimate lyric poetry.

Pasternak confesses that Xlebnikov's achievements are even now largely inaccessible to him and justifies himself with the declaration: "poetry in my view merges in history and in collaboration with real life." This reproach, with its implication that he had torn himself away from real life, would certainly have astonished Xlebnikov; for he had regarded his work as an affirmation of reality, unlike the negative literature of the preceding generations. Xlebnikov's symbolic world is so fully realized that for him every symbol, every created word, is endowed with a complete independent reality, and the question of its relations to any external object, indeed the very question of the existence of such an object, becomes entirely superfluous. For Xlebnikov, as for the little heroine in Pasternak's story, a name possesses the complete and comforting significance it has in childhood:

She could not possibly define what was happening on the other shore, far, far away: it had no name, no distinct colour or precise outlines. . . . Ženya began to cry. . . . Her father's explanation was brief: 'It's Motovilixa. . . . The little girl did not understand at all and, satisfied, swallowed a falling tear. For that was all that she needed: to know the name of the incomprehensible—Motovilixa.

When Ženya had grown out of childhood she was struck for the first time by the suspicion that there was something which appearances concealed or else revealed only to the elect. This attitude of childhood towards appearances corresponds perfectly to Pasternak's own. An epic attitude to his environment is naturally out of the question for a poet who is convinced that, in the world of prosaic fact, the elements of everyday existence fall dully, stupidly and with crippling effect upon the soul and "sink to the bottom, real, hardened and cold, like drowsy tin spoons," and that only the passion of the elect can transform this "depressingly conscientious truth" into poetry. Only feeling proves to be obviously and absolutely authentic. "Compared with this even the sunrise took on the character of urban rumor still needing to be verified." Pasternak bases his poetics on the personal, emotional experience—indeed appropriation—of reality. "In this form the events did not belong to me," and so on. Both his adjustment of the language of poetry to the purely expressive language of music, and the fact that this conception is based on the triumphing of passion, with its animating power, over the inevitable, show Pasternak to be continuing the romantic line of Symbolism; but as his work matures and attains individuality, so his initially romantic language of the emotions evolves gradually into a language about the emotions, and it is in his prose that this descriptive character finds its most extreme expression.

II

Whereas, despite the obvious echoes of Xlebnikov in Pasternak's work, these two poets are clearly distinguishable from each other, it is far more difficult to draw a line between Pasternak and Majakovskij. Both are lyric poets of the same generation, and Majakovskij, more than any other poet, deeply affected Pasternak in his youth and constantly won his admiration. A careful comparison of the respective tissue of metaphors of the two poets at once reveals remarkable similarities. "I was related to Majakovskij by the age and by common influences; certain things coincided in us," observes Pasternak. The metaphorical structure of Pasternak's poems reveals, too, direct traces of his enthusiasm for the author of "A Cloud in Trousers." In comparing the two poets' metaphors we must bear in mind that these have a quite different role to play in the work of each poet. In Majakovskij's poems the metaphor, sharpened by the tradition of Symbolism, is not only the most characteristic but also the most essential poetic trope, determining the structure and development of the lyric theme. In Pasternak's pertinent phrase, poetry here began "to speak in the language of sectarian parables." To define the problem: the poet's absolute commitment to metaphor is known; what remains to be determined is the thematic structure of his poetry. The lyrical impulse is, as we have said, provided by the poet's own self. Images of the external world in the metaphorical lyric are made to harmonize with this impulse, to shift it into different levels, to establish a network of correspondences and masterful assimilations amidst the diverse aspects of the cosmos, to merge the lyric hero into the multifariousness of Being and to dissolve the manifold planes of Being in the lyric hero. Metaphor works through creative association by similarity and contrast. The hero is confronted by the antithetical image of what is mortally inimical to him, protean like all the ingredients of a primarily metaphorical lyric poetry. Such poetry inevitably culminates in the theme of the hero's duel to the death. Held together by a firm and taut chain of metaphors, the heroic lyric fuses the poet's mythology and his being into an inseparable whole, and he, as Pasternak has perfectly understood, pays for its all-embracing symbolism with his life. In this way we have deduced from the semantic structure of Majakovskij's poetry both its actual libretto and the core of the poet's biography.

However rich and refined Pasternak's metaphors may be, they are not what determines and guides his lyric theme. It is the metonymical, not the metaphorical, passages that lend his work an "expression far from common." Pasternak's lyricism, both in poetry and in prose, is imbued with metonymy; in other words, it is association by contiguity that predominates. By comparison with Majakovskij's poetry, the first person is thrust into the background. But it is only an apparent relegation—here too the eternal hero of the lyric is present. It is merely a case of his being metonymically presented; in the same way, no railway train can be seen in Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, but we are aware of its arrival from the reactions of the people in front of the cameras—as if the invisible, transparent train were making its way between the screen and the audience. Similarly, in Pasternak's poetry, images of the surrounding world function as contiguous reflections, or metonymical expressions, of the poet's self. Now and then the author reveals his poetics clearly, but he egocentrically applies them to art in general. He does not believe that it is possible for art to adopt a truly epic attitude to the outside world; he is convinced that genuine works of art, while relating all sorts of things, are really telling of their own birth. "Reality arises in a kind of new category. This category seems to us to be its own condition, and not ours . . . We try to name it. The result is art." Thus Constantinople seemed to the pilgrim from old Russia to be an insatiable city because he never got tired of looking at it. It is the same with Pasternak's poems and, in particular, with his prose, where the anthropomorphism of the inanimate world emerges much more clearly: instead of the hero it is, as often as not, the surrounding objects that are thrown into turmoil; the immovable outlines of roofs grow inquisitive, a door swings shut with a silent reproach, the joy of a family reconciliation is expressed by a growing warmth, zeal and devotion on the part of the lamps, and when the poet is turned away by the girl he loves he finds that "the mountain had grown taller and thinner, the town was become lean and black." We have deliberately given simple examples; there is a wealth of much more involved imagery of this sort in Pasternak's work. The substitution of an adjacent object is the simplest form of association by contiguity. The poet has other metonymical devices as well; he can proceed from the whole to the part and vice versa, from the cause to the effect and vice versa, from spatial relations to temporal ones and vice versa, etc., etc. But perhaps what is most characteristic of Pasternak is his using an action instead of an actor, a man's condition, or one of his remarks or attributes, rather than the man himself, and the consequent separating off and objectifying of these abstractions. The philosopher Brentano, who steadfastly fought against the logically illegitimate objectification of such fictions based in language, would have discovered in Pasternak's poetry and prose a most abundant collection of such alleged entia, treated as creatures of flesh and blood. Sestra moja—žizn' (My Sister Life), the really untranslatable title and leitmotif of Pasternak's most relevant collection of poems ("life" is feminine in Russian), graphically exposes the linguistic roots of this mythology. This same being repeatedly appears in his prose too.

Life lets very few people know what it is doing with them. It loves its job too much and while at work it speaks at most with those who wish it success and who love its workbench.

In Safe Conduct it reappears in a more complex metonymical setting:

Suddenly I imagined, outside beneath the window, his life, which now belonged entirely to the past. It moved sideways away from the window in the form of some quiet street, bordered with trees . . . And the first to stand upon it, right beside the wall, was our State, our unprecedented, impossible State, rushing headlong into the ages and accepted among them for ever. It stood there below, and one could call to it and take it by the hand.

Pasternak's poetry is a realm of metonymies awakened to independent life. The footsteps of the tired hero, themselves longing for sleep as he is, continue to live and move behind him. On his steep path the poet's vision gently beats: "I am the vision." In his reminiscences the author relates how

I often heard the whistling of a nostalgia that had not originated with me. Catching up with me from the rear, it frightened me and made me feel pity . . . My silence was travelling with me, I was attached to its person for the journey, and wore its uniform, a uniform familiar to everyone from his own experience.

The sound uttered by an object assumes the latter's function:

Somewhere nearby . . . a herd . . . was making music. . . . The music was sucked in by blue-bottles. Its skin was rippling to and fro spasmodically and surely.

Action and actor are objects in the same degree:

Two rare diamonds were playing separately and independently in the deep nests of this half-dark bliss.

As an abstraction becomes objectified, it is overlaid with material accessories:

Those were aerial ways, on which, like trains, the rectilinear thoughts of Liebknecht, Lenin and the few minds of their flight departed daily.

An abstraction is personified even at the cost of a catachresis:

Midday quiet reigned. It communed with the quiet that was spread out below in the plain.

An abstraction becomes capable of independent actions, and these actions are objectified in their turn:

Lacquered sounds of giggling from a disintegrating order of life winked at each other in the quiet.

Majakovskij, who had a predilection for continually surmounting obstacles, toyed for years with the thought of writing a novel. He even had ideas for a title—first Two Sisters, then A Dozen Women. It is no accident that the project was always postponed: Majakovskij's element is either the lyrical monologue or the dramatic dialogue; descriptive presentation is profoundly foreign to him, and he substitutes second-person for third-person themes. Everything that is not inseparably attached to the poet's self is felt by Majakovskij to be opposed and hostile to him, and he confronts his opponent face to face—challenges him to single combat, exposes, condemns, mocks and outlaws him. It is not surprising that the only undertaking he completed in the field of literary prose was the series of splendid stage plays written in the last years of his life. There is just as firm a logic about the path that Pasternak took toward narrative prose. There exist poems which are woven through and through with metonymies, while narrative prose may be studded with metaphors (a striking example is Belyj's prose), but in the main there is an undeniably closer relationship on the one hand between verse and metaphor, on the other between prose and metonymy. Verse relies upon association by similarity; the rhythmical similarity of the lines is an essential requirement for its reception, and this rhythmical parallelism is most strongly felt when it is accompanied by a similarity (or contrast) of images. An intentionally striking division into similar sections is foreign to prose. The basic impulse of narrative prose is association by contiguity, and the narrative moves from one object to an adjacent one on paths of space and time or of causality; to move from the whole to the part and vice versa is only a particular instance of this process. The more the prose is stripped of material content, the greater the independence achieved by these associations. For metaphor the line of least resistance is verse, and for metonymy it is a prose whose subject matter is either subdued or eliminated (Pasternak's short stories are an example of the first alternative, and his Safe Conduct of the second).

III

The essence of poetic figures of speech does not simply lie in their recording the manifold relationships between things, but also in the way they dislocate familiar relationships. The more strained the role of the metaphor in a given poetic structure, that much the more decisively are traditional categories overthrown; things are arranged anew in the light of newly introduced generic signs. Accordingly, the creative (or, as the foes of such novelty will say, the forced) metonymy changes the accustomed order of things. Association by contiguity, which in Pasternak's work becomes the artist's flexible tool, transforms spatial distribution and temporal succession. This emerges particularly clearly from the poet's prose ventures, outlined as it is against the background of a prose that seeks to communicate in the customary way. Pasternak grounds this dislocation in emotion, or else, if one's starting point is the expressive function of literature, he uses this dislocation to help express the emotions.

A poetic world governed by metonymy blurs the outline of things, as April, in Pasternak's story "The Childhood of Luvers," blurs the distinction between house and yard; similarly it turns two different aspects of one and the same object into independent objects, like the children in the same story who think that a street seen first from inside the house and then from outside it is two different streets. These two characteristic features—the mutual penetration of objects (the realization of metonymy in the strict sense of the word) and their decomposition (the realization of synecdoche)—bring Pasternak's work close to the endeavors of Cubist painters. The dimensions of things change:

The gondola was, womanlike, gigantic, as everything is gigantic which is perfect in form and incommensurable with the place taken up by its body in space.

The distances between things change so that it becomes certain that a conversation about strangers has to be warmer than a conversation about kindred; and the vision of cosmic movement in the first part of Safe Conduct transforms inanimate objects into a distant, motionless horizon. A striking example of how settings are transformed:

The lamps only accentuated the emptiness of the evening air. They did not give light, but swelled from within, like sick fruits, from the turbid and bright dropsy that puffed up their bloated shades. . . . The lamps came much less in contact with the rooms than with the spring sky which they seemed to be pushed close up to.

Pasternak himself compares, in passing, his dislocated space with the space of Gogol's eschatology: "suddenly it became possible to see far into the distance in all directions." Spatial relations are mingled with temporal ones, and the time sequence loses its strict regularity—objects "are jolted again and again from the past into the future, and from the future into the past, like sand in a frequently shaken hourglass." Any contiguity can be construed as a causal series. Pasternak is impressed by the terminology of the child who grasps the meaning of a sentence from the situation and says, "I did not understand it from the words but from the reason." The poet tends to identify the situation with the reason; he consciously prefers "the vicissitudes of guesswork to the eloquence of fact"; he proclaims that "time is permeated with the unity of a life's events," and builds bridges between them on just those prelogical "ridiculous grounds" which he openly opposes to the syllogisms of "adults." Thus it is no surprise when the chatter of Cohen's companions proves to be "uneven on account of the steplike construction of the Marburg pavements," and when the poet's numerous "therefores" not infrequently introduce clauses whose causal nature is a pure fiction.

The wider the range of the poetic figure of speech, the more thoroughly, to use Pasternak's language, "the accomplished" extinguishes "the subject of the accomplishment." A connection that has been created overshadows one that is still to be made, and governs it; "the fascination of autonomous meaning" takes on prominence, whilst material connectedness is subdued, sometimes to a mere glimmer. In this sense the metonymical connections which Pasternak establishes, no less than Majakovskij's metaphorical connections or the manifold ways of condensing speech—both internal and external—in the poetry of Xlebnikov, show a persistent tendency to dispense with the object, a tendency also characteristic of the other art forms of the period. A connection once created becomes an object in its own right. Pasternak does not tire of underlining the inessential, random nature of the thing to be connected:

Each detail can be replaced by another . . . Any one of them, chosen at random, will serve to bear witness to the transposed condition by which the whole of reality has been seized . . . The parts of reality are mutually indifferent.

The poet defines art as the mutual interchangeability of images. Any images one cares to choose harbor more than similarity alone, and can consequently be mutual metaphors ("what cannot the sky be compared with?")—all images are in some way potentially contiguous. "Who has not something of dust, or home or a calm spring evening in him?" is Pasternak's apology for the all-embracing, metonymical elective affinity. The more unrecognizable this affinity and the more unusual the community that the poet creates, the more the juxtaposed images, and whole series of images, fall to pieces and lose their spellingbook clarity. Significantly, Pasternak consistently opposes "the meaning imported into objects" to their plasticity, for which he so delights in finding pejorative epithets—in Pasternak's world meaning is inevitably etiolating and plasticity deanimating.

IV

To define our problem: the absolute commitment of the poet to metonymy is known; what remains to be determined is the thematic structure of his poetry. The hero is as if concealed in a picture puzzle; he is broken down into a series of constituent and subsidiary parts; he is replaced by a chain of concretized situations and surrounding objects, both animate and inanimate. "Every small detail lived and arose, without regard to me . . . in its significance," Pasternak records in his early cycle of poems Over the Barriers, in which, as he has admitted, he had already found his own poetic system. The theme of the poem "Marburg" is the poet's rejected proposal of marriage, but the principal characters in the action are flagstone, pavingstone, wind, "innate instinct," "new sun," chicks, cricket and dragonfly, tile, midday, Marburger, sand, impending storm, sky, etc. One and a half decades later, in his book of reminiscences Safe Conduct, Pasternak mentions that he is intentionally characterizing his whole life at random, that he could increase the number of significant features or replace them by others, and that, in fact, the poet's life must be looked for under other people's names.

Show us your environment and I will tell you who you are. We learn what he lives on, this lyric hero outlined by metonymies, split up by synecdoches into individual attributes, reactions, and situations; we learn to what he is related, by what he is conditioned, and to what he is condemned. But the truly heroic element, the hero's activity, eludes our perception; action is replaced by topography. If in the case of Majakovskij the collision of two worlds inevitably culminates in a duel, the polished image of Pasternak's poems—the world is a mirror to the world—says over and over again that the collision is illusory: "The enormous garden stirs in the room, raises its fist against the mirror, runs to the swing, catches, hits with the ball, shakes—and doesn't break the glass." If Majakovskij unfolds his lyric theme in the form of a cycle of transformations undergone by the hero, the favorite transitional formula of Pasternak's lyric prose is a railway journey during which his excited hero experiences a change of locality in various ways and in enforced idleness. The active voice has been erased from Pasternak's poetic grammar. In his prose ventures he employs precisely that metonymy which substitutes the action for the actor: "a fully awake and vigorous man . . . waits for the decision to get up to come of its own accord, without his contributing anything." The agens is excluded from his thematic material. The heroine did not call, did not arrange anything—"it was all announced to her." The height of the heroine's activity, which conjures up the inevitability of the tragedy, is the mental transformation of her surroundings; quite "fortuitously, uselessly and senselessly" she notices someone and in imagination she introduces him into her own life. Is man perhaps active in art? No, "in art," according to Pasternak's aesthetic, "man's lips are sealed"; that, indeed, is the distinctive feature of art. Is art itself active, then? No, it does not even invent metaphor, but merely reproduces it. And the poet will not present his reminiscences to the memory of the person who is their object. "On the contrary I myself received them from him as a gift." If the lyric "I" is in Pasternak's work a patiens, is some active third person then the real hero? No, the genuine agent has no place in Pasternak's poetic mythology; as a rule the individual has no idea of what "builds him up, tunes him and stitches him together," and the poet, too, is "perfectly indifferent as to the name of the power that has given him his book." The third person, as it appears in Pasternak's work, denotes the instrument rather than the agent. For example in "The Childhood of Luvers":

Everything that came from the parents to the children came at the wrong moment, from one side, provoked not by them but by certain causes that had nothing to do with them.

The auxiliary, subordinate, marginal nature of the third person is often firmly underlined in Pasternak's themes:

Another human being had entered her life, the third person, just anyone, without a name or with a random name which neither provoked hatred nor inspired love.

What is essential is solely his penetration into the life of the lyric self. Whatever is unrelated to this single hero is only "vague accumulations without names."

This strict body of semantic laws also determines the simple pattern of Pasternak's lyric narrative. The hero is either delighted or appalled at being governed by an external impulse; he is now branded by it, now suddenly loses contact with it, whereupon another impulse takes its place. Safe Conduct is an inspired account of how the author's enamoured admiration focuses in turn upon Rilke, Scrjabin, Cohen, a "dear beautiful girl," and Majakovskij, and how in this process he comes up against the "limits of his understanding" (a person's nonunderstanding is one of the most acute and compelling of Pasternak's lyric themes, just as a person's being misunderstood by others is one of Majakovskij's). Perplexed misunderstandings develop, and the inevitable passive solution follows—the hero goes off, leaving in the lurch, one after the other, music, philosophy, and romantic poetry. The hero's activity is outside Pasternak's sphere. When he does deal with action, he is banal and unoriginal, defending in theoretical digressions his right to triviality. Majakovskij, too, uses triviality as a part of his material, but with him, in contrast to Pasternak, it is used exclusively to characterize the hostile "Other." Pasternak's short stories are similarly empty of action. The most dramatic—'Àerial Ways"—is made up of the following "uncomplicated incidents": the former lover of the wife and friend of the husband is expected back from a sea voyage; all three are shattered by the disappearance of the child; the new arrival is shattered by the confession that the child is his son; fifteen years later he is shattered by the confirmation of this confession and then by the news of his son's death. Everything that in any way resembles action (the causes of the boy's disappearance, his rescue and the cause of his death) is left out of the picture. All that is recorded are the different stages of the emotional turmoil and their reflections.

We have tried to deduce the themes of Pasternak's and Majakovskij's work from the basic structural features of their poetics. Does that mean that the former are determined by the latter? Mechanistic Formalists would answer in the affirmative, supporting their case with Pasternak's claim that in his youth he had had formal affinities with Majakovskij which threatened to get out of hand, thus causing him radically to alter his poetic manner and, with it, the sense of life that lay at the base of it. The position of master of metaphor was filled, so the poet became master of metonymy and drew the appropriate ideological conclusions.

Others would try in their turn to prove the primacy of content. Mechanists of the psychoanalytical school would find the sources of Pasternak's thematic material in his confession that he had languished shamefully long "in the sphere of mistakes made by the childish imagination, boyish perversions, and the hungers of youth." From these assumptions they would infer not only the repeated theme of passive exaltation and the inevitable falls, not only the poet's agitated recourse to motifs of adolescent development, but also his metonymical deviations around every fixed object. Mechanistic materialists would note the author's witness to the apolitical nature of his environment, and would assert a socieconomic basis for his obvious blindness to social problems—particularly to the social pathos of Majakovskij's poetry—and for the mood of perplexed, inactive, elegiac distractedness which permeates both Safe Conduct and "Aerial Ways."

It is legitimate to strive to find a correspondence between the different planes of reality, as it is also to try to infer facts about one of its planes from the corresponding facts about another—the method is one of projecting a multidimensional reality onto one surface. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse this projection with reality itself and to disregard both the characteristic structure and the autonomous movement of the individual planes, that is, their transformation into mechanical stratifications. From among the actual possibilities of formal development, a person or a particular milieu can choose those that correspond most closely to the given social, ideological, psychological, and other conditions; just as a cluster of artistic forms, come by the laws of their development to the point where they are available for use, seek out the appropriate milieu, or the creative personality, that will realize them. But this harmony of dimensions should not be made idyllically absolute; it must not be forgotten that dialectical tensions are possible between the different planes of reality. Conflicts such as these are essential to the progress of cultural history. If many individual characteristics of Pasternak's poetry are in accord with the characteristic features of his personality and his social environment, so, inevitably, there are also phenomena in his work which the contemporary poetic idiom forces upon every one of its poets, even if they contradict his own individual and social personality. (It is a question of the absolute axes of its total structure.) And if the poet rejects the demands of the idiom, he is automatically pushed off its tracks. The poet's artistic mission never penetrates his biography without a struggle, just as his biography is never entirely absorbed into his artistic mission. The hero of Safe Conduct is chronically unsuccessful, because Pasternak cannot do anything with the numerous successes that his original model actually achieved. (In the same way Casanova's book could not make anything of the failures that Casanova actually experienced.) The tendency which we have identified in the work of Pasternak and his contemporaries to make the sign radically independent of its object is the basic endeavor of the whole modern movement in art which has emerged as the antithesis of Naturalism. This tendency is inseparable from the progressive pathos of this movement and is to be found in all artists, independently of the details of their biography. The attempts of observers simply to attach this specific artistic phenomenon to a limited social sector or a particular ideology are typical mechanistic errors: to infer from the nonrepresentational nature of a man's art the unreality of his view of life is arbitrarily to suppress a fundamental antinomy. Rather it is the tendency of philosophy towards the concrete that corresponds most closely to the nonrepresentational tendency in art.

To belong to a compact collective group and to hold firmly to a particular direction are both repugnant to Pasternak, who is a passionate destroyer of customary affinities. He is at pains to convince Majakovskij of how splendid it would be if the latter would do away with Futurism for ever. He dislikes all "banal" affinities with his contemporaries, keeps himself separate from them, and advocates excursions off the common path. Nevertheless, despite the ideological confusion of the period, so variegated as to reach a point of mutual hatred and lack of comprehension, Pasternak's debt to his age comes out very strongly in his poetry. It is revealed both in his persistent creative annullment of the object and in his reconstruction of the grammar of art. This latter used to consist of past and present; in contrast to the simple past, the present was seen as a featureless "nonpast." It was, in fact, Futurism that wished to introduce the future into the poetic system by rubric, theory, and practice, and to introduce it as a decisive category. The poems and journalism of Xlebnikov and Majakovskij shout this tirelessly, and Pasternak's work is imbued with the same pathos, despite his profound inclination for "the deep horizon of recollection." In a new way, in the context of the new antithesis, he conceives the present as an independent category and understands that "the mere perceptibility of the present is already the future." It is not by chance that the high-flown hymn to Majakovskij which closes Safe Conduct ends with the words: "From his childhood he was spoiled by the future, which surrendered to him rather early and, obviously, without much difficulty." This "grammatical reform" fundamentally alters the very function of poetry in its relation to other social values.