In his comprehensive study of the “poetics of light” in the work of Boris Pasternak, Christian Zehnder takes as a starting point Marina Tsvetaeva's oft-cited essay “A Downpour of Light.” His analysis of the “metaphysical poetics” (73) of light throughout Pasternak's oeuvre draws from several theoretical streams: post-Symbolist Sophiology, continuing Samson Brojtman's work, here linked to the theological concept of the Tabor light of transfiguration and opposing the Sophianic feminine to the masculinity of Logos; the idea of Modernism as “ocularphobic” (20), adapted from Martin Jay; and views of light in Pasternak as an “occurrence” (46–47) or “occasion” (45), as defined by Henri Bergson and Vladimir Jankélévitch, respectively, and as proximity, as defined by Emmanuel Lévinas and in some departure from Roman Jakobson's essay on metonymy (contiguity) in Pasternak. Zehnder examines the concept of “light-rain” (46), captured poetically in Tsvetaeva's essay, in which the proximity of the “dark” and “receptive” element of water with light makes it an “occurrence” (46) in a process that brings about an epiphany. Zehnder distinguishes his “metaphysical poetics” (73), following Boris Gasparov's placement of “poetics” in quotation marks, from a study of motifs, and by implication from Alexander Zholkovsky's relatively close concepts of contact and “higher phase” in his studies of Pasternak “invariants,” by noting that his focus is on these phenomena “not as marked or unmarked invariants … but as events, occasions, proximities” (73); he argues that metaphysical poetics provides the framework that lends significance to these motifs.
Zehnder examines the paradox that darkness is sometimes overlooked in Pasternak, perceived as a poet of light; he explores the shadows hidden in plain sight throughout his work. He traces Pasternak's “sympathy with the twilight” (125), a phrase from an early prose fragment, to a Sophiology incompatible with what Zehnder sees as Symbolist ocular—and logocentrism. He examines the early fragments productively through Emmanuel Lévinas's aesthetics of shadow. His readings of light-rain epiphanies in My Sister Life reveal shadows both in the ephemerality of the epiphanies and the necessity of sacrifice that accompanies them. Epiphanies disappear in his poetry of the 1920s, in which light and water clash. Light and shadow take an ethically-tinged turn in stories of the 1920s: Zehnder applies Lévinas's later ethical writings to explore metaphysical illumination (as opposed to enlightenment) and darkness in “The Childhood of Liuvers,” a distortion of light-rain in the descending murkiness of “Aerial Ways,” and the flickering, then fading light of the future in the verse novel Spektorsky. Zehnder opposes this darkness to the glaring, blinding sunlight of communism projected in Andrei Platonov's Chevengur. In his insightful analysis of Safe Conduct, Zehnder reexamines Pasternak's “light beam/power beam” (276) opposition both as a “transfiguration” (275) not through light, but surpassing it, and through Pasternak's rejection of Hermann Cohen and philosophy (light) for the power of art serving love, represented by Rainer Maria Rilke. In Pasternak's Second Birth Zehnder sees the illuminations fading behind the “distances” of socialism, and in the artificial glare of electric light, as the poet tried to adapt to a “new reality” in the era of Stalinist darkness (75). The exaggerated ocularcentrism Zehnder sees in the verse of the 1930s and 1940s are reflections of Pasternak's attempts to adapt to the new cultural context.
Doctor Zhivago, the eye specialist, carries the light of transfiguration, which shines through the water-bearing, neo-Sophianic Lara. Read through Vladimir Lossky's theology of transfiguration, Zhivago's light-epiphanies exemplify an originality threatened by the surrounding post-revolutionary world. While Zhivago fades away and ultimately rejects transfiguration in what Zehnder calls a “heroic act” (406), expressed in the farewell to transfiguration in the poem “August,” the memory of the light having been remains, thus preserving the significance of life.
Zehnder focuses on the themes of “content” (Pasternak's term) and “fulfillment” (76) in Pasternak's late verse, whose simplicity he reexamines from a metaphysical standpoint; he sees both themes manifested in light that shines to fill the framework of simplicity. In close readings of “In Hospital” and “Bacchanalia,” he analyzes light-rain phenomena that illustrate gratitude and fulfillment in the former and counteract emptiness in the latter. Pasternak confronts the Stalinist cliché of the “bright future” (76), with which he had struggled earlier, through illumination of the everyday.
In a book of this scope and detail, minor disagreements with some interpretations are inevitable. Overall, however, this meticulously researched and thought-provoking volume makes a significant contribution to Pasternak scholarship and should be of interest to those studying the poetics of light and visuality, and the intersections of Modernist poetry and metaphysics.
