In the first half of the 20th century, Russia was shaken by a series of upheavals – from World War I and the Revolution to the Civil War and the Great Terror. These events left certain authors with a sense of powerlessness, feeling trapped in the relentless current of history. Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and others sought meaning through literary reflections on their lives and work, believing that – given the deep connection between word and reality so central to Russian culture – this could help them reclaim a sense of agency and assert the value of individual biography, something nearly unthinkable in the interwar Soviet Union. This particular, previously overlooked type of writing was first theoretically categorised in the early 1980s by Dmitry Segal through the concept of safe conduct. While Segal includes Boris Pasternak among the authors of safe-conduct literature, he does not elaborate on this decision. The first part of this thesis therefore begins by interpreting Segal’s relevant writings and identifying the general features of safe-conduct texts, before attempting to place Pasternak within this tradition. The distinctiveness of Pasternak’s safe conduct is outlined through an overview of his work from the early 1920s until his death, with particular focus on his first autobiographical text Safe Conduct and his only novel, Doctor Zhivago. Several defining features of Pasternak’s safe conduct are identified: writing about writing, illegality, compulsion, doubling, talismanic quality, an ambivalent relationship with the Russian cultural tradition, the author or protagonist as a cultural hero, and the text as a catalyst of rebirth. The first part of the thesis concludes with a glimpse into Pasternak’s psyche, especially during the 1930s, when he was torn between two imperatives: telling the truth and staying alive. While Safe Conduct processed the events of the 1920s, it seems that Pasternak's next great crisis was bridged by his translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The second part of the thesis builds on this observation and, to support the hypothesis that a translation too can function as safe conduct, tries to transfer Pasternak’s safe-conduct poetics from his original writing to his translations. After outlining the main features and theoretical trends of translation in Russian culture from Classicism to World War II, the thesis turns to Pasternak’s work as a translator. The latter is situated within the Soviet tradition of translation, with attention to the evolution of the poet’s attitude towards the task and the principles he followed. Of particular importance are lyricisation and his conception of translation as a form of authorship. A separate chapter is devoted to Shakespeare and his important influence on Russian literary and cultural tradition. In this context, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence offers a salient perspective on Pasternak’s relationship with Shakespeare, and his role as a retranslator of Hamlet compared to his predecessors. The thesis concludes with a comparison to Doctor Zhivago and a detailed analysis of the Hamlet translation itself, examining Pasternak’s specific translation strategies (his handling of form, sound, performability, individualisation, and lyricisation) as well as his treatment of the Christian theme. The comparison and the analysis show that Pasternak links the fate of the Danish prince not only to that of Christ, but indirectly also to his own lived experience, consistent with the central hypothesis of the thesis. Since Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet shares the defining characteristics of his authorial safe-conduct texts, we argue that a translation too can function as safe conduct.
|
