How Pasternak’s pine trees were made into waves

The lyrical perspective of Boris Pasternak’s 1941 forty-four lines poem “Sosny” (Pine Trees) is defined by the transition from a familiar, “here-and-now,” forest landscape to a remote “out-there” seascape where the pine trees are replaced with waves. This narrative move derives from the German poetic tradition, first and foremost the song of Mignon (from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) and Heinrich Heine’s lyric about a pine tree in the North dreaming of a faraway palm tree, and Russian versions of this topos (translations, paraphrases and variations on the theme). The paper considers (resorting to the National Corpus of the Russian Language) earlier Russian counterparts of the topos in the texts of Mikhail Lomonosov, Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Karamzin, Vasilii Zhukovsky, Alexander Pushkin and many other Russian poets. The texts feature two structurally as well as semantically different types of anaphoric passages: on the one hand, a static “locational” pattern, beginning with tam, “there,” and on the other, a more dynamic “directional” structure, beginning with tuda (German dahin), “thither.” In the article, Boris Pasternak’s “Pine Trees” are shown to combine and vary elements of both the German, Goethean, predominantly directional paradigm and the Russian, Zhukovskian-Pushkinian predominantly locational one.

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