Article

Name: Semantics of the Fictional Draft: Once again about B. L. Pasternak’s poem “A Fairy Tale” (“Skazka”)

Authors: M. M. Gelfond

National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Federation)

Abstract: The article deals with the fictional creative story of Boris Pasternak’s poem “The Fairy Tale” (“Skazka”), described in the novel “Doctor Zhivago”. It is fundamentally different from the real story: if Pasternak changed the plot and partly the genre of “The Fairy Tale”, as evidenced by his letter to Nina Tabidze, Yuri Zhivago in the novel changes the poetic meter twice – and at the same time comprehends its semantics. The differences between the real and the “novelistic” creative history focus on the semantic halo both of trochaic trimeter – the meter of “The Fairy Tale”, and of trochaic pentameter and trochaic tetrameter, used at starting of the first and intermediate edition. The article shows how the first edition, written in pentameter (trochaic or iambic), connects “The Fairy Tale” with “Hamlet” and “The Gethsemane Garden”. The assumption of a genetic link between the three texts and a few significant plot coincidences enables to find invariant embodiments of one lyrical plot in different genres in them. The triangle: “Hamlet” – “The Fairy Tale” – “The Gethsemane Garden” built within the cycle varies the most important topic of the cycle and the novel – the strategy of individual, personal confrontation with “the twilight of night” and “the years of timelessness”. The study of the second stage of the fictional story “The Fairy Tale” clarifies a number of Pushkin’s contexts, not only in the “Poems of Yuri Zhivago”, but also in the novel as a whole. The study of semantic halos arising at different stages of Zhivago’s work on “The Fairy Tale” allows including it in the context of Russian lyrics.

Keywords: B. L. Pasternak, “Poems of Yuri Zhivago”, “Fairy Tale”, lyrical cycle, intertextual links, semantic halo of the meter

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