“Symbolism and immortality”, was the title of a talk that a very young Boris Pasternak gave in 1913 to a group of students, although the paper was finalized around 1917. It has been known that the integral version was destroyed or misplaced, and only a synthesis was preserved in the author’s papers, which provides access to the thicket of the argument, which concerned ultimately the immortality of artistic creation and the transhistorical participation of the human species in the enduring process. Pasternak himself inscribes this lecture at the heights of his ars poetica: “My main purpose was to put forward the proposal that perhaps this maximally subjective and universally human corner or lot of the soul was art’s immemorial area of activity and its chief content. And, further, that although the artist is of course mortal like everybody else, the happiness of existence which he has felt is immortal and can be felt through his works by others centuries after him” [1]. Unlike the contentious positions about the creative genius and the orientation of the poet (dichter als Führer) that soon enough will inform the thick aura of European modernism in the age of dissonance, for Pasternak in the 1910s (the same decade as the early Lukacs and the youthful Michelstaedter), creation concerned a gathering of experience outside subjectivity; it was fundamentally the experience of the outside beyond the subject, which could only be cultivated by the poetic sensibility’s relation to that outside. It is not clear where there was a figural specificity to the notion of “poet” that Pasternak advances; but, what is essential, is that the poetic task was only possible through a spiritual formation and deployment of symbolization, that is, of the transfigurative use of language. 

Pasternak does not distinguish between vulgar and crafted poetic language; rather he uses the term symbolism to account for the sensible immortal reservoir that is transmitted in the stratification of the genesis of the human race. It is not of minor importance that Pasternak is writing in the dawn of a concrete materialist revolution, in which possession is only registered, counted, and even “destroyed” as mere “stuff”, thus incapable of solving the crisis of the transmission of tradition and blind to the problem of sense. Indeed, perhaps the revolution can only deepen the epochal crisis of symbolization. Pastnark will write affirmatively: “Immortality takes possession of the contents of the soul…in pure form this is what symbolism teaches” [2]. In a conception that is strikingly similar to Warburg & Saxl’s conception of the symbol (and history now designed as a study of the coagulation of symbologies) as a surplus discharged of energy as the reservoir of human sensation and formulas of imagination (the pathos formulae); the attunement towards symbolization never amounts to an accumulation of meaning and narration, but rather it is what preserves the earliest and purest stages of human expression, as argued by Saxl [3].

This is why there is no immortality except in the beginning: the real process of the anthrogenesis is only accessible in those moments of passion and experience while “being observant and drawing from nature”, Pasternak will claim in his talk. The immortality to be retained, it seems now clear, is not that of a future and postponed soteriological communal “life”; it is rather a life that clings to the ordinary and intuitive symbolism that resists the monstrous numbing of fictitious life commanded by the blackmail of the reality principle required by orderability. In this light, perhaps Alfred Metraux is right in that going beyond the neolithic age marked a catastrophic wandering for human beings. (And is not the poetic instantiation a painful reminder of this?)

The stratification of symbolism was of a higher reality; a playful dance between the figure and the non-figural, between the visible and the invisible, between the countable and the non-countable. Pasternak situates this tendency under the sign of “theos“, a religious character in which the texture of the soul is able to find some breathing space as condition of possibility for the opening of symbolism. Modernity is many things at once, but for Pasternak what was being “withered away” at the altar of morality and politics, Church and State (his terms verbatim) was precisely the historical draught of the symbolic man: “The communion of mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic, because it is full of meaning” [4]. This means that there is no community of salvation that serves as the general economy transport between the two kingdoms; if there is a Kingdom it is only of the symbolization of the irreducibility of souls, that can only enjoy immortality in the renunciation of what the materialist and survivalist life is capable of offering in detriment of the experiential possibilities of creation and language when grasping the sense of deathlessness. 

In the life of civil society you will live organized only unto death, without any experience of immortal death of any other, given that death has become mere transaction, a burdensome logistical ritual, a common spectacle. And this is why Pasternak, unlike the Cold War pawn that sometimes he was forced to embody, gradually became convinced that poetic existence could only take place outside the Social with no role or mission to subscribe to: “Do not reserve a poet’s position: it is a dangerous, if not empty” [5]. What was at stake was not a “new life” but a second birth (title of his own poetry collection, Vtoroe Roshdenie from 1934) to plunge into the depth of symbolization. The task is not to invent anything “new” (that modern fetishism), but to regain the life of the soul where the origin commences: “…and here art stops, And earth and fate breath in your face” [6]. It is a mysterious and impossible portrait of a face that reckons with the passing of the symbol and its absolute mystery. The very texture of expressivity that, against all odds, lingers on.

.

.

Notes 

1. Boris Pasternak. An essay in Autobiography (Collins and Harvill Press, 1919), 69.

2. Boris Pasternak. “Symbolism and immortality”, in The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writing on Inspiration and Creation (2008), 40-41.

3. Fritz Saxl. “The expressive gestures of Fine Arts”, in Lectures V1-V2 (Warburg Institute, 1957). 

4. Boris Pasternak. “Foreword”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 14.

5.  Boris Pasternak. “To a Friend”, in  Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 100.

6. Boris Pasternak. “Second Birth”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 109.