The Celestial’s Position, or Over Barriers. Boris Pasternak and Fyodor Stepun

ABSTRACT In this article, the author examines the work of Boris Pasternak, primarily his novel Doctor Zhivago, in the context of his Marburg experience and Kantian ideas as the basis of his moral-aesthetic position. Pasternak tried to live and write over the barriers that a totalitarian era had erected in human life. His late novel managed to tell Russia and the rest of humanity about this tragic century in Russian history, using as the basis of his reflections a Russian intellectual who grew up on the pathos of a Christianity rethought in early twentieth-century Russia. What happened in Russia in 1917 was not only a social pogrom, but also an intellectual one. Pasternak’s novel was a unique attempt to cope with this intellectual catastrophe by relying on Christianity. The very name of the protagonist, Zhivago, has a rhyme in the Gospels. It was not by chance that Pasternak shared with the Christian thinker Fyodor Stepun that he had written about Doctor Zhivago while working on a translation of Goethe’s Faust, that great mystery-drama. He recounted Russia’s historical tragedy through the fate of a single man, a doctor and poet. Pasternak won the battle against the darkness that had engulfed his homeland, preserving a soul capable of grieving for loved ones despite restrictive barriers, for the starry heavens above and the moral law within made the core of his personhood.