Комментарий к стихотворению Пастернака «Последний день Помпеи» [Annotations to Boris Pasternak’s Poem “The Last Day of Pompeii”]

Abstract

The article offers a close reading and contextual analysis of Boris Pasternak’s poem “The Last Day of Pompeii” (1915). Its title borrowed from Karl Briullov’s famous painting is misleading as it has nothing to do either with the Roman city destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius or with the painting but alludes to the defeats of Russian troops at the Western front and a political crisis in the country as clear signs of the imminent demise (“the last day”) of the Russian empire. Pasternak’s apocalyptic imagery parallels a prophesy in Mayakovsky’s contemporaneous A Cloud in Trousers (also 1915) where the poet predicted that 1916 would be the year of revolutions in Russia.

KEYWORDS: Lazar Fleishman at 80, 20^th-Century Russian Literature, Boris Pasternak (1890—1960), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893—1930), Pompeii, Apocalyptic Imagery, “Great Retreat” of 1915, Russian Revolution, Close Reading, History of Literature.