EVFL - "Pasternak"

BORIS PASTERNAK 

1) EMOTION ("romantic") 

2) WILL ("nobleman") 

3) PHYSICS ("the underdog") 

4) LOGIC ("schoolboy") 

When you imagine "Pasternak," you see a thin, not so good-looking man. The face is oval. The gaze is serene, absent-minded, tilted into himself, with a gleam. Gesture and facial expressions are exaggerated. Clothing is loose, though usually gypsy-like and not banal. In vocabulary he avoids strongly crude and emphatically expressed turns of phrase. Speech flows without difficulty, but is often raucous, tense, and inconsistent. In matters of everyday life, economic, sports creature seems almost helpless. Chadolyubov. Creatures of the opposite sex are for him what the sun is for the sunflower, but not directly, but as if in appearance. 

* * * 

"The Pasternaks are extremely handsome, of rare mental beauty, almost medieval, chivalrous in nature. Pasternak's cousin recalled: "I was 20 years old when he came to visit us in an unusual way. He was overly attentive and charmed, though no reason for our everyday life gave him. In Moscow he was living life to the fullest, studying in the philosophy department of the university, playing and composing, educated and subtle. It seemed that he would be a scholar. In worldly terms, he was "out of this world," he was on bollards, scattered and self-absorbed. His Pasternakian nature was evident in the maiden purity he retained until his later, comparatively, years. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Boris was a rare spiritual nobility. Transferring the characterization of Olga Freidenberg on the whole "Pasternakovsky" family, we can say that spiritual nobility is indeed the most notable feature of the nature of this type. At the same time, nobility is provided by a strong, flexible, processive, turned to others and therefore responsive 2nd Will, and soulfulness - by the superpower of emotional potential, by the immense fibers of the 1st Emotion. 

Pasternak's "external beauty" usually, like the other three Physicists, does not shine, and this circumstance is usually the only source of his chronic and consistent dissatisfaction with himself. Boris Pasternak, too, was terribly worried about his appearance. After an injury in his youth he had a short leg and his teeth have grown rare, large and protruding. So when Marina Tsvetaeva said that Pasternak "looks like a Bedouin and his horse at the same time" - this phrase was not just a compliment. What was Pasternak's joy and how many bitter words about the tardiness of this measure were uttered when, it seems, in his sixth decade he managed to replace the chronic source of shame and irritation sticking out of his mouth with a beautiful flat prosthesis. 

At the same time, the presence of external defects does not deprive the "pasternak" of sexual attractiveness (large, shining eyes, calm, distracted look of a confident person - sufficient compensation for any defects), and they themselves "pasternak" rarely depress enough to discourage potential sexual partners. Artist Yuri Annenkov wrote: "Boris Pasternak: huge eyes, puffy lips, proud and dreamy look, high growth, harmonious gait, a beautiful and sonorous voice. In the streets, not knowing who he was, passersby, especially women, instinctively looked at him. I will never forget once Pasternak, too, looked at a girl who had looked at him and showed her his tongue. In a burst of fright, the girl ran away around the corner. "Perhaps that's too much," I said reproachfully. "I'm very shy, and this kind of curiosity embarrasses me," Pasternak replied in an apologetic tone. 

In general, the presence of major physical disadvantages not only does not humble the sensuality of the "parsnip," but on the contrary, it increases it even more, the hypersexual in itself 3rd Physique is made hyperhypersexual. 

V. Kataev was almost the first to talk about Pasternak, this theme was touched upon in his memoirs. Calling Pasternak a "mulatto," he wrote: "I think his main feature was sensuality: from his first poems to his last. 

From the early, mulatto student: "...that even the mezzanine shook at the sight of your shoulders..." "You broke out, and your bangs touched your weird bangs and your pixie lips..." 

From the latest: 

"Under a bramble with ivy, 

From bad weather we seek protection. 

Our shoulders are covered with a cloak, 

My arms are wrapped around you. 

I was wrong. The bushes of these thickets 

Not ivy, but hops. 

Well, you'd better give me that cloak. 

We'll spread it wide underneath us." 

At that time he was already an old man. But what love energy!" This envious exclamation of Katayev at the end, coming from the lips of a man who is by no means insensitive by nature, is remarkable. 

Pasternak's attitude to the material side of life in general can be considered a benchmark and an illustration of the functioning of the 3rd Physics. First, there is bifurcation. In his words, while he carefully downplayed the physical side of life, Pasternak, in fact, valued it most of all. Vsevolod Ivanov's wife recollected: "He liked the fact that the basis of our life, as he put it, was 'spirituality, not materiality'. Although he also valued materiality in the sense of everyday life. And above all, in his wife. Appreciated her economic efficiency. Appreciated that she did not disdain any physical work: washing windows, floors, working the garden. 

As is usually the case with "prudes", Pasternak had few things, but to this few things he had an almost pathological passion. Let us continue to quote the same source: "Boris Leonidovich was extremely unpretentious in clothes. But no matter how he was dressed, he looked fit and even elegant. 

He did not want to part with his old clothes, and Zinaida Nikolayevna had to falsely throw them away. 

One day Boris Leonidovich was very pleased with a gift from his stepson Stanislav Neuhaus, who brought him a light gray jacket from Paris, which Boris Leonidovich wore for a long time and with visible pleasure. 

From the point of view of outsiders, Pasternak had a strange predilection for physical labor, akin in this point to Tolstoy's Physics 3. 

"I'm at work earthy. 

I'll take my shirt off, 

And the heat will hit me in the back, 

And it burns like clay. 

The malignant Kataev looked at Pasternak's gardening weakness with different eyes and, suspecting the poet of posturing, wrote: "Here he stands in front of the dacha, in the potato field, wearing boots, pants, girt with a wide leather belt of an officer type, in a shirt with rolled up sleeves, leaning his foot on the shovel, which digs the loamy earth. This view is not at all confused with the idea of an exquisite modern poet... 

A mulatto in muddy boots, with a shovel in his tanned hands, seems to be dressed up. He is playing a role of some kind. Perhaps the role of the great exile, getting his daily bread by the toil of his hands." Forgive Kataev's rancor; his Third Function was different, so he could neither share nor understand Pasternak's weakness for the vegetable garden. 

Refined and refined in itself, Pasternak's 3rd Physics was characterized by a special supersharpness of sensory perception, allowing him to penetrate where it was impossible to penetrate, and to empathize with what it seemed beyond the power of human sensorics to empathize with: 

"I feel for them, for all of them, 

It was like being in their skin, 

I am melting myself, as the snow melts, 

I myself, like the morning, frown my eyebrows." 

And this is not a metaphor; in one early poem Pasternak describes how, when he sees a mosquito on his lover's blouse, he himself is that mosquito and feels its sting piercing the fabric and sinking into the pink poured breasts of the girl: 

"Mosquitoes stick to raspberries. 

However, the trunk is malarial, 

Right there, you big bastard, 

Where is the luxury of summer more rosy? 

To burrow an abscess through the blouse 

And take a picture of a red ballerina? 

Put the arrow of mischief in, 

Where's the blood, where's the wet leaves?" 

It is difficult for an outsider to imagine what such a thin-skinned man must have felt, having lived almost his entire life in a country ruled by the armored hand of the Bolshevik leviathan, where mass executions, torture, and hunger were perceived as natural and inevitable as bad weather. They say that when, in the early 1930s, the Soviet government came up with the idea of sending some writers through a starving country by train, Pasternak stood out from the whole clan of "engineers of human souls" on the train because he did not swallow a crumb of bread during the entire two-week trip. He couldn't. 

* * * 

"...compassion up to physical pain, sympathy full of sympathy, often followed by effective assistance. And at the same time there is a clear unintentional, unconscious, perhaps, detachment from everyday life, its worries and difficulties, its complete subordination to the art, eclipsing reality itself, which, however, it fed on," Pasternak's sister Josephine wrote, very precisely glimpsing one of the specific features of the "Pasternakovsky" psychotype. For all his talent for empathy, Physics is still in third place in "Pasternak's" system of values, while Emotion is in first place, and, naturally, when a choice is necessary, he always makes it in favor of emotional derivatives (literature, art, music, religion, mysticism), and his interests are concentrated there as well. 

"For him, any situation in life, any landscape he saw, any abstract thought immediately and, it seemed to me, automatically turned into a metaphor or a line of verse. He radiated poetry the way a heated physical body radiates infrared rays. 

One day our noisy company piled into a huge black car with a humpback trunk. The mulatto and I were squeezed into the deepest part of it, into its humpbacked ass. The car moved, and the mulatto, glistening squirrels, laughing, muttering something incomprehensible beforehand, shouted in my ear: "You and I are sitting in his very m o v e r!" - Kataev recounted. 

A life that is purely emotional, i.e., aestheticized and aestheticized, does not cancel the 1st Emotion from what it is. And she is a complete egoist, a gift to herself. Boris Pasternak's 1st Emotion was also exclusively occupied with itself and its own experiences. The unconcern, egocentrism, and addresslessness of his poetry, letters, and speeches often baffled readers and listeners, and it cost them great effort to decipher at least part of the interesting, unexpected, brilliant, but wild, blind, and dark torrent of words that fell upon them. Isaiah Berlin, after visiting Pasternak, wrote: "His speech consisted of magnificent, unhurried periods, sometimes turning into an indomitable verbal flow; and this flow often flooded the banks of grammatical structure - clear passages were replaced by wild, but always strikingly vivid and concrete images, and behind them could come words whose meaning was so dark that it was difficult to follow them..." 

Pasternak wrote: "...the artist's sensitivity and inspiration must be excessive," and thus once again confirmed the presence of the First Emotion in him. After all, redundancy, as has been repeatedly said, is the main feature of the First Function. 

* * * 

Very expressively revealed itself in everything Pasternak did and said, his Second Will. Here it is impossible not to recall the poet's famous telephone conversation with Stalin about Mandelstam's exile. Stalin liked to frighten citizens far from politics and power with his unexpected calls and often achieved the desired effect - severe mental shock. Pasternak was among the few who easily endured this shock, and even at the end of the conversation began to ask to visit Stalin to enlighten the tyrant, a naive soul. Fortunately for the poet, Stalin soon sensed where the conversation was heading and hastened to hang up. Later, when the time came for outside evaluations of this telephone duel, even such obviously biased arbiters as Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam rated Pasternak's behavior "a solid four. 

About other sympathetic traits of the 2nd Will, being Pasternak's personality, it is probably better to say in the language of people who knew him personally: "He was given a childlike simplicity, sometimes even disarming naivety, and sometimes due to excessive trust in people he even manifested weakness and credulity. He was characterized by childlike directness and ardor, but at the same time, the freshness and subtlety of feeling, sensitivity to people. He had developed this quality to an extreme over the years; he was always afraid of hurting his interlocutor, even involuntarily. Sometimes he did not want to make any decision for fear of offending someone, and then he would leave the decision to life itself. It was not out of cowardice or a desire to fit in, but out of benevolence, respect for the other. Inwardly, he was firm and unwavering... 

Boris Leonidovich was alien to prudence; he was incapable of vindictiveness, contempt, or vindictiveness. He was noble in himself: he was always glad to give his all, asking nothing for himself; he was always eternally grateful for the slightest service. He did not notice his grievances and sorrows in the constant renewal of his whole being, always responding with his heart and soul to everything that life could bring new. And he was always able to look at life, things and people in a new way - with the view of a poet striving for "all-conquering beauty", always ready to "give the way to the future". Life, things and people were constantly new to him. Marina Tsvetaeva could repeat in 1960 what she said in 1922; not Pasternak a child, but the world in him a child. 

Momentary snapshots of Pasternak's 2nd Will are abundantly scattered throughout his poetry as well: 

"Being famous isn't pretty..." 

"I wasn't born to do it three times. 

Look differently in the eyes..." 

"There are in the experience of great poets 

The traits of the naturalness of that one, 

Which is impossible, having experienced them, 

Not to end up completely dumb. 

In kinship with all that is, sure 

And knowing the future in everyday life, 

You can't help but fall into heresy by the end, 

Into unheard-of simplicity. 

. 

"All my life I wanted to be like everyone else, 

But a century in its glory 

Stronger than my whining. 

And wants to be like me." 

"Life, too, is only a moment. 

Only dissolution 

We ourselves in all other 

As if as a gift." 

* * * 

Pasternak's 4th Logic can also serve as a standard for all four Logics. A man who had received a double philosophical education in Russia and Germany, a student of the famous neo-Kantian Kogen, the teacher of the great Cassirer, Pasternak, having finished his studies, simply disconnected from the process of rational comprehension of existence and to the end of his days, good-naturedly ironizing, liked to say that to spend all his life on philosophy is the same as eating mustard all your life. And this phrase alone shows how much he neglected not only philosophy, but common sense as a whole. After all, a lifetime of self-imprisonment in literature, which he condemned himself to, is no better diet. But the 4th Logic is the 4th Logic, and Pasternak, having returned from Germany, threw off his reasoning, like a savage who escaped from the world of white men, throws off his tired tails at the edge of his native jungle and, inhaling the usual mixture of aromas of dead leaves and musk, returns to himself, again living only by instinct and intuition. 

* * * 

In addition to the chronic conflict with his time and power in Pasternak's soul another conflict lived permanently - a conflict with his native tribe and tribal religion. He himself spoke about it very cautiously, seldom and streamlined: "I was baptized as a baby by my nanny, but due to the restrictions against the Jews and moreover in a family that was spared from them and enjoyed some fame due to the artistic merits of my father, it caused some complications, and this fact has always remained an intimate semi-secret, the subject of rare and exceptional inspiration, rather than a quiet habit. 

Much harsher, more direct and unabashedly, Isaiah Berlin spoke about this mental wound of Pasternak: "Pasternak was a Russian patriot. He felt very deeply his historical connection to his homeland... A passionate, almost all-consuming desire to be considered a Russian writer, whose roots go deep into Russian soil, was especially evident in his negative attitude toward his Jewish origins. He did not want to discuss the issue-not that he was embarrassed, no, he just did not like it; he wanted the Jews to assimilate and as a people to disappear. Except for the closest family members, he was not interested in any relatives, past or present. He spoke to me as a believing (albeit in his own way) Christian. Any mention of Jews or Palestine, I noticed, hurt him..." 

To say that the conflict between blood, on the one hand, and profession and religion, on the other, was completely insurmountable in Pasternak's soul, is impossible. Not only is Judaism not an opponent of poetry, but it is actually based on it, recall the Psalter and the Song of Songs. And if he wished, Pasternak could have engaged in bilingual poetry, as many of his fellow Russian poets did. 

Religion was a different matter, and the problem was insoluble. Of course, if it were up to him, Pasternak, citing the arbitrariness of his babysitter and his own infant insanity, could have disowned his unconscious baptism. But this did not happen, and it did not happen because Pasternak was a true Christian. He was a Christian not by position, obligation, habit, tradition, but by heart. Simply put, Christ, as described by the Evangelist John, belonged to the "Pasternak. This, and only this, is the secret of Pasternak's insistence on confessing Christ; with Him Pasternak confessed himself above all. 

* * * 

When the occasion presents itself, one cannot but comment on the problem of the structure of the Fourth Gospel and its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth. 

First, the mystery and fascination of the Gospels is that they describe two psychotypes: the "fat man" in Matthew and the "parsnip" in John. In Scripture, the two Gospels of these apostles are polarized, and the task of the intermediate Gospels of Mark and Luke was to reconcile and smooth out, if possible, the contradictions of the extreme Gospels. Mark and Luke succeeded in this, and the result was a truly inhumanly multifaceted, polyphonic image of the founder of Christianity, recognizable by many in the mirror and therefore extremely attractive. Dostoevsky complained that, in his imitation of Christ, when painting the image of Prince Myshkin, he never really got close to the original. And no wonder, Myshkin is one-dimensional, just as his creator was one-dimensional, not knowing that the peerlessness of Christ's image lies in the collectivity of his sculpture. 

In the Evangelist Matthew, with his 1st Will, Christ the "fat" is strict, stern, tyrannical, jealous; the phrase thrown to the disciple who is sent to the funeral, "Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their dead," exhaustively characterizes the 1st Will of the Matthew Christ the "fat". Not only is this phrase absent from John the Evangelist, but in his Gospel the "parsnip" Christ does not use the imperative inclination at all. 

To which psychotype did the real Christ belong, the model seen through different prisms of different psychotypes of different Evangelists, it is impossible to say with certainty now. However, taking into account psyche-yoga, some corrections can be made to the evangelical and later descriptions of Christ. Most importantly, Matthew and John agree that the Savior had a 3rd Physic, clearly visible from his psychic abilities. And from this it follows that Christian art has hardly guessed the appearance of Christ, reproducing His features thin, shallow, to the point of being sugary beautiful, i.e. painting the 4th rather than the 3rd Physic. 

There is every reason to suppose that Christ was a short, stooped man, with a thin, nasal face, whose only ornamentation was the big, shiny, very expressive eyes characteristic of high-status Emotion. Moreover, it is more than likely that he had some large and very noticeable physical defect: something like a shrunken arm or leg. I deduce this from His psychic heightened perception and from the fact that His usual attraction to prostitutes, i.e., to women, an open, uninhibited, demonstrative sexuality, which is common in male 3rd Physics, never led Him to sin. Although Jesus obviously created all the prerequisites for sin himself, clearly preferring the society of harlots to all others. But. God was merciful and gracious most likely because fear was stronger than lust, which for a "parsnip" is only possible in the case of an objective, unconcealable failure of external data. 

* * * 

"Pasternak belongs to that rare type of people who, despite a strong 2nd Will, studiously avoid a political career. Only chance can push him into politics, as it did not happen to the joy of Boris Pasternak himself at the end of his long-suffering life. 

It is most likely that only fate made another "pasternak's" political career, the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, founder of the Antoninus dynasty, fervently loved by the Romans and father-in-law and stepfather of Marcus Aurelius (see "Lao-tzu"). The incredible, almost miraculous forms that even absolute power acquires in the tender, affectionate hands of the "parsnip" can be seen in the excerpts from Antoninus Pius's biography placed below: "He distinguished himself by his appearance, was famous for his good manners, was distinguished by his noble charity, had a quiet expression, possessed extraordinary gifts, brilliant eloquence, excelled in literature, was sober, diligently engaged in cultivating the fields, was gentle, generous, did not encroach on others' things, - for all this he had a great sense of proportion and lack of all conceit... He was nicknamed "Pius" (The Pious One) by the Senate ... because he was by nature very merciful indeed and did not commit a single act of cruelty during his reign... 

His first utterance in his new position, it is said, was this: when his wife began to reproach him for showing little generosity to his own on some occasion, he said to her: "Foolish, after we have been called to run the empire, we have also lost what we had before...." 

As emperor, he accorded the senate the respect which he would have liked to have accorded to him by another emperor when he was a private man.... Neither in respect of the provinces nor in respect of any other matters did he pass any judgment without having first spoken to his friends, and he formulated his decisions in accordance with their opinions. His friends saw him in the garb of a private man, in the midst of his domestic affairs. 

He governed the nations subject to him with great care, guarding everyone and everything, as if they were his property. During his reign all the provinces prospered. The troublemakers disappeared.... 

...No one before him had such authority with foreign nations, although he always loved peace to such an extent that he often repeated the words of Scipio, who said that it was better to preserve the life of one citizen than to kill a thousand enemies... 

Among the many other proofs of his warmth of heart is this: when Marcus (Marcus Aurelius) mourned the death of his tutor and the court servants persuaded him not to show his feelings openly, the emperor said: "Allow him to be human; for neither philosophy nor imperial power deprive a man of the ability to feel..." 

He is perhaps the only sovereign who lived without shedding, as far as he was concerned, the blood of citizens or enemies, and he is justly compared to Numa, whose happiness, piety, peaceful life, and sacred actions were his permanent possessions. 

It is true, reading this, one cannot help believing in miracles: how at almost the same time as Christ, in a state that had made cannibalism, debauchery, and arbitrariness a tradition, absolute power could be in the hands of a man of such high morality that it is difficult to find an analogue even in our enlightened and humane age. 

The length of quotations during the stories about the lives of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius (see "Lao-tzu") was aimed not only to draw in as much detail as possible a psychological portrait of representatives of these types who found themselves at the top of the state pyramid, but also to partially restore historical justice. After all, everyone knows about Nero and Caligula - the worst representatives of the imperial power of Rome, while few people know about its best representatives - the first Antoninas. And it is not a sin at all to remind once again about such remarkable people. Finally, the example of the lives of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius suggests another idea, so far not trivial, that the political system itself does not decide much in the life of society; the decisive word belongs to the people who stand at its head. 

* * * 

The type of "Pasternak," strange as it may seem, is not so rare in the human race. One can even speak of entire peoples in whom the share of "Pasternaks" happened to be so significant as to be able to color the physiognomy of the national psychology in their own, "Pasternak-like" way. To such peoples, I think, first of all, should be attributed the Jews, Armenians and Roma. There seems to be no need to prove that the excessive 1st Emotion dominates in these ethnic groups and that they are highly artistic natures, too. Jews, Armenians, Gypsies - people are freedom-loving, independent and even in diaspora do not tend to lose their individuality (2nd Will). Their 3rd Physics is clearly indicated by greedy fertility, almost pathological childbearing and hypersexuality, combined with extreme sensitivity in matters of sex (virginity, fidelity, etc.). 

So, no matter how Pasternak and Christ treated their countrymen, they themselves were the psychotypical salt of their nation.