Between utopia and tragedy: the convergence of Faustian motif of “homunculus” and the key images of the novel “Doctor Zhivago” by B. Pasternak

Abstract

The purpose of study is to identify the semantic and figurative parallels of the second part of Goethe’s “Faust” and B.L. Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”. The subject of study is the influence of Goethe’s text on the text of Pasternak, who started writing the novel simultaneously with the completion of Faust translation. The relevance of study is due to the significant interest of Russian literary criticism in translations performed by poets and prose writers of the 20th century and, in this regard, the study of conscious and unconscious intertextual dialogue penetrating into the author’s work of writers-translators. Using the comparative-historical and structural-semantic method, the “double optics” of writing “Doctor Zhivago” is revealed: the novel was created under the influence of the mystical text of the second part of Faust encrypted by the author and, in a certain sense, is a continuation of Faust on Russian soil. We prove that the two texts have homologous key themes: the theme of new people, revealed by Goethe in the images of Euphorion and the homunculus, Pasternak – in the images of the heroes of the novel by Yuri Zhivago and Pavel Antipov. We formulate semantic parallels between the image of the homunculus and the understanding of the Russian revolution as a whole: it is proved that reading the text “through Goethe” is a fruitful semantic key to Pasternak’s text.