“Reconstructing Sensible Experience” as an Imperative of Thought. Reflections on Boris Pasternak’s Poetic Experience

Abstract

I suggest that the quote used in the title — the words of Valery Alexandrovich Podoroga — should be seen as an invitation to a certain thought procedure, without which it is probably impossible to fully understand the tasks that the Mimesis project or, more broadly, the analytical anthropology of literature sets for itself. The paper examines whether it is possible to transfer certain analytical strategies developed in Mimesis into the domain of poetic expression. Therefore, I seek to understand Pasternak's poetic experience as, first of all, sensible experience, i. e. the one based on the primary structure of impressions and emotional, bodily-unconscious reactions that determine his relation to the world. The first part of the paper formulates the criteria under which Pasternak's poetry is likely to become the object of the proposed analytical strategy: the problem of time, Pasternak's peculiar Bergsonism, and the poet’s attitude to poetic language and, above all, to metaphor as an instrument of knowledge. The second part of the article deals with Pasternak's first prose sketches, where I discuss the idea of "will-to-a-form" and its subsequent removal, or better "displacement by feeling," — a strategy described by Pasternak himself as underlying his poetic imagery.