Santi, Amleti e Maddalene. L’energia del Nome nel “Dottor Živago” di Boris Pasternak

Abstract

Beneath an apparently traditional and realistic structure, Boris Pasternak’s opera summa is a strongly symbolic novel whose plot develops through suggestion and epiphany. The Name is one of the privileged modes which expresses the book’s archetypal substance. Pasternak is at ease in the world of onomastics, because he is the interpreter of two great traditions that are intertwined in his person: on the one hand, onomatodoxy, name-worship (imeslavie) and the discussions on the Name of God and on the other, the mythological school with its twentieth-century precursors (the Marrism that so much influenced Olga Frejdenberg, Pasternak’s cousin to whom he was very close).The paper focuses in particular on Hamlet (a fundamental figure in the Pasternakian imagination), on Saint George (after whom the protagonist Jury Živago is named) and Magdalene, whose reverberation spreads throughout the novel and bridges the gap between the heroine Lara and the poet Marina Cvetaeva.