Chapter 82 Section 4 Personal Commitment to the Times: "Pasternak"

The former Soviet poet Pasternak is the object of Wang Jiaxin's singing and talking in this poem in order to achieve "a kind of silent intimacy in the soul".Before analyzing the poetry itself, it is best to understand the poet first: Pasternak was originally a modern poet who focused on his inner experience, but after the founding of the Soviet Union, he was gradually deprived of the right to write freely. After being silent, he published a novel in the late 1950s, and was again severely criticized by the country because he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After that, he had to succumb to this authoritarian pressure until his death.Obviously, the image of Pasternak in this poem is strongly smeared with the subjective color of the poet Wang Jiaxin. In his words, compared with other poets in the Soviet autocratic era, Pasternak , he "lived longer, withstood longer difficult years,... he is more of a 'bearer'" [8]. However, his life is not to make peace in the dark ages, but to maintain his own The belief and conscience of the dead will bear more pain and pressure than the dead.

In the poem "Pasternak"[9], Wang Jiaxin described the poet's situation and spirit in this way: "The corners of your mouth are more silent, that is//The secret of fate, you can't tell/It's just Endure, suffer, let the marks under the pen deepen/in order to obtain, give up/in order to live, you ask yourself to die, die completely". , those souls / those souls that met in the tremors of the Mass / those sparkles in death, and my / / Own land! The tears in the eyes of the northern cattle / maple leaves burning in the wind / the darkness and hunger in the stomachs of the people ..." The only choice in the face of suffering is to bear it.Pasternak can only hold on to his Russia if he endures a crazier blizzard, and the result is no longer suffering. "This is happiness, the highest law rising from the bottom of my heart". The poem itself is clear He expressed these intentions clearly, and said all he could say, which was shocking in China in the early 1990s.So this poem was widely read as soon as it was published. It recognized the image of suffering in an era with personal wisdom and sadness, and then established a noble standard of existence that requires suffering and facing the soul.

Perhaps the latter is the more fundamental impulse that compelled Wang Jiaxin to write this poem.This measure of existence was given by Pasternak: "This is you, you found me/tested me from disaster after disaster, and made my life suddenly painful"; "It's not suffering, it's you who finally bear These / still irresistible, come to seek us / / discover us: it is asking for a symmetry / or a requiem more stirring than an echo"; "this is the sadness, inquiry and interrogation of your eyes / It is like a bell, oppressing my soul". It is very obvious that the personalization in this poem emphasizes not withdrawing from the times, nor is it escaping responsibility for the times and absolute rebellion against tradition, but It appears as the inevitable encounter between man and the world, as an individual's active continuation of the past human spirit, and by virtue of his own existence, he bears all the pressure of human destiny and the life of the times.In this sense, Pasternak is actually a spiritual symbol. He is the spiritual height that Wang Jiaxin stands for himself and his contemporaries, in order to reflect on himself and cleanse the fog in his mind.

It is through this commitment that the individual becomes truly individual.It means saying goodbye to the boom and bustle of fashion, and piercing through frivolous words and deeds in order to insist on a principle that really belongs to the inner conscience, but also to the whole of humanity.The embodiment of this principle in poetry is that although one cannot live according to one's heart, one must write according to one's own heart.This also means that this poem reveals another revelation from Pasternak, which is the writing that sticks to the heart: "From the vast haze, not only the inspiration of Russia, but also the poetry itself is revealed. Come to me: it once again constitutes my judgment..." [10] It should be said that this poem does provide a poetic scale, writing is a specific form of personal commitment to the times, borrowing Wang Jiaxin himself in In the words written elsewhere, writing is "a way of connecting yet fundamentally different from our contemporaries." As for the internalizing aspect of writing, it means "turning a lifelong solitude into labor." [11]. This is actually the portrayal of Pasternak in his poems. He is always sung as a poet who writes according to his inner conscience. He rejects the noise of the world with his silent mouth. And into the loneliness and sadness of the spiritual world.The affectionate chanting of this image in the poem is also the confirmation and internal restraint of the poet's own individual existence.

The artistic achievement of the poem "Pasternak" is mainly considered to be the creation of a "deep image".This means that it maintains a simple and direct way of expression throughout the text, with few rhetoric that needs special interpretation, and no decorative images floating on the surface of the language. All words are used to create an inner feeling. The imagery, that is, all the content mentioned above.This is fundamentally a kind of writing according to the heart: the impulse to express all comes from the purest and most internalized requirements of the poet. Notes:

[1] Quoted from Chen Sihe's "Common Name and No Name", included in "Chen Sihe's Selected Works", Guangxi Normal University Press, 1997 edition, p. 139. [2] Quoted from Li Zhensheng's "Seasonal Rotation", Xuelin Publishing House, 1996 edition, p. 34. [3] See the preface of Chen Sihe's "Selected Novels Approaching the End of the Century (Volume 2)", included in "The Collection of Dog Geng", Shanghai Far East Publishing House, 1996 edition; "The World in Fragments", included in "Written in Midnight", Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1996 year edition.

[4], first published in the first issue of "Shanghai Literature" in 1991. [5] See Zhang Xinxing: "Normal Mind and Extraordinary Mind--On Shi Tiesheng", included in "Dwelling and Nomadic Land", Xuelin Publishing House, 1994 edition. [6] "Uncle's Story", first published in No. 6, 1990. [7] Quoted from Wang Anyi's "Recent Creation Talk", included in "Traveling by Train", China Overseas Chinese Publishing House, 1995 edition, p. 39. [8] Quoted from Wang Jiaxin's "Answering Forty Questions", included in "Swimming Cliff", Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, 1997 edition, pp. 205-206.

[9] "Pasternak" is included in Wang Jiaxin's collection of poems "Swimming on the Cliff", p. 64. [10] Ibid., p. 206. [11] Quoted from Wang Jiaxin's "Who Is Among Us", included in "The Nightingale in Its Own Time", Oriental Publishing Center, 1997 edition, p. 67.