Boris Pasternak's last work, his unfinished play metatext
: Pasternak's comments on his plans for the
play, which he related to his son, E. B. Pasternak, to Olga Carlisle,
and, in briefer form, to others in correspondence and
conversation. Aware that he might be unable to finish the play,
Pasternak was apparently eager to convey its intended contents and
some hint of its symbolic structure to trusted listeners. He told
Carlisle that the blinded serf woman who gives the play its title is
of course symbolic of Russia, oblivious for so long of its own
beauty, of its own destinies.
In attempting to recreate the atmosphere of the nineteenth century, in which the action of the play takes place, Pasternak refers to literary sources mainly from the Romantic era and later evocations of it: one sees hints of Pu&shachek;kin (Mossman), Gogol&soft; (Hayward, Mossman), German Romantic-era writers (Carlisle), and closer literary predecessors Blok and Belyj, who also draw on earlier traditions. Indeed, according to Christopher Barnes and E. Pasternak, these Symbolists provided the inspiration for the play's title, in their literary homage to what Belyj perceived as the Gogolian image of Russia as Sleeping Beauty.
Here we see a hint at another source of inspiration for Pasternak's
late-life play: composer Petr Il&soft;i&chachek; &Chachek;ajkovskij,
references to whom in Pasternak's work have been examined to some
degree by Platek, Schreiner, Fischer, and particularly Kac. The
creator of the famous ballet, whose heroine falls under a spell from
which she is freed by love, wrote a much less well-received opera
about a woman in a different kind of bondage: trilogy
although the literary evidence does not support
that characterization, are reminiscent of operatic drama, while the
domestic setting of much of the play recalls &Chachek;ajkovskij's
chamber
settings in all this is very melodramatic, but I think that theatre should
be emotional, colorful &ellipsis;
; in writing a theatrical
work, he looked toward one of the great masters of Romantic opera in
Russia for inspiration.