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Boris Pasternak's "August": Analyzing the Poet's Most Personal Gospel Poem

The hero of the poem sees his own funeral in a dream. A terrifying dream where death, in the guise of a land surveyor, digs a grave for a new corpse. However, in a paradoxical way, this poem about death suddenly becomes a piercingly confessional text about how the end of a person's earthly existence is by no means the end of their life.

In the "50 Great Poems" project, we discuss a masterpiece of Boris Pasternak's late lyricism—the poem "August."

Boris Pasternak. August.

As it promised, without deceiving,

The sun penetrated early in the morning

In a slanted stripe of saffron

From the curtain to the sofa.

It covered with hot ochre

The neighboring forest, the village houses,

My bed, my damp pillow,

And the edge of the wall behind the bookshelf.

I remembered the reason why

The pillow was slightly moistened.

I dreamed that for my farewell

You were coming through the forest, one after another.

You came in a crowd, separately and in pairs,

When suddenly someone remembered that today

Is the sixth of August by the old calendar,

The Transfiguration of the Lord.

Usually, light without flame

Issues from Tabor on this day,

And autumn, clear as a sign,

Draws all eyes toward itself.

And you passed through the small, beggarly,

Naked, trembling alder grove

Into the ginger-red cemetery forest,

Burning like a printed gingerbread.

With its hushed treetops,

The sky stood in solemn proximity,

And with rooster-like voices,

The distance echoed long and far.

In the forest, as a state land surveyor,

Death stood amidst the graveyard,

Staring into my dead face,

To dig a grave my size.

Someone's calm voice nearby

Was physically palpable to all.

It was my former prophetic voice

Sounding, untouched by decay:

"Farewell, Transfiguration azure

And the gold of the second Savior,

Soften with a final feminine grace

The bitterness of my fateful hour.

Farewell, years of the era of stagnation,

Let us part, O abyss of humiliations,

Woman who throws down a challenge!

I am the field of your battle.

Farewell, the spread wing's reach,

The free persistence of flight,

And the image of the world, revealed in the word,

And creativity, and miracle-working."

1953

Author

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) was a poet, prose writer, translator, and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature (1958) for the novel "Doctor Zhivago."

"August" and the novel "Doctor Zhivago"

"August" is part of the cycle "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago." This cycle of 25 lyrical texts constitutes the final, seventeenth chapter of the novel "Doctor Zhivago," which Pasternak worked on from 1945 to 1955.

Most of the poems in the cycle, supposedly written by the main character, are linked to key Gospel events. Pasternak's recourse to biblical themes transforms a book about the "life of one doctor" into a novel about the constant presence of the Divine Word in the human soul.

Most of Pasternak's "biblical" poems are dedicated to the events of Holy Week. In "August," however, the poet turns to the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ.

Each poem from Zhivago's notebook usually corresponds to specific prosaic episodes in the novel. But with "August," it is more complicated: it is not easy to find a specific fragment of the book that matches this poem both figuratively and thematically. This is why, in Pasternak studies, this text has earned the title of the "most Pasternakian" of all Yuri Zhivago's notebooks, although "Gethsemane Garden" is considered the final and key poem for understanding the novel itself.

The Dream-Poem

The lyrical hero wakes from a heavy dream; there are tears on his pillow. He has just seen his own death and funeral as if it were real. But strikingly—in the dream he is being buried, yet he is simultaneously dead and alive!

All the loved ones at the grave hear the "untouched by decay" voice of the soul. And this is not a figure of speech—they physically feel this voice. The vision of what seems to be the absolute end of a person turns into a vision of... the continuation of life. But why does this continuation bring no relief? Where do the tears on the pillow come from?

The mourners at the funeral hear the deceased's verses. His creativity, his word, remains after him in earthly life; it continues to sound in the mortal human world, to serve people, and to turn their souls toward Beauty. But does the author gain the fullness of immortality because of this? Does he feel the joy of a completely different existence?...

Yes, he observes his own funeral. Yes, he sees that his word is alive for people. But all of this is as if from afar, from behind an insurmountable transparent wall—let his poems be heard, but he himself can no longer return to the abandoned world. It is a moment of powerless despair, fear, and abandonment: he has not died, but his former earthly life is forever closed to him. To the sky, the trees, even to his own poems that outlive him—to "creativity and miracle-working"—he can say only one thing: farewell. And to repeat this word in tears again and again.

However, if there is no return to the past, does that mean there is no hope? Is "farewell" merely a word of parting, or is it also a word of one departing toward a new Encounter?

The Awakening-Poem

Pasternak places these events, filled with pain and tragedy, on a very specific (he even indicates the date!) and very unusual day—the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord.

On this day, the Church remembers how Jesus Christ, ascending Mount Tabor in Galilee on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, revealed to His disciples Peter, James, and John the light of His Divine Glory emanating from His face and clothing: The Savior "was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white as the light" (Matthew 17:1-9). Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh spoke of this Gospel episode: "At that moment, the Divine light broke through, enveloped His entire essence, and His human nature, which had surrendered itself entirely to the Living God unto death, shone in response."

In the transfiguration of the Savior's human nature, Christians see a prototype of humanity attaining a new state of grace after the second coming of Christ and the general resurrection. The glory of the Transfiguration is the lot of all people who will enter eternity with the Savior and share with Him the joy of the Kingdom of God. The Feast of the Transfiguration is a feast of hope. Hope that after earthly existence, we will find ourselves where there is no pain, no sense of separation or doom, where we will find the absolute fullness of life.

The hero of the poem already receives in his dream a certain experience of the sensation of life continuing—through his creativity, which remains in the earthly world after his death.

And yet, this sensation is still permeated with a "human, too human" longing; it is not yet death, but it is not yet a new life either—it is merely a distant semblance of that true Eternity toward which he strives on the day of the Transfiguration, having said "farewell" three times. To creativity and miracle-working.

It is interesting to compare this with a stanza from "Gethsemane Garden," where the Savior Himself says farewell to miracle-working in order to die and rise again:

He gave it up without struggle,

As one gives up things borrowed,

Omnipotence and miracle-working,

And was now like mortals, like us.

Note also that although "August" ends with a farewell, we, the readers, already know that after these words, the hero... woke up alive on a pillow moistened with tears. And after waking, he saw that the light of the August sun had penetrated his room.

The Icon-Poem

The image of heavenly light, endowing the earthly world with extraordinary, unearthly colors, is very important in this poem. The entire palette of "August" is iconographic. Saffron, hot ochre, ginger-red forest, gold, and azure—Pasternak sought to convey through colors and hues that "light without flame" that we can observe in icons of the Transfiguration. Note that these are exactly the colors icon painters use to obtain golden Divine light: "Take Constantinople ochre, grind it, add a little saffron, and with this mixture, cover everything you wish to gild. After this, apply red poliment to the convexity of the patterns..."

Transfiguration Again and Again

The Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord has always been a special day for Pasternak. Even in childhood, in the summer of 1903, on the day of the Transfiguration, the future poet fell from a horse and almost died: a skilled doctor managed to prevent a serious inflammation that had begun in the boy. In 1913, ten years later, Pasternak, remembering his fall and the proximity of death, admitted that the helplessness and immobility he experienced contributed to the awakening of the "taste for creativity" in his soul. He considered his miraculous salvation on the day of the Transfiguration to be his personal transfiguration, a new birth, a moment of the awakening of his creative gift.

And so, 50 years after his adolescent salvation, in 1953, Pasternak turns to this day again and writes a poem dedicated to the Transfiguration. "August" was created by Pasternak during a period of highest tension of his spiritual and creative forces. This poem became a true revelation for the poet and his lyrical hero, who here simultaneously contemplates his past life and "prophetically" strives toward the future, toward eternal life.

Literature used:

- Collected Works of B.L. Pasternak in 11 volumes (Vol. 4, "Doctor Zhivago");

- Evdokimova E.A. "Death and Transfiguration in the Poetry of B. Pasternak";

- Poems "August" and "In the Hospital";

- Miroshnichenko O.S. "B. Pasternak's Poem 'August' as a Space of Genre Struggle";

- Lileeva A.G. "From the Experience of Reading Poems from Boris Pasternak's Novel 'Doctor Zhivago' ('August')";

- "Icon. Secrets of the Craft";

- Vlasov A.S. "The Gift of the Living Spirit. B. Pasternak's Poems 'August' and 'Parting' in the Context of the Novel 'Doctor Zhivago'."