Discourse structure of the epic poem “Lofty malady” by B.L. Pasternak

The article deals with analyze narrative and performative structure of B.L. Pasternak's epic poem “Lofty Malady” (1928) and determine their correlations. The poem has weakened storylines, but explicit episodisation, that permits to describe this art work as the narrative. Moreover, two key characteristics of the non-canonical epic poem, such as “dual-worldness of the character” and “the character as subject and object of description” are revealed. Due to the border situation, in which the character is found, the narrative poem presents the “liminal” model of narrative. The manner of the narrator-character is closely connected with the problem of identity in the time of social and political upheaval. The hero's reflections on the fate of intelligentsia in the post-revolutionary society can also include lyric poetry, the metaphor for which is “lofty malady”. In particular, due to the identification of the hero-narrator and lyric poetry, which is demonstrated in the lines “I am a guest and - all over the world - / This is the lofty malady”, the poem turns into an auto-metadescription of lyric poetry. In the lines about Lenin's speech, which were inserted into the second edition (1928), one of the performative strategies of lyric poetry, an odic one, but in its inverted form, can be traced. Furthermore, “eternality” as the temporal vector of ode is combined with the impressionistic “momentariness”, encompassing within itself the performative of praise. Thus, on the material of what the hero-narrator has witnessed, he contemplates about two opposite modes of lyric poetry (“eternality” and “momentariness”). From the perspective of discourse structures, this study emphasizes that in the narrative poem performative effects occur against the background of the narrative, on the one hand, and by actualization of genre strategies of lyric poetry, on the other.