Myth - Tragedy - Mystery in Boris Pasternak's Poem “Hamlet”

The article analyses the figurative and semantic interactions of the genre paradigms of myth, tragedy and mystery in the poetics of Boris Pasternak's poem “Hamlet”. The study uses a systematic approach to the text, taking into account its contextual links with the cycle Poems by Yuri Zhivago and the novel Doctor Zhivago. The tragic contexts in “Hamlet” are actualised directly by referring to the semantic field of Shakespeare's tragedy via the poem's title, which acquires a conceptualising character for the whole work. Through the prism of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the fate of Yuri Zhivago is read as certainly tragic, and the main events of fate acquire “fatal” overtones. Like Hamlet, Yuri Zhivago is burdened with a high “tragic blame”, caused by a fatal mismatch between the hero's internal ideal aspirations and the ambivalent possibility / impossibility of their realisation in the the “historical” reality given to him by the fate. Both myth and mystery are included in the figurative-semantic paradigm of the poem through the semantic space of the Gospel text manifested through reminiscences, allusions, symbolic and iconic images. Central in this series is the image of the Agony in the Garden. It generates the parallel between Hamlet and Christ and the triad of Hamlet, Christ, and Zhivago. In this gospel episode, Pasternak discovers the semantic mutual reflections of myth, tragedy and mystery, because the tragic contradiction experienced by the hero finds a mythological and mysterious denouement. The study leads to the following conclusions. Initially, Hamlet enters the world of the poem as the hero of the tragedy, and Christ of the evangelical myth and genre-invariant mystery, but in the consciousness of the binary Zhivago-Pasternak author, all three heroes, including Zhivago himself, are explicated as subjects of consciousness of all three genre worlds living in dialogical mutual reflections: myth - tragedy - mystery, that is, they are thought as heroes of a single genre-story paradigm that constructively organises the inner semantic architectonics of the work.

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