Boris Pasternak and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (about Pasternak’s Poem The Starry River of a Week Ago)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Boris Pasternak’s poem The Starry River of a Week Ago (1917) is a description of the creation process and a reflection on the nature of this process. To support this view, attention will be drawn to some significant sets of images and themes in this text that are found also in a group of five poems by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, in which ice-skating functions as a metaphor of creation. These poems will give rise to a specific tradition within German poetry where ice-skating is symbolic of both the rapture and the risk of inspiration. In the last part of the paper it will be shown that, although there is no evidence of Pasternak’s acquaintance with Klopstock’s poetry, his thorough knowledge of German language and literature leaves little doubt about this acquaintance. Moreover, it is possible to find a number of affinities in the way of thinking of these two writers.

Le mélange du sacré et du profane dans les livrets de tragédies lyriques du librettiste Nicolas-François Guillard (1752-1814)

Nicolas François Guillard (1752-1814) was one of the best librettists of the Tournant des Lumières. The libretto of Proserpine by Quinault, set to music by Lully at the end of the seventeenth century, was adapted by Guillard and once again set to music by Giovanni Paisiello in 1803. Six years later, in 1809, La Mort d’Adam, adapt-ed by Guillard from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’ Der Tod Adams (1757), was set to music by Jean-François Lesueur. These rewritings, with religious or sacred topics staged for a secular theatre by Guillard, are very different from the original works and tend to be family dramas: he then transforms them into secular works with secular content. Human sacrifices are present in these works but seem to feature here for family reasons and not only for religious purposes. Divinities are presented by the librettist as human beings, whose family roles are predominant. The sacred and the profane are mixed in these two librettos, changed into hybrid works. Guillard seems to use the same model to adapt historical, mythological or religious works, which means that the role and the impor-tance of the religious in the works staged at the Académie Impériale de Musique in the period of the Tournant des Lumières has to be examined.