Ti sono già venute le parole? Silenzi, corpi e contaminazioni nell’Infanzia di Ljuvers di Boris Pasternak

This article is based on the idea that poetry is, as Pasternak notes, the ‘language of organic fact’ and retraces the path of such a poetic word in his short novel Detstvo Liuvers (The Childhood of Liuvers). An attempt will be made to view Zhenia Liuvers not as a ‘principle of femininity’, but rather as one side of an essential comparison with an embodied alterity. I will use a semiotic framework to highlight Zhenia’s relationship with different zones of alterity, particularly the body. This will provide an insight into an arc of perceptive, expressive and moral developments that begins in the magical realm of childhood and concludes at a need to blend with an infi nitely interconnected reality if it is to regenerate.