Zinaida’s antipathy towards the Mandelstams would have incensed Boris and caused further rifts between them. Boris’s belief in his destiny at this time gave him a certain fearlessness that Zinaida could not begin to match. She later admitted: ‘no one could know on whose head the rock would fall and yet he showed not an ounce of fear’.
On 28 October 1937, Boris’s friend and neighbour at Peredelkino, Boris Pilnyak, was arrested by the secret police. His typewriter and the manuscript of his new novel were confiscated and his wife arrested. The NKVD report implicated Boris too: ‘Pasternak and Pilnyak held secret meetings with [the French author André] Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book attacking the USSR.’ In April, after a trial lasting just fifteen minutes, Pilnyak was condemned to death and executed. His final words to the court after months of imprisonment were: ‘I have so much work to do. A long period of seclusion has made me a different person; I now see the world through new eyes. I want to live, to work, to see in front of me paper on which to write a work that will be of use to the Soviet people.’
Another of Pasternak’s friends, the playwright A. N. Afinogenov, who had been expelled from the Communist Party and from the Writers’ Union for daring to criticise the dictatorship through his work, was abandoned by all his friends except Boris. On 15 November he wrote: ‘Pasternak is going through a hard time now; he has constant quarrels with his wife. She tries to make him attend all the meetings; she says he doesn’t think about his children, and his reserved behaviour seems suspicious and he will be arrested if he continues to be aloof.’
Pasternak confided to the literary scholar and critic Anatoly Tarasenkov in 1939: ‘In those horrendous, blood-stained years anyone might have been arrested. We were shuffled like a pack of cards. I have no wish to give thanks, in a philistine way, for remaining alive while others did not. There is a need for someone to show grief, to go proudly into mourning, to react tragically – for someone to be tragedy’s standard bearer.’
In spite of unimaginable pressures, Pasternak stayed true to himself in his professional life. His loyalty to his friends was unwavering. Osip Mandelstam was again arrested in 1938 and eventually died in the gulag. The only person to visit Mandelstam’s widow after his death was Boris. ‘Apart from him no one had dared to come and see me,’ said Nadezhda.
It is almost miraculous that Pasternak was not exiled or killed during these years. Why did Stalin save his ‘cloud dweller’? Another quirk that may have saved the writer’s life was that Stalin believed the poet had prescient powers, some sort of second sight.
In the early hours of 9 November 1932, Stalin’s wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, committed suicide. At a party the previous evening, a drunken Stalin had flirted in front of the long-suffering Nadya and had publicly diminished her. That night, when she heard rumours that her husband was with a lover, she shot herself in the heart.
The death certificate, signed by compliant doctors, said that the cause of death was appendicitis (as suicide could not be acknowledged). Soviet ritual required collective letters of grief from different professions. Almost the whole of the literary establishment – thirty-three writers – signed a formal letter of sympathy to Stalin. Pasternak refused to add his name to it. Instead, he wrote his own letter in which he hinted that he shared some mythical communion with Stalin, empathising with his motives, emotions and presumed sense of guilt.
In his letter, Boris wrote: ‘I share the feelings of my comrades. On the evening before, I found myself thinking deeply and continually about Stalin for the first time from the point of view of an artist. In the morning I read the news, and I was shaken just as if I had been present, and as though I had lived through it, as though I had seen it all.’ It appears that Stalin may well have believed that Pasternak was a ‘poet-seer’ who had prophetic powers. According to the émigré scholar Mikhail Koryakov, writing in the American Russian-language newspaper Novy Zhurnal: ‘from that moment onwards … it seems to me, Pasternak, without realising it, entered the personal life of Stalin and became some part of his inner world’.
As neither Pasternak nor an increasingly nervous Zinaida could have known about this golden protection from on high, that he continued to work on Doctor Zhivago, drafting the structure throughout the mid-thirties, seems almost to be a further act of literary suicide. Looking back, he explained to the Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval: ‘Following the October Revolution things were very bad for me. I wanted to write about this. A book in prose about how bad things were. A straightforward and simple narrative. You understand, sometimes a man must force himself to stand on his head.’
Pasternak forced himself to stand on his head yet again in 1937 when the Writers’ Union asked him to sign a joint letter endorsing the death sentence of a high-ranking official plus several other prominent military figures on charges of espionage. Pasternak refused. Incensed, he told the union: ‘the lives of people are disposed of by the government, not by private individuals. I know nothing about them [the accused]. How can I wish their death? I did not give them life. I can’t be their judge. I prefer to perish together with the crowd, with the people. This is not like signing complimentary tickets to the theatre.’ Pasternak then penned a letter to Stalin: ‘I wrote that I had grown up in a family where Tolstoyan convictions were very strong. I had imbibed them with my mother’s milk, and he could dispose of my life. But I did not consider I was entitled to sit in judgement over the life and death of others.’
Tensions now erupted with Zinaida, who argued with Boris and urged him to sign the Writers’ Union letter, fearing the consequences for their family if he did not. His adherence to his beliefs made him seem selfish in her eyes. Zinaida was pregnant, which sadly did not seem cause for great celebration at the time. Their marriage was struggling due to their extreme ideological differences and to the political pressures of the times. When Boris first learned of Zinaida’s pregnancy, he wrote to his parents that her ‘present condition is entirely unexpected, and if abortion weren’t illegal, we’d have been dismayed by her insufficiently joyful response to the event, and she’d have had the pregnancy terminated.’ Zinaida later wrote that she very much wanted, ‘Boria’s child’, but her acute fear that Boris could be arrested at any moment made it hard to carry the pregnancy. So convinced was Zinaida that Boris was likely to be arrested at any moment that she had even packed a small suitcase for this emergency.
‘My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn’t,’ wrote Boris. ‘That day I examined the pros and cons of my own survival. I was convinced I would be arrested – my turn had come. I was prepared for it. I abhorred all this blood and I couldn’t stand it any longer. But nothing happened. I was later told that my colleagues had saved me – at least indirectly. Quite simply no one dared to report to the hierarchy that I hadn’t signed.’
It offers insight into his bullish mentality that, fully aware that he might be shot or seized that night, Pasternak wrote: ‘We expected that I would be arrested that night. But, just imagine, I went to bed and at once fell into a blissful sleep. Not for a long time had I slept so well and peacefully. This always happens to me after I have taken some irrevocable step.’
On 15 June Pasternak saw his signature displayed on the front page of the Literaturnaya Gazeta, along with those of forty-three other writer colleagues. He rushed from Peredelkino to Moscow to protest to the secretariat of the Writers’ Union about the unauthorised inclusion of his signature, but by then the heat had gone and no one took much notice. Again, against his better instincts, he had been saved.
Boris’s dear friend Titsian Tabidze was not so lucky. After his early morning arrest on 11 October 1937, he had been charged with treason, sent to the gulag and tortured. He was executed two months later, though no announcement was made at the time. It was not until after Stalin’s death in the mid-1950s that the truth emerged. Boris mourned his friend keenly, remaining loyal to Titsian�
�s wife, Nina, and daughter Nita. All through the 1940s, when they all prayed that Titsian was alive somewhere in Siberia, Boris assisted the family financially, sending them all the royalties from his translations of Georgian poetry and regularly inviting them to stay at Peredelkino. Titsian’s crime was similar to Pasternak’s. He had written with conscience about Russia, and been openly defiant at a time when literary modernity was crushed by the Soviet state. After an attack on Titsian in the press, Boris had urged him in a letter: ‘Rely only on yourself. Dig more deeply with your drill without fear or favour, but inside yourself, inside yourself. If you do not find the people, the earth and the heaven there, then give up your search, for then there is nowhere else.’
Pasternak’s second son, Leonid, was born just into the new year, 1938. Boris wrote to his family in Berlin on New Year’s Day: ‘The boy was born lovely and healthy and seems very nice. He managed to appear on New Year’s night with the last 12th strike of the clock. And he was mentioned in the statistics report of the maternity hospital as “the first baby, born at 0 o’clock of the 1st January 1938”. I named him Leonid in your honour. Zina suffered a lot in childbirth, but she seems to be created for difficulties and bears them easily and almost silently. If you’d like to write to her and can do so without feeling obligated, please write.’
It is a mark of how far his marriage to Zinaida was unravelling that, eighteen months earlier, while Zinaida organised the house move to Peredelkino from Moscow all by herself – moving her sons and all the family’s furniture – Boris went to stay with his former wife Evgenia, at her Tverskoi Boulevard home. ‘He was very drawn to young Zhenya and to me. He lived a few days with us and entered our lives so naturally and easily, as though he had only been away by chance,’ Evgenia later wrote to her friend Raisa Lomonosova of Boris’s stay with her that summer; ‘But despite the fact that, in his words, he is sick to death of that life, he will never have the courage to break with her [Zinaida]. And it is pointless him tormenting me and reviving old thoughts and habits.’
For Boris, Evgenia’s artistic temperament suddenly seemed less stifling, compared with Zinaida’s bland domesticity. It gave rise to a nostalgia in Boris for his first family and underlined his dour sense of duty to his second. He found Zinaida’s personality ‘challenging’ and ‘inflexible’ and was by now aware that their characters were too different for them to reside together in any sort of harmony. Years later, Zinaida’s daughter-in-law, Natasha (who married Boris and Zinaida’s son, Leonid), said of her mother-in-law: ‘She had a very rigid character. She was practical and disciplined. She would say “now we go to lunch” and everyone would sit down. She was the head of the table, like a captain running a ship.’
Pasternak’s friend the poet Anna Akhmatova observed that at the beginning, being blindly in love, Boris failed to see what others perceived: that Zinaida was ‘coarse and vulgar’. To Boris’s literary friends, she did not share his desire for spiritual and aesthetic pursuits, preferring to play cards and chain-smoke into the early hours. But Akhmatova correctly predicted that Boris would never leave Zinaida because he ‘belonged to the race of conscientious men who cannot divorce twice’. It was inevitable that his emotional journey was not yet over. He was about to meet Olga, the soul mate who would be his Lara, for whom he had longed all his life.
4
Cables under High Tension
Six months after their first meeting at the Novy Mir offices, when Olga introduced Boris to her two young children, it was clear their love was incontrovertible. Both were obsessed by each other, consumed by an irresistible power of attraction. After Boris met Irina and Mitia that April evening in 1947, he was more forcefully drawn to Olga than ever. Yet this was further complicated by his heightened awareness of the pain and trauma he was awakening for them all in betraying Zinaida. ‘Boris suffered immensely from the ramifications of his romantic decisions,’ reflected Irina.
When the children were tucked up in bed that spring night, Boris sat with Olga in her tiny bedroom until midnight, the two of them alternating between elation at the strength of their passion and fevered despair at the practical reality of their situation.
Boris told Olga that he was tormented by his feelings for her and for his own family in Peredelkino. That every time he returned to Zinaida after walking with Olga in Moscow, when he saw his ‘no longer young’ wife waiting for him, he was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood abandoned in the forest. He just could not get out the words that he had rehearsed over and over about how he wished to leave her. Boris tried to break free of his deep emotional and ardent attraction to Olga that night in her apartment, confessing his relentless guilt towards Zinaida. He explained to Olga that she had nothing to do with his indifferent feelings towards his wife. He had lived unhappily with Zinaida for the previous ten years. He admitted that he had known within the first year of marriage to Zinaida that he had made a fearful mistake. Astonishingly, he confessed that it was not really her he liked but her husband, Genrikh, whose talents he revered. ‘I was so captivated by the way he played the piano,’ Boris said. ‘At first he wanted to kill me, the strange fellow, after she left him. But later on he was very grateful to me!’
Boris spoke with such anguish to Olga about the drama of the break-up of his first marriage and the ‘hell’ of his domestic set-up with Zinaida, that there was no question of Olga doubting him and his motives towards her. Of course he wanted more than anything to pursue a great love affair with her, but he could not envisage how he could disentangle himself from yet another marriage. As he stood at the door to leave her, the night folding in behind him, he told Olga that he felt that he had no right to love. The good things in life were not for him. He was a man of duty and she must not deflect him from his set way of life – and his work. He added that he would look after Olga for the rest of his life. An honourable promise, considering they had not yet consummated their relationship.
After Boris left, Olga could not sleep. Restless, she kept going to the balcony, listening to the sounds of daybreak, watching the street lamps grow dim under the young lime trees of Potapov Street. At six in the morning the doorbell rang. Boris was standing there. He had gone to his dacha at Peredelkino by train – unlike Yury Zhivago, who galloped to and from his true love – then come straight back and walked the streets of Moscow until dawn. Olga was wearing her favourite Japanese dressing gown, decorated with little houses. She pulled him towards her and they embraced in silence. Both knew that regardless of the complexity of the situation and the potential destruction caused by their ardour, they could not live without each other.
The next day Olga’s mother took the family on a trip to Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo on the outskirts of Moscow, where there was an eighteenth-century house surrounded by sweeping parkland. Boris and Olga were left to spend their first night and day together ‘like newlyweds’. Olga took great pleasure in ironing Boris’s crumpled trousers for him: not the most romantic of acts, but Boris being Boris, he was ‘jubilant’ that they could live like a married couple for this twenty-four-hour period. To mark the happy occasion, he inscribed a small red volume of his verse for Olga: ‘My life, my angel, I love you truly. April 4th, 1947.’
From the moment that they became lovers, Boris and Olga were inseparable. He would come to her apartment every day at six or seven in the morning. Spring that year turned into a hot summer: the lime trees were laden with blossom, the boulevards seemed to have the fragrance of molten honey. They were completely in love, able to exist on little sleep, fuelled by the adrenalin of desire, excitement and yearning. Boris wrote a poem called ‘Summer in Town’, about this time. It became one of Yury Zhivago’s poems in Doctor Zhivago.
Conversation in a half tone.
With a flurry of haste
The whole sheaf of hair
Is gathered up from the nape of the neck.
From under the heavy comb
A helmeted woman looks out,
Her head thrown back
With all i
ts plaited hair.
Outside, the hot night
Promises a storm,
The passers-by scatter,
Shuffling home.
Brief thunder
Echoes sharply,
And the wind stirs
The curtain at the window.
Sultry
Silence.
Fingers of lightning
Search the sky.
And when the dawn-filled,
Heated morning
Has dried the puddles in the streets
After the night rain
The centuries-old, scented,
Blossoming lime-trees
Frown
For lack of sleep.
As the affair between the besotted writer and Olga intensified, tensions escalated between Olga and her mother, Maria Kostko. For while Olga and even little Irina were excited that a poet of Boris’s calibre had entered their lives, Maria was vehemently against the union. All she wanted was for her daughter to find the emotional and financial security of a suitable third husband. ‘It is impossible, unthinkable, unjustifiable to have a relationship with a married man,’ Maria repeatedly reproached Olga. ‘We even have the same age, him and I.’ It must have been doubly alarming for Maria that her daughter was not only embarking on a relationship with a married man but such a famous and controversial figure. In her eyes this would have been akin to Olga signing her death warrant, given the frequency and ferocity of arrests. She had good reason to fear, for Maria had direct experience of Stalinist repression, having spent three years in the gulag during the war. Worse, the betrayal had originated close to home: it was believed that her second son-in-law, Alexander Vinogradov, had tipped off the authorities, saying Maria had ‘slandered the leader’ in a private conversation about Stalin in their home. It is thought that part of his motive was to get his mother-in-law out of their crowded apartment. A lawyer revealed to Olga that there was indeed a letter of denunciation from Vinogradov towards her mother in Maria’s police files, a revelation that caused fearful rows between Vinogradov and Olga before he died in 1942. Subsequently Olga learned that the camp where her mother was being kept had suffered enemy bombing; prison order had broken down and prisoners were dying of hunger.
Lara Page 8