The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  I did not see him again for eleven years. By 1956 his estrangement from his country’s political establishment was complete. He could not speak of it, or its representatives, without a shudder. By that time his friend Olga Ivinskaya had been arrested, interrogated, maltreated, sent to a labour camp for five years. ‘Your Boris,’ the Minister of State Security, Abakumov, had said to her, ‘your Boris detests us, doesn’t he?’ ‘They were right,’ Pasternak said: ‘she could not and did not deny it.’ I had travelled to Peredelkino with Neuhaus and one of his sons by his first wife, who was now married to Pasternak. He repeated over and over again that Pasternak was a saint: that he was too unworldly – his hope that the Soviet authorities would permit the publication of Doctor Zhivago was plainly absurd – martyrdom of the author was far more likely. Pasternak was the greatest writer produced by Russia for decades, and he would be destroyed, as so many had been destroyed, by the State. This was an inheritance from the tsarist regime. Whatever the difference between the old and the new Russia, suspicion and persecution of writers and artists were common to both. His former wife Zinaida – now Pasternak’s wife – had told him that Pasternak was determined to get his novel published somewhere. He had tried to dissuade him, but his words were in vain. If Pasternak mentioned the matter to me, would I – it was important – more than important – perhaps a matter of life and death, who could tell, even in these days? – would I try to persuade him to hold his hand? Neuhaus seemed to me to be right: Pasternak probably did need to be physically saved from himself.

  By this time we had arrived at Pasternak’s house. He was waiting for us by the gate and let Neuhaus go in, embraced me warmly and said that in the eleven years during which we had not met much had happened, most of it very evil. He stopped and added, ‘Surely there is something you want to say to me?’ I said, with monumental tactlessness (not to say unforgivable stupidity), ‘Boris Leonidovich, I am happy to see you looking so well. But the main thing is that you have survived. This seemed almost miraculous to some of us’ (I was thinking of the anti-Jewish persecution of Stalin’s last years). His face darkened and he looked at me with real anger: ‘I know what you are thinking,’ he said. ‘What am I thinking, Boris Leonidovich?’ ‘I know, I know it, I know exactly what is in your mind,’ he replied in a breaking voice – it was very frightening – ‘do not prevaricate. I can see more clearly into your mind than I can into my own.’ ‘What am I thinking?’ I asked again, more and more disturbed by his words. ‘You think – I know that you think – that I have done something for them.’ ‘I assure you, Boris Leonidovich,’ I replied, ‘that I never conceived of this – I have never heard this suggested by anyone, even as an idiotic joke.’ In the end he seemed to believe me. But he was visibly upset. Only after I had assured him that admiration for him, not only as a writer, but as a free and independent human being, was, among civilised people, world-wide, did he begin to return to his normal state. ‘At least’, he said, ‘I can say, like Heine, “I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom.”’2

  He took me to his study. There he thrust a thick envelope into my hands: ‘My book,’ he said, ‘it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.’ I read Doctor Zhivago during the following night and day, and when, two or three days later, I saw him again, I asked what he intended to do with it. He told me that he had given it to an Italian Communist, who worked in the Italian section of the Soviet radio, and at the same time was acting as an agent for the Communist Italian publisher Feltrinelli. He had assigned world rights to Feltrinelli. He wished his novel, his testament, the most authentic, most complete of all his writings – his poetry was nothing in comparison (although the poems in the novel were, he thought, perhaps the best he had written) – he wished his work to travel over the entire world, to lay waste with fire (he quoted Pushkin’s famous biblical line), to lay waste the hearts of men.

  After the midday meal was over, his wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, drew me aside and begged me with tears in her eyes to dissuade him from getting Doctor Zhivago published abroad. She did not wish her children to suffer; surely I knew what ‘they’ were capable of? Moved by this plea, I spoke to the poet at the first opportunity. I promised to have microfilms of his novel made, to bury them in the four quarters of the globe, to bury copies in Oxford, in Valparaiso, in Tasmania, Cape Town, Haiti, Vancouver, Japan, so that copies might survive even if a nuclear war broke out – was he resolved to defy the Soviet authorities, had he considered the consequences?

  For the second time during that week he showed a touch of real anger in talking to me. He told me that what I said was no doubt well-intentioned, that he was touched by my concern for his own safety and that of his family (this was said a trifle ironically), but that he knew what he was doing; that I was worse than that importunate Commonwealth diplomat eleven years ago. He had spoken to his sons. They were prepared to suffer. I was not to mention the matter again. I had read the book, surely I realised what it, above all its dissemination, meant to him. I was shamed into silence.

  After an interval, we talked about French literature, as often before. Since our last meeting he had procured Sartre’s La Nausée, and found it unreadable, and its obscenity revolting. Surely after four centuries of creative genius this great nation could not have ceased to generate literature? Aragon was a time-server, Duhamel, Guéhenno were inconceivably tedious; was Malraux still writing? Before I could reply, one of his guests, a gentle, silent woman, a teacher who had recently returned after fifteen years in a labour camp, to which she had been condemned solely for teaching English, shyly asked whether Aldous Huxley had written anything since Point Counter Point. Was Virginia Woolf still writing? – she had never seen a book by her; but from an account in an old French newspaper which in some mysterious fashion had found its way into her camp, she thought that she might like her work.

  It is difficult to convey the pleasure of being able to bring news of art and literature of the outer world to human beings so genuinely eager to receive it, so unlikely to obtain it from any other source. I told her and the assembled company all that I could of English, American, French writing. It was like speaking to the victims of shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civilisation. All they heard they received as new, exciting and delightful. The Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, Pasternak’s great friend, had perished in the Great Purge. His widow, Nina Tabidze, who was present, wanted to know whether Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw were still great names in the Western theatre. I told her that interest in Shaw had declined, but that Chekhov was greatly admired and often performed, and added that Akhmatova had said to me that she could not understand this worship of Chekhov. His world was uniformly drab. The sun never shone. No swords flashed. Everything was covered by a horrible grey mist. Chekhov’s universe was a sea of mud with wretched human creatures caught in it helplessly. It was a travesty of life. Pasternak said that Akhmatova was wholly mistaken. ‘Tell her when you see her – we cannot go to Leningrad freely, as you probably can – tell her from all of us here, that all Russian writers preach to the reader: even Turgenev tells him that time is a great healer and that kind of thing; Chekhov alone does not. He is a pure artist – everything is dissolved in art – he is our answer to Flaubert.’ He went on to say that Akhmatova would surely talk to me about Dostoevsky and attack Tolstoy. But Tolstoy was right about Dostoevsky, that his novels were a dreadful mess, a mixture of chauvinism and hysterical religion: ‘Tell Anna Andreevna that, and from me!’ But when I saw Akhmatova again, in Oxford in 1965, I thought it best not to report his judgement: she might have wished to answer him. But Pasternak was in his grave. In fact, she did speak to me of Dostoevsky with the most passionate admiration.

  III

  This brings me to my meeting with the poet Anna Akhmatova. I had been introduced to her poems by Maurice Bowra, and longed to meet her. In November 1945 I went from Moscow to Leningrad. I had not seen the city since 1919, when I was ten years
old and my family was allowed to return to our native city of Riga, the capital of a then independent republic. In Leningrad my recollections of childhood became fabulously vivid. I was inexpressibly moved by the look of the streets, the houses, the statues, the embankments, the market places, the suddenly familiar, still broken, railings of a little shop, in which samovars were mended, below the house in which we had lived. The inner yard of the house looked as sordid and abandoned as it had done during the first years of the Revolution. My memories of specific events, episodes, experiences came between me and the physical reality. It was as if I had walked into a legendary city, myself at once part of the vivid, half-remembered legend, and yet, at the same time, viewing it from some outside vantage-point. The city had been greatly damaged, but still in 1945 remained indescribably beautiful (it seemed wholly restored by the time I saw it again, eleven years later). I made my way to the Writers’ Bookshop in the Nevsky Prospekt. While looking at the books I fell into casual conversation with a man who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems. He turned out to be a well-known critic and literary historian. We talked about recent events. He described the terrible ordeal of the siege of Leningrad and the martyrdom and heroism of many of its inhabitants, and said that some had died of cold and hunger, others, mostly the younger ones, had survived. Some had been evacuated. I asked him about the fate of writers in Leningrad. He said, ‘You mean Zoshchenko and Akhmatova?’ Akhmatova to me was a figure from the remote past. Maurice Bowra, who had translated some of her poems, spoke about her to me as someone not heard of since the First World War. ‘Is Akhmatova still alive?’ I asked. ‘Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna?’ he said: ‘Why yes, of course. She lives not far from here on the Fontanka, in Fontanny Dom [Fountain House]; would you like to meet her?’ It was as if I had suddenly been invited to meet Miss Christina Rossetti. I could hardly speak. I mumbled that I should indeed like to meet her. ‘I shall telephone her,’ my new acquaintance said. He returned to tell me that she would receive us at three that afternoon. I was to return to the bookshop, and we would go together.

  I returned at the appointed hour. The critic and I left the bookshop, turned left, crossed the Anichkov Bridge, and turned left again, along the embankment of the Fontanka. Fountain House, the palace of the Sheremetevs, is a magnificent late baroque building, with gates of exquisite ironwork for which Leningrad is famous, and built around a spacious court – not unlike the quadrangle of a large Oxford or Cambridge college. We climbed up one of the steep, dark staircases, to an upper floor, and were admitted to Akhmatova’s room. It was very barely furnished – virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away – looted or sold – during the siege. There was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa, and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us.

  Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness. I bowed. It seemed appropriate, for she looked and moved like a tragic queen. I thanked her for receiving me, and said that people in the West would be glad to know that she was in good health, for nothing had been heard of her for many years. ‘Oh, but an article on me has appeared in the Dublin Review,’ she said, ‘and a thesis is being written about my work, I am told, in Bologna.’ She had a friend with her, an academic lady of some sort, and there was polite conversation for some minutes. Then Akhmatova asked me about the ordeal of London during the bombing: I answered as best I could, feeling acutely shy and constricted by her distant, somewhat regal manner. Suddenly I heard what sounded like my first name being shouted somewhere outside. I ignored this for a while – it could only be an illusion – but the shouting became louder and the word ‘Isaiah’ could be clearly heard. I went to the window and looked out, and saw a man whom I recognised as Randolph Churchill. He was standing in the middle of the great court, looking like a tipsy undergraduate, and screaming my name. I stood rooted to the floor for some seconds. Then I collected myself, muttered an apology, and ran down the stairs. My only thought was to prevent Churchill from coming to the room. My companion, the critic, ran after me anxiously. When we emerged into the court, Churchill came towards me and greeted me effusively: ‘Mr X,’ I said mechanically, ‘I do not suppose that you have met Mr Randolph Churchill?’ The critic froze, his expression changed from bewilderment to horror, and he left as rapidly as he could. I have no notion whether I was followed by agents of the secret police, but there could be no doubt that Randolph Churchill was. It was this untoward event that caused absurd rumours to circulate in Leningrad that a foreign delegation had arrived to persuade Akhmatova to leave Russia; that Winston Churchill, a lifelong admirer of the poet, was sending a special aircraft to take Akhmatova to England, and so on.

  Randolph, whom I had not met since we were undergraduates at Oxford, subsequently explained that he was in Moscow as a journalist on behalf of the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had come to Leningrad as part of his assignment. On arriving at the Hotel Astoria, his first concern had been to get the pot of caviar which he had acquired into an icebox: but, as he knew no Russian, and his interpreter had disappeared, his cries for help had finally brought down a representative of the British Council. She saw to his caviar and, in the course of general conversation, told him that I was in the city. He said that I might make an excellent substitute interpreter, and unfortunately discovered from the British Council lady where I was to be found. The rest followed. When he reached Fountain House, he adopted a method which had served him well during his days in Christ Church (his Oxford college), and, I dare say, on other occasions; ‘and’, he said with a winning smile, ‘it worked’. I detached myself from him as quickly as I could, and after obtaining her number from the bookseller, telephoned Akhmatova to offer an explanation of my precipitate departure, and to apologise for it. I asked if I might be allowed to call on her again. ‘I shall wait for you at nine this evening,’ she answered.

  When I returned, a learned lady, an Assyriologist, was also present who asked me a great many questions about English universities and their organisation. Akhmatova was plainly uninterested and, for the most part, silent. Shortly before midnight the Assyriologist left, and then Akhmatova began to ask me about old friends who had emigrated – some of whom I might know. (She was sure of that, she told me later. In personal relationships, she assured me, her intuition – almost second sight – never failed her.) I did indeed know some of them. We talked about the composer Artur Lurié, whom I had met in America during the War. He had been an intimate friend of hers, and had set to music some of her, and of Mandel’shtam’s, poetry. She asked about Boris Anrep, the mosaicist (whom I had never met): I knew little about him, only that he had decorated the floor of the entrance hall of the National Gallery with the figures of celebrated persons – Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo, Clive Bell, Lydia Lopokova and the like. Twenty years later I was able to tell her that an image of herself had been added to them by Anrep. She showed me a ring with a black stone which Anrep had given her in 1917.

  She had, she said, met only one foreigner – a Pole – since the First World War. She asked after various other friends – Salomé Andronikova, to whom Mandel’shtam dedicated one of his most famous poems; Stravinsky’s wife, Vera; the poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Georgy Adamovich. I answered as best I could. She spoke of her visits to Paris before the First World War, of her friendship with Amedeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her hung over the fireplace – one of many (the rest had perished during the siege). She described her childhood on the shores of the Black Sea, a pagan, unbaptised land, she called it, where one felt close to an ancient, half-Greek, half-barbarian, deeply un-Russian culture. She spoke of her first husband, the celebrated poet Gumilev. She was convinced that he had not taken part in the monarchist conspiracy for which he had been executed; Gorky, who had been asked by many writers to intervene on hi
s behalf, apparently did nothing to save him. She had not seen him for some time before his condemnation – they had been divorced some years before. Her eyes had tears in them when she described the harrowing circumstances of his death.

  After a silence, she asked me whether I would like to hear her poetry. But before doing this, she said that she wished to recite two cantos from Byron’s Don Juan to me, for they were relevant to what would follow. Even if I had known the poem well, I could not have told which cantos she had chosen, for although she read English fairly freely, her pronunciation of it made it impossible to understand more than a word or two. She closed her eyes and spoke the lines from memory, with intense emotion. I rose and looked out of the window to conceal my embarrassment. Perhaps, I thought afterwards, that is how we now read classical Greek and Latin. Yet we, too, are moved by the words, which, as we pronounce them, might have been wholly unintelligible to their authors and audiences. Then she read from her book of poems – Anno Domini, The White Flock, Out of Six Books – ‘Poems like these, but far better than mine,’ she said, ‘were the cause of the death of the best poet of our time, whom I loved and who loved me …’ – whether she meant Gumilev or Mandel’shtam I could not tell, for she broke down in tears, and could not go on reading.