by Peter Finn
In the summer of 1959, Pasternak began work on a drama to be called The Blind Beauty. “I want to re-create a whole historical era, the nineteenth century in Russia with its main event, the liberation of the serfs,” he told one visitor. “We have, of course, many works about that time, but there is no modern treatment of it. I want to write something panoramic, like Gogol’s Dead Souls.” He envisioned the drama as an ambitious trilogy with the first two parts taking place on a country estate in the 1840s and then the 1860s before the action shifts to Saint Petersburg in the 1880s. The trilogy includes a serf who loses her sight, but the blind beauty is Russia, a country “oblivious for so long of its own beauty, of its own destinies.”
“I don’t know whether I’ll ever finish it,” Pasternak told a visitor. “But I know that when I complete a line that sounds exactly right, I am better able to love those who love me and to understand those who don’t.”
Pasternak began to put aside his massive correspondence to focus on this “happy endeavor,” his enthusiasm for the subject rising as he delved into the research and writing. “I have been eagerly zealous at my new work of late,” he told his sister in July. He told a correspondent in Paris, “Since the time when I first lukewarmly toyed with the idea of the play, it has turned from an idle whim or trial shot into a cherished ambition, it has become a passion.” He began to read scenes out loud to Ivinskaya, who found the language colorful and every word alive. She felt that the play would “be a work just as bound up with his life and artistic nature as the novel was.”
Some of the official hostility in Moscow began to ease that summer. At the Third Congress of Soviet Writers in May, Khrushchev suggested that writers should keep their feuds in-house and not trouble—or embarrass—the government. Pasternak was not mentioned and of course did not attend, but Khrushchev was bothered by the Zhivago affair. Smarting from the global reaction to the campaign against Pasternak, he asked his son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, to read Doctor Zhivago and report back. According to The New York Times, Adzhubei said that while the novel “is not a book that would cause a good Young Communist to toss his cap in the air … it is not a book that would touch off counter-revolution.” Adzhubei concluded that with the removal of a mere three hundred or four hundred words, Doctor Zhivago could have been published. Khrushchev exploded, and had Surkov removed as secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers; one report said he grabbed Surkov by the collar and shook him furiously.
In a speech to the Third Congress, Khrushchev told the delegates, “You may say: ‘Criticize us, control us; if a work is incorrect, do not print it.’ But you know that it is not easy to decide right away what to print and what not to print. The easiest thing would be to print nothing, then there would be no mistakes.… But it would be stupidity. Therefore, Comrades, do not burden the government with the solution of such questions, decide them for yourselves in a comradely fashion.” Later in the year, the Union of Soviet Writers suggested that Pasternak could apply to be reinstated, but he rejected the approach. “They all showed themselves up at that time,” he said, “and now they think that everything can be forgotten.”
Pasternak began to venture out in public in Moscow, and his first appearance, to attend a concert of the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, drew press notice. The Philharmonic was playing in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev—the first major concert tour by an American organization after the signing in 1958 of the United States–Soviet Union Cultural Exchange Agreement. Bernstein was a sensation, bringing audiences to their feet, although some Communist critics were unhappy with what they saw as his attempt to lift the Iron Curtain in music. As well as American compositions, he played works by Igor Stravinsky that had never been played in the Soviet Union. Before pieces, Bernstein also spoke directly to the audience, and Soviet listeners were completely unused to that kind of engagement with a conductor. Before playing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, he said the composer “created a revolution before your own revolution. Music has never been the same since that performance.” The New York Times noted that “when the savage rhythms and weird melodies had reached their climax, there was a moment of breathless silence and then a great explosion of wild cheering.”
While in Leningrad, Bernstein got Pasternak’s address and invited him to the final Moscow concert on September 11. Pasternak responded in a letter with two postscripts in which he accepted the invitation but went back and forth on an invitation to Bernstein and his wife to visit him in Peredelkino on the day before the concert. His changes of mind may have reflected Zinaida’s objections before he finally defied her and asked them to come in the final postscript. When Bernstein and his wife arrived they were initially left outside in the pouring rain while Pasternak and his wife had a lengthy argument. The guests, upon being admitted, were told that the family squabble was about what door they should enter; they evidently never suspected that Pasternak’s wife despised the thought of foreign visitors.
Bernstein and his wife ate with Pasternak, and the conductor found him “both a saint and a galant.” Bernstein reported that they talked for hours about art and music and the “artist’s view of history” before later correcting himself and noting that the conversation was “in fact virtually monologues by him on aesthetic matters.” When Bernstein complained about his difficulties with the minister of culture, Pasternak replied, “What have ministers got to do with it?”
“The Artist communes with God,” he told the American, “and God puts on various performances so that he can have something to write about. This can be a farce, as in your case; or it can be a tragedy—but that is a secondary matter.”
Moscow Conservatory’s Great Hall was packed with much of the intelligentsia. Pasternak attended with his wife and “every eye in the hall seemed to focus on the two people … there was a subdued buzzing in the hall as people motioned to one another and stared.
“The tension, almost unbearable in its intensity, was broken suddenly when Mr. Bernstein appeared on stage, followed by a tremendous cheer. Some of those present, perhaps including Mr. Bernstein, were sure that at least part of the enthusiastic greeting was meant to be shared by Mr. Pasternak.”
Pasternak visited Bernstein backstage and the two men shared a bear hug. “You have taken us up to heaven,” said Pasternak. “Now we must return to earth.”
Chapter 15
“An unbearably blue sky”
Pasternak turned seventy on February 10, 1960. When he arrived at Ivinskaya’s to celebrate, he was red-faced from the piercing wind; there were frost flowers on the windows and snow fluttered in the air. Pasternak warmed his stomach with cognac and settled in with the assembled company, including the German journalist Heinz Schewe. Ivinskaya served roast chicken with homemade cabbage salad, and the meal was washed down with more cognac and two bottles of Georgian red wine. Pasternak was happy and loquacious. He spoke at length about a number of German writers. There were lots of presents, and notes of congratulations from around the world. Pasternak’s sisters sent a telegram. An alarm clock in a leather case came from Prime Minister Nehru. The owner of a gas station in Marburg mailed him earthenware pots.
“How late everything has come for me,” he told Ivinskaya. “If only we could live forever like this.”
Pasternak had 109 days.
Late the previous year, he had written to a Western correspondent, “A short time ago I began to notice now and then a disturbance at the left side of my breast. This is allied to my heart—I am telling no one about it as, if I do mention it, I shall have to give up my habitual daily routine. My wife, relatives, friends will stand over me. Doctors, sanatoriums, hospitals crush out life before one is yet dead. The slavery of compassion begins.” Earlier that winter, Katya Krasheninnikova, one of his young devotees, visited Pasternak. He told her he had lung cancer, and one or two years to live. He asked her to tell no one but to go to communion with him.
On his birthday, Pasternak still appeared vigorous; he hid the sometimes sharp pain in hi
s chest. But in letters to distant friends, there were hints of an end foreseen, a summing up. “Some benign forces have brought me close to that world where there are no circles, no fidelity to youthful reminiscences, no distaff points of view,” he told Chukurtma Gudiashvili, the young Georgian ballerina, “a world which the artist prepares himself all his life to enter, and to which he is born only after death, a world of posthumous existence for those forces and ideas for which you have found expression.”
Among his more exotic valedictory thoughts was that Feltrinelli should buy his body from the Soviet Union, bury him in Milan, and have Ivinskaya watch over his tomb. His lover began to notice that his strength was ebbing. He would tire while working on commissioned translations and seemed less buoyant during their walks. She was frightened by a grayness that had begun to creep into his complexion.
At Easter, a German admirer, Renate Schweitzer, came to visit. The two had shared an intimate correspondence since Schweitzer, a poet who worked as a masseuse, first wrote to him in early 1958. She was entranced by a newspaper photo of Pasternak and then by the Russia of Pasternak’s Zhivago. Schweitzer was a thunderstruck fan, and Pasternak was somehow transported by this epistolary relationship to the Germany of his student days in Marburg. Schweitzer became so moved by the confessional, tender tone in Pasternak’s letters—in one he ruminated on his complicated life with Zinaida and Olga—that she considered trying to become a Soviet citizen and moving to Peredelkino. Pasternak preferred her as a creature of their correspondence and was ambivalent about the visit, particularly because he was feeling so poorly.
At the dacha, where she ate Easter dinner with the Pasternaks and their guests, Schweitzer noted the pallor in Pasternak’s face and how little he ate. She also visited Ivinskaya with Pasternak, and emboldened by alcohol and in front of her hostess, she kissed her hero with more ardor than affection. She asked the unamused Ivinskaya if she could “have him for a week.”
After walking Schweitzer to the train station, Pasternak complained that his coat was “so heavy.” He also felt compelled to ask for Ivinskaya’s forgiveness, but she was more troubled by his overwrought state—sobbing, on his knees—than the brazen kisses with Schweitzer. Later that week, he also told Nina Tabidze that he thought he had lung cancer but swore her to secrecy. As the pain in his chest became more pronounced, he wondered to Ivinskaya if he was “falling ill as a punishment for what I did to you over Renate.”
The following week, Pasternak began to keep a journal on his health, scribbling notes in pencil on loose sheets of paper. “I have heart complaints, pain in the back. I think I’ve overtaxed myself during Easter. Can hardly stay on my legs. Tiring to stand at my writing desk. Had to stop writing the play. The left arm feels dull. Have to lie down.” He sent Ivinskaya a note that he would have to stay in bed for a few days. “I give you a big kiss. Everything will be alright.”
On the twenty-third, he surprised Ivinskaya when she saw him approaching her on the road, carrying his old suitcase. He was expecting money from Feltrinelli to be brought to him by Schewe or an Italian courier. He looked “pale and haggard, a sick man.”
“I know you love me, I have faith in it, and our only strength is in this,” he told her. “Do not make any changes in our life, I beg you.”
They never spoke again.
On the twenty-fifth, Pasternak was examined by a doctor, who diagnosed angina and recommended complete bed rest. Pasternak was unconvinced. “I find it hard to imagine that such a constant pain, as firmly embedded as a splinter, should be due only to something wrong with my heart, very overtired and in need of attention as it is.”
Two days later, Pasternak felt better and the results of a cardiogram were encouraging. “It will all pass,” Pasternak wrote in his journal.
At the end of April, Pasternak was struggling to get up the stairs to his study, and a bed was made for him in the music room downstairs. He told Ivinskaya not to make any attempt to come to see him. “The waves of alarm set off by it would impinge on me and at the moment with my heart in this condition, it would kill me,” he told her in a note. “Z in her foolishness would not have the wit to spare me. I have already taken soundings on the subject.” He told her not to get upset, that they had come through worse things. But he was now in some physical distress. “The effect on my heart of the slightest movement is instantaneous and horribly painful,” he told her. “All I can do that is relatively painless is lie flat on my back.”
On May 1, Pasternak was visited by Katya Krasheninnikova, the young woman with whom he wanted to have communion at the church. “I’m dying,” he told her. Pasternak asked her to go through the sacrament of confession with him; he read the prayers aloud with his eyes closed, his face serene. Pasternak asked Krasheninnikova to open the door so his wife could hear and then loudly complained that Zinaida refused to call a priest or organize a church burial. Krasheninnikova said she passed Pasternak’s confession on to her own priest, and he said the prayer of absolution. “That’s how they used to do it in the camps,” she later told Pasternak’s son.
A few days later, Pasternak again thought he felt better. He got out of bed, but after washing his hair he suddenly felt very unwell. He continued to advise Ivinskaya that the condition was temporary and counseled her to be patient. “If I were really near death, I should insist that you be called over here to see me,” he told her in another note. “But thank goodness this turns out to be unnecessary. The fact that everything, by the looks of it, will perhaps go on again as before seems to me so undeserved, fabulous, incredible!!!”
On the night of May 7, Pasternak suffered a heart attack. The USSR Literary Fund Hospital dispatched Dr. Anna Golodets and several nurses to provide care for him around the clock. Golodets found her patient battling a high temperature and severe lung congestion. She thought the low, slanting bed set up downstairs had to be very uncomfortable, but she found Pasternak uncomplaining and determined to hide the extent of his disease from his loved ones. He liked the window open during the day; outside, his garden was in full bloom.
Marina Rassokhina, the youngest nurse at just sixteen, delivered updates to Ivinskaya and sometimes spent the night with her. She relayed to Ivinskaya how Pasternak, without his false teeth, felt unbearably ugly. “Olyusha won’t love me anymore,” he told the nurse. “I look such a fright now.” He was frustrated that he couldn’t shave but allowed his son Leonid to do it for him. One of the other nurses, Marfa Kuzminichna, who had served at the front during the war, admired Pasternak’s courage as death neared. “I already feel the breath of the other world on me,” he told her. He spoke about his “double life” and asked her not to condemn him. He didn’t entirely lose his sense of humor. As the nurses prepared for a blood transfusion, he told them they looked like “Tibetan lamas at their altars.”
In mid-May, Pasternak was examined by four doctors, who diagnosed a heart attack and stomach cancer. Pasternak was given a series of injections that led to some hallucinations. He thought he spoke to the writer Leonid Leonov about Faust and was very upset when he learned that event had not happened. An oxygen tent seemed to ease his breathing and reduce the nightmares.
Zinaida sent a telegram to Oxford, assuring his sisters that he was being treated by Moscow’s best doctors. She was draining her savings to pay for some of the care. Western correspondents in the capital tried to obtain antibiotics for him through their embassies.
By now the foreign press was at the gates of the dacha seeking updates in what became a round-the-clock death watch. There were concerned visitors—Akhmatova, the Ivanovs, the Neigauzes, among others—but Pasternak declined to see them. He told them he loved them, was comforted they were nearby, but said the Pasternak they knew was gone. The patient only wanted his wife or his son Leonid, or the nurses, in his sickroom. He didn’t even like to see doctors without being freshly shaved with his false teeth in. Silence enveloped the house, and Zinaida, monosyllabic and unsentimental, managed the daily routine, helped by Pasternak�
��s brother, Alexander, and his wife, who had moved out to Peredelkino to assist.
Zinaida several times offered to allow Ivinskaya to see Pasternak and to leave the house while she visited. Over the previous year, she was tormented by gossip about the affair with “that lady,” which grew to humiliating proportions because of Pasternak’s fame. Pasternak said he couldn’t bear to see Zinaida “in tears” because of all the whispers. Zina, he said, is “for me like my own daughter, like my youngest child. I love her as her dead mother would.”
Pasternak was adamant that his lover should not come over. Instead, she came to the gate of the dacha weeping and Pasternak’s brother would speak to her. Zinaida thought it was “monstrous” that Pasternak would not see her. She wondered if her husband was disappointed in Ivinskaya, and if the relationship had soured. Pasternak’s notes to Ivinskaya suggest not. He simply could not bear the stress and the pitched emotion of an Ivinskaya visit. He did not want her to see him in his reduced state, and he did not wish to foist all the drama of a visit on his family. He was too decorous, and his lives with these two women were, for him, distinctly separate. It wasn’t who Pasternak loved, but how he wanted to die that kept Ivinskaya hovering near the dacha gate and Zinaida nursing his dying body.
In late May, a portable X-ray machine was brought to the house and it showed cancer in both lungs that was metastasizing to other major organs. There was no hope of recovery. Pasternak asked to see his sister Lydia. Alexander sent a telegram to England: “SITUATION HOPELESS COME IF YOU CAN.” Despite pleas directly to Khrushchev, Lydia spent a week in London waiting for the Soviet authorities to make a decision; by the time they issued a visa it was too late.