Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago. Anna Pasternak

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СКАЧАТЬ to request permission for an overnight stay in Berlin. Despite Frederick pleading that his brother-in-law was in no fit state to continue the journey, the request was turned down.

      En route to the station, they stopped off at a nondescript hotel to have something to eat. Sitting in the visitors’ lounge, with guests drifting through, Josephine observed that her brother’s face clouded with sadness. Occasionally he would speak in his familiar booming voice, complaining about the journey ahead to Paris. While Frederick went to the train station to make enquiries, Boris at last opened up to his sister during their last precious hour together. Oblivious to the people coming and going around them, they sat huddled close, while the distraught writer tried to control his emotion and suppress his tears.

      All of a sudden he spoke with perfect clarity. ‘He said: “You know, I owe it to Zina – I must write about her. I will write a novel … A novel about that girl … Beautiful, misguided. A veiled beauty in the private rooms of night restaurants … Her cousin, a guardsman would take her there. She, of course, could not help it. She was so young, so unspeakably attractive …”’ Boris, who had not yet met Olga Ivinskaya, was referring to his second wife, Zinaida Neigaus, whom he had married the year before. The marriage was already running into difficulties, which caused Boris fierce guilt and disquiet, not least because he had already left his first wife for Zinaida, who was then married to his friend, the eminent pianist Genrickh Gustavovich Neigaus.

      Josephine was stunned: ‘I could not believe my ears. Was this the man as I had known him, unique, towering above platitudes and trivialities, above easy ways in art and above cheap subjects – this man now forgetting his austere creative principles, intending to lend his inimitable prose to a subject both petty and vulgar? Surely he would never write one of those sentimental stories which flourished at the turn of the century?’

      An hour later, choking back tears as she waved him off from the platform, Josephine tried to take in Boris’s anguished face as he stood by the window of the departing train. She clutched the arm of Frederick, who called out to his brother-in-law: ‘Go to bed straightaway.’ Yet it was only early on a summer’s evening. And then, Josephine heard Boris’s deep, distinctive voice for the last time in her life: ‘Yes … if only I could go to sleep.’

      In his personal life Boris was conflicted on many levels. He could not assuage his guilt at the way he had treated his first wife and, feeling emotionally shredded, he was unproductive in his work. His parents were bitterly disappointed that he did not return to Munich after the writers’ congress in Paris, en route to Russia, which he had promised them he would try to do. Boris wrote rather defensively to his father on 3 July: ‘I’m incapable of doing anything whatever on my own, and if you imagine that a week’s stay near Munich is going to put right what’s been wrong for two months (progressive loss of strength, sleeplessness every night and growing neurasthenia), you’re expecting too much. I don’t know how it all came about. Perhaps it’s all a punishment to me for Zhenia [Evgenia] and the suffering I caused her at the time.’

      If only Boris had known that this visit would be his last chance to see his parents again. In the summer of 1938, Leonid and Rosalia left fascist Germany for London, where they intended to rest and get strong enough for their eagerly anticipated final journey home to Russia. They wanted to visit Lydia, who had previously moved to Oxford in 1935 and married the British psychiatrist Eliot Slater, whom she had met in Munich. She was expecting her first child. Leonid and Rosalia were followed to England by Josephine and Frederick, along with their children Charles and Helen. With the German invasion of Austria, Josephine and Frederick’s Austrian passports no longer protected them and they had fled from Munich, abandoning their home. After a family reunion and period of recuperation, Leonid and Rosalia fully planned to move back to the country where their hearts lay: their homeland, Russia.

      Rosalia’s unexpected death, from a brain haemorrhage in her sleep, on 22 August 1939, left the family reeling and desolate. Boris wrote to his siblings on 10 October from Moscow: ‘this is the first letter that I have been able to write to you, for various reasons, after Mama’s death. It has turned my life upside down, devastated it and made it meaningless; and in an instant, as though drawing me after it, it has brought me closer to my own grave. It aged me in an hour. A cloud of unkindness and chaos has settled over my whole existence; I’m permanently distracted, downcast and dazed from grief, astonishment, tiredness and pain.’

      A week after Rosalia’s death, world war broke out. Leonid lived the rest of his life in Oxford, surrounded by his daughters and grandchildren. He would never see his sons, Boris or Alexander, again.

      During the war, Pasternak was actively involved and served as a firewatcher on Volkhonka Street. Several times he dealt with the incendiary bombs that fell on the family apartment’s roof. With others, he spent time on drill, fire-watching and shooting practice, delighted to discover that he had skill as a marksman. In spite of the war, Boris enjoyed moments of happiness, feeling that he was collaborating in the interest of Mother Russia and national survival. Yet amidst the camaraderie, there was the constant ‘acuteness of pain’ of the ‘excessive intolerable separation’ from his family.

      Leonid Pasternak died on 31 May 1945, weeks after Russia’s final victory in the war. ‘When Mother died it was as if harmony had abandoned the world,’ said Josephine. ‘When Father died it seemed that truth had left it.’ Boris shed ‘an ocean of tears’, on Leonid’s death (he had often addressed him as ‘my wonder papa’ in his letters). It troubled the writer greatly that he had never been able to replicate the rare depth and quality of enduring, harmonious marital love that his parents had experienced. In most of his correspondence with his father, he rails against his own emotional shortcomings, endlessly verbally flagellating himself – ‘I’m like someone bewitched, as if I’d cast a spell on myself. I’ve destroyed the lives of my family’ – and relentlessly exposing his acute sense of guilt, which runs like a continuous fever through him.

      Given how profoundly he revered his parents and loved his siblings, his choice to stay in Soviet Russia and to live apart from them was surprising. Despite the unbearable oppression of Stalin’s censorship of the 1920s and ’30s, he did not consider leaving Russia. On 2 February 1932 he had written to his parents about his calling to his beloved ‘Mother land’: ‘This fate of not belonging to oneself, of living in a prison cell warmed from all sides – it transforms you, it makes you a prisoner of time. For herein too lies the primeval cruelty of poor Russia; once she bestows her love upon someone, her beloved is caught forever within her sights. It is as if he stands before her in the Roman arena, forced to provide her with a spectacle in return for her love.’

      He continuously made it plain that he did not want to live the life of an exile. Yet, after the Revolution he was in emotional exile from his family. However successful he became, there is a sense that he was rudderless without them. Always searching, in many ways, he was lost. It was a constant source of shame and self-reproach that he was not able to emulate his parents’ stable and happy union. He may have fallen in love easily, but his inability to sustain a happy marriage was one of his greatest torments.

      3

       The Cloud Dweller

      It was at a party in Moscow in 1921 that the thirty-one-year-old Boris met the painter Evgenia Vladimirovna Lure. Petite and elegant, with blue eyes and soft brown hair, Evgenia came from a traditional Jewish intellectual family from Petrograd. She spoke French fluently and had a cultural finesse which Boris was drawn to. His attraction no doubt bolstered by the fact that Leonid knew Evgenia’s family and heartily approved of the union. Boris, who always sought his father’s approval, duly fell in love with her.

      ‘One СКАЧАТЬ