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

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СКАЧАТЬ to draw Pasternak into the literary establishment. For the main part he was left alone, while the purges on writers continued with terrifying frequency and force. In October 1937, his great friend Titsian Tabidze was expelled from the Union of Georgian Writers and arrested. Paolo Yashvili, rather than be forced into denouncing Tabidze, shot himself dead at the offices of the Writers’ Union.

      When in 1937 Osip Mandelstam was allowed to return from exile, Zinaida feared having any contact with him and his wife, in case it threatened her family’s safety. Boris abhorred what he saw as such moral cowardice. On several occasions, Zinaida prevented him from receiving friends and colleagues at Peredelkino for fear of contagion by association. Once, when Osip and Nadezhda turned up at the Peredelkino dacha, Zinaida refused to receive them. She forced her husband back onto the verandah to tell his friends lamely and with considerable embarrassment: ‘Zinaida seems to be baking pies.’ According to Olga Ivinskaya, Zinaida always ‘loathed’ the Mandelstams, who she considered were compromising her ‘loyal’ husband. Olga claimed that Zinaida was famous ‘for her immortal phrase: “My sons love Stalin most of all – and then their Mummy.”’

      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.’

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