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

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СКАЧАТЬ to write short works and publish quickly in order to support his family, which after divorce and remarriage had doubled in size. Already, Pasternak’s attitude to his work was one of risk-taking. Completely against being any sort of mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda, he believed it a moral imperative that he write the truth about the age. He considered it dishonest to be in a privileged position against a backdrop of universal deprivation. Yet publication of his work was regularly delayed by censorship problems.

      In August 1929, the whole literary community were affected by an issue that broke out in the press. During the 1920s it was frequent practice among Soviet authors to publish works abroad to secure international copyright (the USSR was not a signatory to any international copyright convention) and to circumvent official censorship. On 26 August the Soviet press accused two authors, Evgenyi Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak, who published abroad, of major acts of treachery involving anti-Soviet slander. The party- and state-organised campaign of vilification played out in the press lasted several weeks, leaving the writing community in a state of fear and insecurity. In the end Zamyatin emigrated to France and Pilnyak was forced to resign from the Writers’ Union. Pasternak took these cases closely to heart as he shared stylistic features and close personal relations with the two writers. These literary witch hunts coincided with the collectivisation of agriculture. Over the next few years, its violent enactment would devastate the rural economy and destroy the lives of millions.

      On 21 September 1932 Pasternak added a note to a collection of poems under preparation at the Federatsiya state publishing house. ‘The Revolution is so unbelievably harsh towards the hundreds of thousands and the millions: yet so gentle towards those with qualifications and those with assured positions.’ Openly voicing the struggles of this oppressive and cruel period of post-revolutionary Russia through his poetry quickly brought counterattacks and noises of displeasure from Soviet authorities. Boris continued fearlessly. As his son Evgeny commented: he ‘had to become the witness to truth and the conscience-bearer for his age’. Perhaps this is because Boris took his own father’s advice to heart. ‘Be honest in your art,’ Leonid Pasternak had encouraged him; ‘then your enemies will be powerless against you.’

      During the summer of 1930 Pasternak composed the poem ‘To a Friend’, bravely addressing it ‘To Boris Pilnyak’ whose recent novella, Mahogany, which presented an idealised portrait of a Trotskyite communist, had been published in Berlin and banned in the Soviet Union. Pasternak’s poem was published in Novy Mir in 1931 and in a reprint that year of Above the Barriers. Written as a statement of solidarity with Pilnyak, and as a warning that writers were under assault, it drew damning comment from Pasternak’s orthodox colleagues and critics. Paradoxically it caused more controversy than the stance taken by Pilnyak and his novella. In ‘To a Friend’, Pasternak wrote:

      And is it not true that my personal measure

      Is the Five-Year Plan, its rise and its fall?

      Yet what can I do with my rib-cage’s pressure

      And with my inertia, most sluggish of all?

      In vain in our day, when the Soviet’s at work

      By high passion all seats on the stage have been taken.

      But the poet has forsaken the place they reserved.

      When that place is not vacant, the poet is in danger

      By 1933, it had become clear that collectivisation – during which at least five million peasants died – had been a terrible and irreversible disaster. As Pasternak would write in Zhivago: ‘I think that collectivisation was both a mistake and a failure, and because that couldn’t be admitted, every means of intimidation had to be used to make people forget how to think and judge for themselves, to force them to see what wasn’t there, and to maintain the contrary of what their eyes told them … And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’ At another point Yury says to Lara: ‘everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common round, has crumbled into dust and been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganisation of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred … ’

      During the Great Terror in the 1930s, during which much of the old Bolshevik elite, generals, writers and artists perished, Pasternak was increasingly forced to retreat into silence, sure that he too would not have to wait long for the late-night knock at his door. His fear and distress were compounded when soon after Vsevolod Meyerhold had invited him to translate Hamlet, the director and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, perished at the hands of the secret police. Boris valiantly persisted in his translation, finding in it ‘the mental space to escape constant fear’.

      His courage paid off. On 14 April 1940 he was asked to read his Hamlet aloud at the Moscow Writers’ Club. Of the evening, he wrote to his cousin Olga Freidenberg: ‘The highest incomparable delight is to read aloud, without cuts, even though it is only half of your work. For three hours you are feeling Man in the highest sense, independent, hot for three hours, you are in spheres you know from the day you were born, from the first half of your life, and then, exhausted, with your energy spent, you are falling back down, nobody knows where to come back to reality.’

      The first time that Olga Ivinskaya saw Boris properly, at close range, and ‘feeling Man’ and ‘hot for three hours’, was the autumn evening in 1946 when he read out his Shakespeare translations at the Moscow museum library. She found him ‘tall and trim, extraordinarily youthful, with the strong neck of a young man, and he spoke in a deep, low voice, conversing with the audience as one talks with an intimate friend or communes with oneself’. In the interval some of the audience summoned up the courage to ask him to read work of his own, but he declined, explaining that the evening was supposed to be devoted to Shakespeare and not to himself. Olga was too nervous to join the ‘privileged people’ brave enough to approach the writer, and left. She arrived home after midnight and, having forgotten her door key, was forced to wake her mother. When her mother angrily reprimanded her, Olga retorted: ‘Leave me alone, I’ve just been talking to God!’

      Olga had spent her adolescent years, along with her friends at school and ‘everybody else of my age’, infatuated with Boris Pasternak. As a teenager she frequently wandered through the streets of Moscow repeating the seductive lines of his poetry over and over to herself. She knew ‘instinctively that these were the words of a god, of the all-powerful “god of detail” and “god of love”.’ When as a teenager she went for her first trip to the sea, in the south, a friend gave her a small volume of Pasternak’s prose, The Childhood of Luvers. Lilac-coloured and shaped like an elongated school exercise book, the binding was rough to the touch. This novella, which Boris started writing in 1917 and had published in 1922, was his first work of prose fiction. Originally published in the Nashia Dni almanac, Pasternak wanted this to be the first part of a novel about the coming-into-consciousness of a young girl, Zhenia Luvers, the daughter of a Belgian factory director in the Urals. Although Zhenia Luvers has typically been viewed as the prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak based much of the characterisation on the childhood of his sister, Josephine.

      Lying on the upper bunk of her sleeping compartment, as the train sped south, Olga tried to fathom how a man could have such insight into a young girl’s secret world. Like many of her peers, she often found it hard to understand Pasternak’s poetic images, as she was accustomed to more traditional verse. ‘But the answers were already in the air all around us,’ she wrote. ‘Spring could be recognised by its “little bundle of laundry/of a patient leaving hospital”. Those “candle-drippings” stuck on the branches in springtime did not have to be called “buds” – it was sorcery and a miracle. It gave you the feeling of personally СКАЧАТЬ