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

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СКАЧАТЬ in Odessa in the eighteenth century. Leonid had blue eyes, was slender and handsome with a trim goatee beard. ‘He always wore a kind of cravat,’ remembers his grandson Charles: ‘Never a tie but a loose white silk scarf tied in a bow. He was not a vain man but he must have fancied his visage as he never stopped making self-portraits.’ Charles had a boyish fascination with the nail on the fourth finger of Leonid’s right hand. ‘He specifically let it grow long so that he could scrape paint that he didn’t want off a canvas.’

      Like Leonid, Rosalia possessed precocious talent. She was a concert pianist who, as a child of nine, had made her public debut to great acclaim in a Mozart piano concerto. From the age of five, she would sit under the grand piano and listen to her older sister’s piano lessons, then reproduce by memory the pieces her sister was playing. Rosalia was a comforting-looking woman, well padded, with thick chestnut hair always in a neat bun and knowing dark eyes. ‘I felt more attracted to Rosa than to her girlfriends and other young women,’ Leonid recalled. ‘This was not only because of her exceptional musical talent – like any natural gift, this conquered all – but also because of her mind, her rare good nature and her spiritual purity.’ Despite Leonid’s attraction to her, he initially fought against a relationship, worried that it might impede her career as a pianist. Leonid was also unsure what he, as an impoverished artist, could offer her, as she was already a professor of the Odessa Conservatory. Fate decreed otherwise, as they kept bumping into each other. Before proposing to her (they married on Valentine’s Day in 1889) Leonid sank into an uncharacteristic period of reflective apathy: ‘One unsolved question did not cease to torment me: was it possible to combine the serious and all-embracing pursuit of art with family life?’

      He need not have worried; for him it definitely was. Sadly, less so for Rosalia. After Boris was born on 10 February 1890, she stopped playing in public, although she still played privately and in her spare time earned money giving piano lessons. In 1895 she came out of retirement to play part of a series of benefits for the Moscow School of Painting and Architecture, where Leonid taught. The journal Moskovskiye Vedomosti reported that ‘the very talented pianist Mrs Rosalia Isidovna Pasternak (wife of a famous artist) played the piano part of Schumann’s quintet’. The concerts were a resounding success.

      As they grew up, the children bore witness to their mother’s career sacrifice and it saddened them. During a family holiday in Schliersee, Bavaria, Josephine overheard her father say to her mother: ‘I now realise that I ought not to have married you. It was my fault. You have sacrificed your genius to me and the family. Of us two, you are the greater artist.’ The children considered this too noble. ‘It would have been better if we had not been born,’ wrote Lydia, ‘but maybe it was vindicated by the existence of Boris.’

      Josephine recalled of their childhood: ‘When I think back about our family as it was before we parted (during the Revolution) I see it thus: three suns or stars, and three minor bodies related to them. The minor bodies were: Alexander, Lydia and myself. The suns were father, mother and Boris. Mother was the brightest sun. However outstanding they were, both with father and Boris one could detect endeavour, quest, in their art. Mother never tried to shine: she shone as naturally as people breathe.’

      In 1903 the Pasternaks took a summer cottage on an estate in the village of Obolenskoye, 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow. Evenings were spent with Rosalia at the piano, her music flooding through the open windows. While the teenage Boris played Cowboys and Indians with his brother Alexander, they stumbled across the next-door house where the pianist Scriabin was staying. Listening to him compose his The Divine Poem, part of his Symphony No 3 in C Minor, Boris was so enchanted that he decided that he too would become a composer. Thanks to Rosalia’s tutelage, he was already an accomplished pianist. ‘From his childhood, my brother was distinguished by an inordinate passion to accomplish things patently beyond his powers, ludicrously inappropriate to his character and cast of mind,’ said Alexander.

      Part of what Alexander was referring to was a fantasy of his brother’s which ended in disaster. The veranda of the family’s rented dacha had a sweeping view across water meadows and every evening peasant girls galloped by on their unsaddled horses, taking the herd to the grazing land for the night. They were illuminated by the setting sun. Its glowing rays captured the bay horses, the motley skirts and shawls and the sunburnt faces of the riders. Boris longed to ride in this romantic cavalcade, despite having no riding experience. When, on 6 August, one of the peasants failed to show up, Boris rode off on a wild horse that bucked him to the ground. The whole family watched, aghast, as he fell under the horse and the herd thundered over him. The accident left him with a broken leg which, when the cast came off after six weeks, remained shorter than the other. This caused a lifelong limp. As a result, he was unfit for military service – which may, in the long run, have saved his life.

      The disability rankled. Boris hated failure in anything, and this helps explain why, despite considerable success in composition, he decided to give up his musical aspirations when he realised that he had a ‘secret trouble’. ‘I lacked perfect pitch,’ Pasternak wrote later. ‘This was quite unnecessary to me in my work but the discovery was a grief and humiliation and I took it as proof that my music was rejected by heaven or fate. I had not the courage to stand up to all these blows and I lost heart. For six years I had lived for music. Now I tore it up and flung it from me as you throw away your dearest treasure.’

      However, when he had abandoned music, fate played her hand: he took up verse and found his true calling. Once he discovered his vocation as a writer, it was his father’s working relationship with Leo Tolstoy that was to indelibly influence Boris’s creative life and stringent writing ethic.

      In 1898 Leonid’s career hit a high note when Leo Tolstoy commissioned him to illustrate Resurrection, which had taken him ten years to write. Tolstoy had met Leonid five years earlier in 1893 when he attended the regular exhibition of the Wanderers (a show case of distinguished Moscow and St Petersburg artists). Tolstoy was introduced to Leonid and shown Pasternak’s painting The Debutante. Leonid was invited to Tolstoy’s Moscow home the following Friday for tea and told to bring his portfolio. When Tolstoy saw some illustrations that Leonid had done with War and Peace in mind, he turned to Leonid and said: ‘They offer the squirrel nuts when it’s lost its teeth. You know, when I wrote War and Peace, I dreamed of having such illustrations. It’s really wonderful, just wonderful!’

      Working with Tolstoy on Resurrection at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoys’ country estate situated in the Tula region, was a privileged, immensely enjoyable yet challenging time for Leonid. ‘Some of the most memorable and happiest days of my life were spent reading the manuscript in the daytime and conversing with Tolstoy in the evenings.’ He would walk up and down the hall with the writer, discussing what he had read and planned to illustrate the following day. Once, when Tolstoy saw one of Leonid’s illustrations he exclaimed: ‘Ah, you express that better than me. I must go and change my prose.’

      Under incredible pressure to meet the deadlines of Tolstoy’s St Petersburg publisher and do the writer he worshipped justice, Leonid diligently completed thirty-three illustrations in six weeks, afterwards falling ill, burnt out with exhaustion. This intense collaboration made an enduring impression on Boris. ‘It was from our kitchen that my father’s remarkable illustrations for Tolstoy’s Resurrection were dispatched,’ he said.

      The novel appeared, chapter by chapter, in the journal Niva, a periodical edited by the Petersburg publisher Fyodor Marx. Boris was struck by how feverishly his father had to work to meet the deadline. ‘I remember how pressed for time father was. The issues of the journal came out regularly without delay,’ he wrote. ‘One had to be in time for each issue. Tolstoy kept back the proofs, revising them again and again. There was the risk that the illustrations would be at variance with the corrections subsequently introduced into it. But my father’s sketches came from the same source whence the author obtained his observations, the courtroom, the transit prison, the country, the railway. It was the reservoir of living details, the identical realistic presentation СКАЧАТЬ