Lara
Page 4
She did go straight into the pages of his book. In Doctor Zhivago Pasternak describes Lara’s daughter Katenka: ‘A little girl of about eight came in, her hair done up in finely braided plaits. Her narrow eyes had a sly, mischievous look and went up at the corners when she laughed. She knew her mother had a visitor, she had heard his voice outside the door, but she thought it necessary to put on an air of surprise. She curtsied and looked at Yury with the fearless, unblinking stare of a lonely child who had started to think early in life.’
From the moment that Boris entered Olga’s family’s life, he felt torn – torn between his love and loyalty to them, and to his wife Zinaida and their son Leonid. Just as years before he had previously been torn between Zinaida and his first wife, Evgenia, and their son, Evgeny. Almost a decade earlier, on 1 October 1937, Pasternak had written to his parents about the unsettled air of regret in his home: ‘A divided family, lacerated by suffering and constantly looking over our shoulders at that other family, the first ones.’
Although Boris was tortured by guilt for the suffering he caused Zinaida (and to Evgenia before her), part of him seemed to enjoy – or at least need – the drama of anguish. Renouncing Olga was never something he seriously considered. Early into his affair with Olga he told his artist friend Liusia Popova that he had fallen in love. When asked about Zinaida, he replied: ‘What is life if not love? She [Olga] is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person. And now this golden sun has come into my life, it is so wonderful. So wonderful. I never thought I would still know such joy.’
2
Mother Land and Wonder Papa
Pasternak inherited his prodigious work ethic from his father, Leonid, a post-impressionist painter, who exerted the greatest influence on his son’s creative life. All Leonid’s four children – Boris, Alexander, Josephine and Lydia – grew up acutely aware of their father’s ‘shining perennial example of artistry’ and felt discomfiture that Boris’s fame eclipsed their father’s.
Before the Revolution, when the family lived together in Moscow, it was Leonid, not Boris, who was the better known. Leonid worked through one of the greatest periods of Russian cultural life. He painted and socialised with Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, the composer Alexander Scriabin and the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, who founded the St Petersburg Conservatory. The Russian painter Ilya Repin gained such respect for Leonid that he later sent him art students. There was definitely the feeling in the family that Leonid and his pianist wife, Rosalia, were overlooked. There was a silent shame, unspoken by all but Boris, that he had outshone them both.
In 1934, when Boris was forty-four, he wrote to Leonid: ‘You were a real man, a Colossus, and before this image, large and wide as the world, I am a complete nonentity and in every respect still a boy as I was then.’ In November 1945, a few months after Leonid died, Boris told Josephine: ‘I wrote to father that he need not have been dismayed that his enormous services have not received even a hundredth of the recognition they deserve … that there is no justice in our lives, that he will ultimately triumph, having lived such a sincere, natural, interesting, itinerant and rich life.’
Where Leonid undoubtedly triumphed was in his rich personal life. His marriage to Rosalia was blessed; the couple were genuinely devoted to each other. Leonid was a rare artist in that he was a truly contented man. He considered himself lucky both to pursue a profession he revered and to marry a woman he loved. Unlike many artists, he always had time for his children. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Boris. The writer always put his work before his family, while they would not have considered it appropriate to challenge this. ‘He was a genius,’ Evgeny said of his father, Boris, by way of explanation for the writer’s parenting shortfalls. ‘He was that rare thing – a free man. He was much ahead of his time and it was not easy for him to follow his dream. It is so sad if you have to sacrifice your genius for your family. We only went to him when strictly necessary. I was glad of his assistance but never asked for it. We didn’t bother him. He was a man of power and we knew and respected that.’
None of Leonid’s children ever felt that they were secondary to his art or that anything could be more important in their father’s life. In fact they became his art. Contemporaries used to joke that ‘Pasternak’s children were the main breadwinners in the family’, as they were his favoured subjects. A master of rapid drawings, capturing characteristic movements and poses, his charcoal sketches of family life are considered some of his most powerful compositions. From these affectionate drawings alone, it is clear that Rosalia was a devoted mother. Her body is always portrayed leaning in towards her children; whether she is sitting with them at the piano or watching them study or draw, her quiet maternal presence is palpable.
Leonid met Rosalia Isidorovna Kaufman in Odessa, where he grew up, in 1885 when he was twenty-three and she was eighteen. The Pasternaks were of Jewish descent, whose forebears had settled 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 wa
s 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 of ideas that saved him from the danger of digressing from the spirit of the original.’
In view of the urgency of the matter, special precautions were taken to prevent any delay in the sending of the illustrations. The services of the conductors of the express trains at the Nikolayevsky railway were enlisted; the guards on the express trains to St Petersburg acted as messengers.
‘My imagination was impressed by the sight of a uniformed guard waiting outside our kitchen door, as on a station platform outside a railway carriage,’ wrote Boris. ‘Joiner’s glue sizzled on the range. The drawings were hastily sprinkled with fixative and glued on sheets of cardboard, and the parcels, wrapped up, tied and sealed up with sealing wax and handed over to the guard.’ The whole family was involved in this endeavour – Rosalia used to help with the pressured business of packing and mailing the illustrations, while the children watched, rapt.
Thirty years later, on 21 May 1939, Pasternak wrote to his father: ‘Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter [Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya-Esenina] came to see me with a friend of hers and they talked a great deal about you. She had already spoken to me several times before about how she loved your illustrations. “Of all Tolstoy’s illustrators, not one has come close to him or embodies his ideas so faithfully as your father” – “Yes, yes, the drawings for Resurrection, they’re just brilliant,” put in the other. And we all agreed that you have no equal.’
Tolstoy died on 7 November 1910 while ‘fleeing the world’ at Astapovo train station. The world’s press was camped out on the platform. Leonid was summoned to make a drawing of the deceased writer on his death bed and took the twenty-year-old Boris with him. Boris watched as his father drew in pastel the corner of the room where Countess Tolstoy sat ‘shrunken, mournful, humiliated’ at the head of the iron bed where her husband was lying. Sofia Tolstoy explained to Leonid that after Tolstoy left her, due to antagonisms between her and his disciples, she had tried to drown herself and had to be dragged out of the lake at Yasnaya Polyana. It took Leonid fifteen minutes to complete the death-bed drawing. In his notebook, Leonid wrote: ‘Astapovo. Morning. Sofia Andreyevna at his bedside. The people’s farewell. Finale of a family tragedy.’
The summer before the 1917 Revolution, Boris Pasternak was visiting his parents at the apartment they rented in a manor house in a Molodi estate, 60 kilometres south of Moscow. It was thought that the house had served as a lodge for Catherine II’s journeys to the south of Crimea. The generous proportions of the manor and grand layout of the park, with its converging avenues, suggested royal origins. While his first collection of poetry, Above the Barriers, was being prepared, Pasternak went to work as an industrial office clerk to support the war effort. The twenty-seven-year-old poet was given a job in a chemical works in an industrial town called Tikhiye Gory, on the banks of the River Kama in the Republic of Tatarstan. This town, known as ‘Little Manchester’, was at an imp
ortant intersection of geographical and trade routes uniting East and Western Russia. While fulfilling his daily filing duties, Pasternak did not cease his literary work. In order to earn money he began translating Swinburne’s trilogy of dramas about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
‘In March 1917, when news of the Revolution that had broken out in Petersburg came through, I set out for Moscow,’ Pasternak later wrote. ‘At the Izhevsk factory I was to find and pick up Zbarsky, a fine fellow of an engineer who had been sent there on a work assignment, place myself at his disposal and then continue my journey with him. From the Tikhiye Gory we sped on in a covered wagon on runners, for an evening, right through the night and part of the following day. Wrapped up in three long coats and half buried in hay, I rolled on the floor of the sleigh like some bulky sack, robbed of any freedom of movement.’
The February Revolution was focused around Petrograd (now St Petersburg). In the chaos, members of the Imperial Parliament assumed control of the country, forming a provisional government. The army leadership felt that they did not have the means to suppress the Revolution, resulting in Tsar Nicholas’s abdication. A period of dual power ensued, during which the provisional government held state power while the national network of ‘soviets’, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the working classes and the political left. During this period there were frequent mutinies, protests and strikes as attempts at political reform failed and the proletariat gained power. In the October Revolution (November in the Gregorian calendar) the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, overthrew the provisional government and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, moving the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918 out of fear of imminent foreign invasion. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside. Civil war subsequently erupted among the ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks) and ‘Whites’ (anti-socialist factions). It continued for several years, creating poverty, famine and fear, especially amongst the intelligentsia. The Bolsheviks eventually defeated the Whites and all rival socialists, paving the way for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.