Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  In Doctor Zhivago, Yury Zhivago bears witness to the momentous political upheaval:

  The paper was a late extra, printed on one side only; it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People’s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were established in Russia. There followed the first decrees of the new government and various brief news items received by telegraph and telephone.

  The blizzard slashed at Yury’s eyes and covered the printed page with a grey, rustling snowy gruel, but it was not the snowstorm that prevented Yury from reading. He was shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment and the thought of its significance for centuries to come.

  After 1917 life in Moscow was harrowing. Food and fuel were scarce and living conditions poor. Fortunately, Boris’s brother Alexander, a budding architect, knew exactly which bits of roof beams could be cut away and sawn up for firewood without causing the whole house to collapse, as a number did in the Moscow winter of 1918–19. Fuel was in such demand that at night Boris broke planks from rotten fences or stole firewood from government places, and guests invited for tea brought a log as a gift instead of sweets or chocolates. In the grey hours before sunrise, the Pasternak children would set out for the Boloto, a market where villagers sold what vegetables they could. In Zhivago, Pasternak recalls the privations and pressures of war, the resulting famine and spread of typhoid:

  Winter was at hand and in the world of men the air was heavy with something as inexorable as the coming death of nature. It was on everybody’s lips.

  Food and logs had to be got in. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become an abstract notion, and food and firewood were replaced by the problems of alimentation and fuel supply.

  The people in the towns were as helpless as children in the face of the unknown – of that unknown which swept every known usage aside and left nothing but desolation in its wake – although it was the offspring and creation of the towns.

  People were still talking and deceiving themselves as their daily life struggled on, limping and shuffling to its unknown destination. But Yury saw it as it was, he could see that it was doomed, and that he and such as he were sentenced to destruction. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. The days were counted, and these days were running out before his eyes.

  … He understood that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future. He both feared and loved that future and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if saying good-bye, was avidly aware of the trees and clouds and of the people walking in the streets, of the great Russian city struggling through misfortune – and he was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better but was powerless to do anything.

  In 1921, to Boris’s great distress, his sisters and parents left Russia and travelled to Germany. Unbeknownst to any of them, they would never live in Russia together again. Deprived of her rights for higher education in Russia – just as any offspring of a non-proletarian family in the post-revolutionary climate was – Josephine went to Berlin on her own, keen to enter a university and rent accommodation for her parents, who intended to come after her. She was soon joined by Lydia, Leonid and Rosalia. Boris and Alexander stayed on at the family’s studio apartment at 14 Volkhonka Street in Moscow, as they had embarked on their respective careers as writer and architect. Rosalia and Leonid had managed to obtain visas for Germany for a long course of health treatment – Leonid had to have a cataract removed and Rosalia had heart problems. The hungry years of the Revolution had undermined their health, strength and spirit, while Leonid Pasternak was deeply concerned by the threat that he would lose his Moscow apartment to state requisition. However, it never occurred to any of the family that they would not be reunited in Russia after the country’s upheavals.

  Josephine’s last memories of her childhood in Moscow were the gruelling winters when the town was covered in snow and the citizens had to report at labour centres. ‘They were given spades and perhaps a day’s ration and had to clear the roads,’ she remembered. ‘Lydia was underage and did not need to report, but she went instead of me as I was not strong enough to shovel the heavy snow. She and Boris were in the same group. It must have been an unforgettable day … A day of such brilliance of sun and snow, of purity of landscape, of concerted effort and of friendliness among the people at work.’ In Doctor Zhivago, to escape starvation and the political uncertainties in Moscow after the 1917 Revolution, the Zhivago family travels to Varykino, Tonya’s ancestral estate in the Urals. When their train is halted by snowdrifts, the civilian passengers are commandeered to clear the rails. Yury Zhivago remembers these three days as the most pleasant part of their journey:

  But the sun sparkled on the blinding whiteness and Yury cut clean slices out of the snow, starting landfalls of dry diamond fires. It reminded him of his childhood. He saw himself in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn into the curly fleece, cutting the same dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream buns and fortresses and cave cities. Life had had a splendid taste in those far-off days, everything had been a feast for the eyes and for the stomach!

  But at this time, too, during their three days of work in the open air, the workers had a feeling of pleasantly full stomachs. And no wonder. At night they were issued with great chunks of hot fresh bread (no one knew where it came from or by whose orders); it had a tasty crisp crust, shiny on top, cracked at the side and with bits of charcoal baked into it underneath.

  Berlin in the 1920s was a period of high productivity for Leonid Pasternak, as the city had become a meeting place of the Russian intelligentsia. Over 100,000 Russians were living in exile. Leonid painted and befriended Albert Einstein, and the opera singer Chaliapin, who was rehearsing for his Berlin recital. He also sketched and painted the Russian composer, pianist and conductor Prokofiev at the piano, painter Max Liebermann and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was to enjoy an intense correspondence with Boris.

  It was an immeasurable source of pain for Boris that after his parents left Moscow, he only saw them once again. He visited them in Berlin in 1922 and lived with them for nearly a year with his first wife, Evgenia. Afterwards, in the ensuing correspondence, lasting over twenty years, the constant ache of his missing them and echo of regret is tangible.

  Conditions meanwhile were worsening throughout Russia, with food shortages and ration cards introduced in 1929. Collectivisation was regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution, mainly in grain deliveries in Russia. In 1930, there was a decree of the Federation of Soviet Writers’ Associations providing for the formation of writers’ shock brigades, to be sent out to the collective and state farms.

  The conditions that Pasternak witnessed at the state farms stressed and depressed him; he regarded what he saw as inhuman. ‘Among them was the war with its bloodshed and its horrors, its homelessness, savagery and isolation, its trials and worldly wisdom which is taught,’ he later wrote in Doctor Zhivago. ‘Here too were the lonely little towns where you were stranded by the war, and the people with whom it threw you together. Such a new thing, too, was the Revolution, not the one idealised in student fashion in 1905, but this new upheaval, today’s born of the war, bloody, pitiless, elemental, the soldiers’ revolution, led by the professional, the Bolsheviks.’ It made you question your loyalty to what mattered in life. Everything and everyone felt deposed. Nothing seemed sacred anymore; not even loyalty to your spouse:

  Everything had changed suddenly – the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, who to listen to. As if all of your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgement you respected. At such a time you felt the need to entrust yourself to something absolute – life or truth or beauty – of being ruled by it now that man-made rules had been d
iscarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life which was now abolished and gone for good.

  Josephine Pasternak last set eyes on Boris at Berlin train station in the summer of 1935. On 23 June the Kremlin had insisted that Boris attend an anti-fascist writers’ congress in Paris. This summons was a rushed exercise in Soviet propaganda, as the ‘Congress for the Defence of Culture’ had already commenced in Paris two days earlier. The Kremlin recognised suddenly that Boris Pasternak’s absence from a line-up that included the world’s leading writers – including Gide, Bloch and Cocteau from France, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley from Britain, as well as Brecht and Heinrich Mann from Germany – would be a cause of international dismay. Despite suffering from chronic insomnia and depression so debilitating that it had led him to spend months in the writers’ country sanatorium outside Moscow earlier that spring, the Kremlin ordered Pasternak to go immediately to Paris. He was, however, granted six hours free to stop off in Berlin.

  Boris had telegrammed his family from Russia prior to his departure to say that he dearly hoped to see Josephine and Frederick along with his parents during this fleeting visit. Rosalia and Leonid were in Munich at the time and regrettably were not strong enough to make an impromptu journey to Berlin. But Josephine and Frederick immediately travelled overnight from Munich, arriving at the family’s Berlin apartment the following morning to await Boris’s arrival.

  Josephine was troubled by a new fragility in her older brother’s emotional state. He had been unwell for months, exhausted and distressed by Stalin’s reign of terror on writers and his own inner torment. Despite being hailed as ‘one of the greatest poets of our time’ when he was introduced at the writers’ congress the following day, he felt ashamed of his esteemed reputation. Afterwards he wrote to his father that the whole event had left him with ‘the bitter dregs of a terrible, inflated self-importance, ludicrous over-estimation and embarrassment, and – worst of all – a sort of gilded captivity’. So severe was his nervous exhaustion and depression that when initially requested to go to Paris for the conference, he had rung Stalin’s secretary in person to protest that he was too unwell to attend. ‘If there was a war and you were called to serve, would you go?’ he was asked. Yes, Boris replied. Well, ‘regard yourself as having been called to serve’, was the reply.

  Within twenty-four hours an ill-fitting suit was bought for him and two days later he arrived at midday by taxi at his parents’ apartment in Berlin, which Josephine and Frederick had opened up in readiness for his visit. ‘I do not remember my brother’s first words or his greeting, or how we all embraced each other: everything was overshadowed by the strangeness of his bearing,’ recalled Josephine. ‘He behaved as if only a few weeks, not twelve years, had separated us. Every now and again he burst into tears. And he had one wish only: to sleep!’

  Josephine and Frederick drew the curtains and insisted that Boris lie down on the sofa. They sat with him while he slept for two or three hours. Josephine was increasingly anxious, as she knew that Boris had to be at the Friedrichstrasse train station for around six that evening and as yet they had not had time to talk. When Boris woke up he seemed mildly refreshed; however Frederick tried to persuade him to rest further and continue on to Paris the following morning. The three of them travelled by underground to the Soviet embassy 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.