Given how profoundly he revered his parents and loved his siblings, his choice to stay in Soviet Russia and to live apart from them was surprising. Despite the unbearable oppression of Stalin’s censorship of the 1920s and ’30s, he did not consider leaving Russia. On 2 February 1932 he had written to his parents about his calling to his beloved ‘Mother land’: ‘This fate of not belonging to oneself, of living in a prison cell warmed from all sides – it transforms you, it makes you a prisoner of time. For herein too lies the primeval cruelty of poor Russia; once she bestows her love upon someone, her beloved is caught forever within her sights. It is as if he stands before her in the Roman arena, forced to provide her with a spectacle in return for her love.’
He continuously made it plain that he did not want to live the life of an exile. Yet, after the Revolution he was in emotional exile from his family. However successful he became, there is a sense that he was rudderless without them. Always searching, in many ways, he was lost. It was a constant source of shame and self-reproach that he was not able to emulate his parents’ stable and happy union. He may have fallen in love easily, but his inability to sustain a happy marriage was one of his greatest torments.
3
The Cloud Dweller
It was at a party in Moscow in 1921 that the thirty-one-year-old Boris met the painter Evgenia Vladimirovna Lure. Petite and elegant, with blue eyes and soft brown hair, Evgenia came from a traditional Jewish intellectual family from Petrograd. She spoke French fluently and had a cultural finesse which Boris was drawn to. His attraction no doubt bolstered by the fact that Leonid knew Evgenia’s family and heartily approved of the union. Boris, who always sought his father’s approval, duly fell in love with her.
‘One wanted to bathe in her face,’ he said, but also pointed out that ‘she always needed this illumination in order to be beautiful, she had to have happiness in order to be liked’. An insecure and vulnerable beauty, she was flattered by the famous writer’s interest in her. By the spring of 1922, they were married. ‘Zhenya’ was twenty-one years old.
If relationships act as mirrors to our flaws and our needs, Boris learned much about himself during his first marriage. Evgenia also had a volatile, artistic streak and their clash of egos was not conducive to marital harmony. Boris’s fame was impacting his ego; he did not consider Evgenia enough of an artist to merit her difficult, emotional behaviour. Of the two of them, he considered himself the greater artist and assumed Evgenia would lay aside her ambition to help foster his, just as he had witnessed his mother do for his father. While he was by nature active, preferring to run everywhere rather than walk – probably to help burn off his excess nervous energy – Evgenia was languid, preferring to sit around the house. Energetically, they did not seem compatible.
Boris travelled with his new wife to Berlin for a holiday in the summer of 1922. It was Evgenia’s first time abroad and the newlyweds relished their time in the German capital, visiting bustling cafes and art galleries. While Evgenia liked to sightsee and enjoy the pulsating life of fashionable quarters, Boris, like Tolstoy, was more drawn to the ‘real Germany’: the misery of slums in the northern districts of the city.
Boris was paid in dollars for some of his translation work. He spent his money freely. Ashamed of having so much relative to the poverty of so many, his tips, like his brother-in-law Frederick’s, were always blushingly generous. According to Josephine, who sometimes accompanied her brother on his walks around Berlin, he also ‘showered hard cash upon pale urchins with outstretched hands’. Boris explained his and Tolstoy’s attraction to the less privileged: ‘people of an artistic nature will be attracted by the poor, by those with a difficult, modest lot in life. There everything is warmer and riper, and there is more soul and colour there than anywhere else.’
Once the first cloudless weeks of gallery visiting and seeing old friends were over, the writer began to get restless, and irritable. Evgenia suffered from gingivitis, an inflammation of the gums, which caused her to cry a lot. But Boris was indifferent to her suffering. ‘We, the family, sided with her,’ explained Josephine, ‘but what could we do? Boris did not display any kind of callousness: he simply seemed fed up with the incongruity of the whole set-up – the boarding house, the lack of privacy, his wife’s uncontrollable tearful moods.’ The family raised eyebrows further when he decided to take a room of his own where he could work in peace. This they considered sheer extravagance. The last straw came when Evgenia discovered that she was pregnant. The quarrels became fiercer: ‘A child! Slavery! It is your concern, after all,’ Boris would say to his wife, ‘you are the mother.’
‘What?’ Zhenya would cry out, ‘mine? Mine? Oh! You, you – you forget that I am devoted to my art, you selfish creature!’
The main source of their tension was whether and when they should return to Moscow. Boris was keen to get back to Russia, while Evgenia preferred Berlin, ‘Russia’s second capital’. The vitality of Russian intellectual life reached its zenith in the early 1920s, then declined under the impact of widespread political unrest and soaring inflation. The bleakness of Germany’s fate saddened Pasternak, who later wrote: ‘Germany was cold and starving, deceived about nothing and deceiving no one, her hand stretched out to the age like a beggar (a gesture not her own at all) and the entire country on crutches.’ Typically theatrical, he added that it took him ‘a daily bottle of brandy and Charles Dickens to forget it’.
Back in Moscow the couple moved into the Pasternaks’ old apartment on Volkhonka Street. Soon after returning, on 23 September 1923, their son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, was born. ‘He is so tiny – how could we give him a new, an unfamiliar name?’ Boris wrote. ‘So we chose what was closest to him: the name of his mother – Zhenya.’
Uncertain of his income, and unable to make ends meet with the advances from publishers for his own work and translations, Pasternak worked for a short time as a researcher for the Library of the People’s Commissariat for Education in Moscow. Here he was responsible for reading through foreign papers and censoring – cutting out – all references to Lenin. He turned this mundane exercise to his advantage: scouring the foreign press enabled him to keep abreast of Western European literature. During intervals he read, amongst others, Proust, Conrad and Hemingway. He also joined the Left Front of Arts, whose journal, LEF, was edited by the poet and actor Vladimir Mayakovski, who had been two years below Boris at school. When Boris became part of the front it was more as a gesture of solidarity to his old associate than a genuine desire to become actively involved in the group and its revolutionary agenda, and he broke with them in 1928. That same year he sent the first part of his autobiographical prose offering Safe Conduct to a literary journal for publication.
In April 1930 Mayakovski suffered a mental breakdown, penned a suicide note and killed himself. His funeral, attended by around 150,000 people, was the third-largest event of public mourning in Soviet history, surpassed only by those of Lenin and Stalin. In 1936, Stalin proclaimed that he ‘was and remains the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch’. Olga later wrote of Mayakovski: ‘In many ways the antidote of Pasternak, he combined powerful poetic gifts with a romantic anguish which could find relief only in total service to the Revolution – at the cost of suppressing in himself the urgent personal emotions evident in his pre-revolutionary work’.
Increasingly frustrated that he did not have the freedom to write what his heart desired, Pasternak found his daily life almost intolerable. Working conditions – always of utmost importance to Boris – had become unbearable. The entire Volkhonka Street block had been requisitioned by the state and turned into one communal apartment housing six families: a total of twenty people, sharing one bathroom and kitchen. Boris and his family were granted permission to use his father’s old art studio as their living space. It was incredibly noisy, so Pasternak moved his work to the area which served as a dining room. Hardly conducive to concentration: it was open house to the other families, their visitors and rel
atives. Pasternak was at this time working on an intricate translation into Russian of Rainer Maria Rilke’s haunting ‘Requiem for a Lady Friend’, which the writer had penned as a tribute to his friend the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who suddenly died eighteen days after giving birth to her first child.
By 1930 Pasternak had become infatuated again – this time with Zinaida Neigaus. What is extraordinary is that for a man with such a fierce sense of morality, Pasternak failed to honour one of the most basic codes of life – he ran off with the wife of one of his best friends.
He admired the esteemed pianist Genrikh Neigaus almost to the point of obsession. In a letter to his mother on 6 March 1930 he had written: ‘The only bright spot in our existence is the very varied performances by my latest friend (for the past year), Heinrich Neuhaus [Genrikh Neigaus]. We – a few of his friends – have got into the habit of spending the rest of the night after a concert at one another’s homes. There’s abundant drink, with very modest snacks which for technical reasons are almost impossible to get hold of.’
Boris was quickly enthralled by Zinaida. The daughter of a St Petersburg factory owner, from a Russian Orthodox family, with her black hair cut short and well-defined lips, she was a classic ‘art nouveau’ figure. She was also everything Evgenia was not. While Evgenia was highly emotional and yearned for the fulfilment of her own creative life, Zinaida Neigaus was happy to facilitate her husband’s career. When Genrikh gave winter concerts in cold halls, Zinaida would organise the arrival of the grand piano and lug the firewood in herself to stoke the fire. While her husband remained with his head in the artistic clouds – he was proud of telling friends that his practical skills were limited to fastening a safety pin – Zinaida raised their two sons, Adrian and Stanislav. She was endlessly energetic, robust, domestic and practical, unlike the elegant but languid Evgenia. Boris’s nephew Charles, who met both women, remembered: ‘Despite Boris’s ardent description of Zinaida, I found her (admittedly more than twenty-five years later in 1961) one of the ugliest women I have ever met. Evgenia was softer, more sensitive and far more attractive than the harsh, raven-haired, chain-smoking Zinaida.’
Pasternak’s interest in Zinaida grew during the summer of 1930 when he and Evgenia holidayed in Irpen near their friends, the historian Valentin Asmus, and his wife, Irina. Zinaida, Genrikh and their sons, then aged two and three, made up the party, along with Boris’s brother Alexander (called Shura by the family), his wife Irina and their son Fedia. Irpen was beautiful: languorous heat, oxen grazing in the fields, meadows filled with wild flowers and in the far distance, the shaded banks of the River Irpen: summer at its fullest and finest. Boris and Evgenia’s dacha stood in its own grounds surrounded by woods. Evgenia spent part of the summer painting an oil of a gigantic spreading oak tree which filled their plot of land. Long evenings were spent eating outside, watching fireflies and candles flicker in the dusk, discussing philosophy or literature, reciting poetry and listening to Genrikh play.
Zinaida had arranged for a grand piano to be delivered from Kiev so that her husband could practise for a recital that he was giving on the open-air stage of Kiev’s Kupechesky Gardens on 15 August. The whole group from Irpen attended the concert. As the humid night progressed, thunderclouds gathered. Genrikh played the Chopin Concerto in E minor to great acclaim. By the end of the performance, a violent storm had broken out, with flashing lightening and thunderous noise. While the pianist and orchestra were sheltered under a platform canopy, the audience became drenched. Yet they all remained, happily entranced by the music. This evening and Genrikh’s playing of Chopin’s E-minor Concerto formed the subject of Pasternak’s poem ‘Ballade’, which he dedicated to Genrikh.
While the summer proved to be the perfect tonic for Boris, Zinaida and Evgenia had taken against each other – perhaps intuitive to the fact that they were soon to become rivals. Initially, Zinaida tried to avoid the Pasternaks. She was not only alarmed by Boris’s excessive praise of her domestic prowess – he would take any chance to help or gather firewood, bring in water from the well or hang around her to sniff her freshly scented ironing – but because she disliked Evgenia. Zinaida, rigorous to the point of military standards in her domesticity, found the elegant, ethereal Evgenia spoilt, lethargic and indulgent. Meanwhile Evgenia dismissed the stocky Italianate-looking woman as unsophisticated and coarse. Boris blithely ignored the mounting tensions between them.
The group broke up in September and by the end of the month, only Boris and Zinaida’s families were left. They were all due to leave early next morning. The night before, Zinaida, having already packed, went to Boris’s dacha to see if they were ready. She found Evgenia assembling the canvases that she had painted all summer, while Boris was busy putting things in suitcases with the painstaking care he had learned as a child. As there was little time left, Zinaida swept in and efficiently finished all their packing. Boris was lost in admiration. Zinaida, with her proprietorial and bossy nature, must, however, have been wholly unwelcome to poor Evgenia. Later, Boris expressed his veneration for Zinaida in the opening lines of the first poem in the collection Second Birth.
Would I have found the strength to act,
without the dream I dreamed in Irpen?
Which showed me what largesse a life could hold,
the night we packed our things to go.
The following evening the two families boarded the Moscow-bound train from Kiev. Genrikh and his two sons were asleep when Zinaida stepped out into the corridor to smoke. Boris left Evgenia and their son sleeping too, to follow Zinaida. For three hours they stood in the corridor talking as the train rattled on. Boris, who could contain himself no longer, confessed his love for Zinaida.
In an almost comical attempt to dampen his ardour, Zinaida recounted an episode from her childhood. She told Boris that from the age of fifteen she had been the mistress of her cousin, Nicolai Melitinsky, who was then forty-five. Her father, a military engineer, who had married her eighteen-year-old half-Italian mother when he was fifty, had died when Zinaida was ten. Finances had been tight for her mother, who scraped to send her to the Smolny Institute for girls. Meanwhile she and her middle-aged cousin met for trysts in a flat rented for that purpose. The guilt of these years was later to torment and appal her.
Naively, she had not bargained for the fact that the burgeoning novelist in Pasternak would be more engaged by her tale of humiliation than dispirited or disgusted. Shortly afterwards, Boris described her as a ‘beauty of the Mary Queen of Scots type, judging by her fate’. Zinaida’s teenage affair was to become Lara’s ‘backstory’ in Doctor Zhivago: she is seduced by the much older lawyer Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky: ‘Her hands astonished him like a sublime idea. Her shadow on the wall of the hotel room had seemed to him the outline of innocence. Her vest was stretched over her breast, as firmly and simply as linen on an embroidery frame … Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.’ When Lara talks of how damaged she is by her affair with Komarovksy, you can almost hear Zinaida on the train trying to discourage Boris. ‘There is something broken in me, there is something broken in my whole life,’ Lara says to Yury Zhivago. ‘I discovered life much too early, I was made to discover it, and I was made to see it from the very worst side – a cheap, distorted version of it – through the eyes of an elderly roué. One of those useless, self-satisfied egoists of the old days who took advantage of everything and allowed themselves whatever they fancied.’
The seeds for Lara’s character were sown by his meeting Zinaida, but when Boris later fell for Olga Ivinskaya, it was she who fully embodied as a living archetype his Lara.
Soon after his return from Irpen, Boris caused mayhem. Selfishly putting his own desires first, he confessed his love for Zinaida to Evgenia, then went to Genrikh and declared his devotion to the pianist’s wife. In typical Boris style, the meeting was emotional and highly charged, with both men weeping. Boris spoke of his deep admiration and affection for Ge
nrikh, and in an act of gauche insensitivity presented him with a copy of ‘Ballade’. He then insisted that he was incapable of spending his life without Zinaida.
Boris’s confidante, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, thought her friend was falling headlong into disaster. ‘I fear for Boris,’ she wrote. ‘In Russia poets die as an epidemic – a whole list of deaths in ten years. A catastrophe is unavoidable; first, the husband. Second, Boris has a wife and son; third, she is beautiful (Boris will be jealous) and fourth and chiefly, Boris is incapable of a happy love. For him to love means to be tortured.’
If Pasternak was tortured, so too were the women he loved. For months Zinaida would be torn by overwhelming guilt at breaking up her marriage. Boris was similarly racked over his treatment of Evgenia, writing to his parents in March 1931 that he had caused Evgenia ‘undiminished suffering’. He concluded that his wife loved him because she did not understand him and deluded himself that she needed rest and freedom – ‘complete freedom’ to realise herself professionally. He appeared to be projecting – he needed freedom from his unhappy marriage to Evgenia, while the melodrama he thrived on was exactly the creative fuel he required.
On New Year’s Day 1931, when Genrikh left for a concert tour of Siberia, Boris began obsessively calling on Zinaida, as often as three times a day, and temporarily moved out of the family’s apartment. Unable to withstand Zinaida’s vacillation any longer, after five months of ardent pursuit, he turned up at the Neigauses’ Moscow home. Genrikh opened the door to Boris and addressed him in German as ‘Der spätkommende Gast’ (the belated guest) and left to go to play at a concert.
Lara Page 6
