Boris begged Zinaida once more to leave Genrikh. When Zinaida refused, he grabbed a bottle of iodine from the bathroom cupboard and in some sort of weak suicide bid, swallowed it all. His gullet burned and he started making involuntary chewing movements. When Zinaida realised what he had done she poured milk down Boris’s throat to induce vomiting – he was sick twelve times – probably saving his life. A doctor came and ‘rinsed out his insides’ as a precaution against internal burns. The doctor insisted that the exhausted Pasternak must have complete bed rest for two days and that for the first night he must not move. So he stayed at the Neigauses, in a ‘state of utter bliss’ as Zinaida tended to him, moving noiselessly and efficiently around him.
Extraordinarily, such was his reverence for the melodramatic poet, that when Genrikh returned home at two o’clock that morning and learned of what had happened, it was to his wife that he turned and said: ‘Well, are you satisfied? Has he now proved his love for you?’ Genrikh then agreed to hand Zinaida over to Boris.
‘I’ve fallen in love with Z[inaida] N[ikolaevna], the wife of my best friend, N[euhaus],’ Pasternak wrote to his parents 8 March 1931. ‘On January 1st he left for a concert tour of Siberia. I had feared this trip and tried to talk him out of it. In his absence, the thing that was inevitable and would have come about in any event, has acquired the stain of dishonesty. I’ve shown myself unworthy of N[euhaus] whom I still love and always will; I’ve caused prolonged, terrible and as yet undiminished suffering to Zhenia – and yet I am purer and more innocent than before I entered this life.’
Although Genrikh was shaken and hurt by Boris and Zinaida’s affair – he had to stop playing in the middle of one concert during his Siberian tour and left the stage in tears – he was by no means an innocent party. Zinaida’s eventual break with him was eased by Genrikh’s own infidelities. In 1929 he had sired a daughter by his former fiancée, Militsa Borodkina, and he married her in the mid-1930s.
In November 1932 Boris wrote to his parents and sisters from Moscow that Genrikh ‘is a very contradictory person, and although everything settled down last autumn he still has moods in which he tells Zina that one day in an attack of misery he’ll kill her and me. And yet he continues to meet us almost every other day, not only because he can’t forget her, but because he can’t part from me either. This creates some touching and curious situations.’ However, Sir Isaiah Berlin, a great friend of Boris and Josephine, remembered that for years after Zinaida left him, Genrikh was a frequent visitor at the couple’s dacha in Peredelkino, where Boris and Zinaida lived from 1936. After one typical Sunday lunch, Isaiah Berlin and Genrikh travelled back to Moscow together on the train. Sir Isaiah was somewhat taken aback when Genrikh turned to him and said, by way of explanation for why he had let his wife go: ‘You know, Boris is really a saint.’
Sadly though, Boris was all too human. One of the things that plagued him most during his marriage to Zinaida was his fixation with Zinaida’s teenage affair with Melitinsky. As mental torture is largely irrational, Zinaida was powerless to quell her husband’s jealous anxieties. He often became paranoid staying in hotels because the ‘semi-debauched set-up’ reminded him of Zinaida’s teenage trysts with Melitinksy. The story of Zinaida’s youthful liaison became an obsession which triggered sleeplessness and mental depression. Boris once destroyed a photograph of Melitinksy which his daughter had bought to Zinaida as a gift following her cousin’s death.
On 5 May 1931, when it was clear that Boris was not going to return to Evgenia, she and her son left Russia. They travelled to Germany, where Boris’s family – Josephine, Frederick, Lydia, Rosalia and Leonid – greeted them with open arms, intent on cocooning them with familial love. ‘Look after her,’ Boris instructed his family. ‘And we did,’ said Josephine. Frederick organised and paid for Evgenia, who had been ill with tuberculosis, to spend the summer at a sanatorium in the Black Forest while her son stayed with the family at a pension on the Starnberger See in Munich.
Understandably, Boris’s family in Germany, who loved Evgenia and adored little Evgeny, were shocked by Boris’s behaviour. They saw him as having discarded his first wife and son, and handing responsibility over to them. Leonid’s censure weighed heavily on Boris, who was left in no doubt that his family were appalled by the way he had treated Evgenia and Evgeny. On 18 December 1931, when Boris was openly living with Zinaida, his father wrote to him from Berlin:
Dear Boria!
What a lot I ought to write to you on all sorts of subjects – the terrible thing is that I know in advance that it’s a pointless waste of time, because you, and all of you, act without thinking out the consequences in advance; you’re irresponsible. And of course one’s sorry for you as well, we are especially so – what a mess you’ve got yourself into, you poor boy! And instead of doing all you can to disentangle everything and as far as possible reduce the suffering on both sides, you’re dragging it out even more and making it worse!
In early February 1932, Boris wrote Josephine a letter running over twenty pages. It is part an emotional confession of the guilt he feels at his treatment of Evgenia, part justification of his love for Zinaida – who he at one stage describes unflatteringly: ‘always comes back from the hairdresser looking terrible, like a freshly polished boot’ – part a catalogue of his neurotic mental state, which seems to veer near to madness; and part grateful homage to his sister, who Evgenia said ‘did more for her than anyone else in the world’ during the previous summer in Germany.
All is far from rosy. He admits to Josephine that he struggles with Zinaida’s oldest son, Adrian, ‘a hot-headed, selfish boy and a brutal tyrant towards his mother’. Living with another young boy makes the absence of his own son, Evgeny, even more painful. Boris also explains why, on his father’s insistence, he did not vacate the rooms in Volkhonka Street for Evgenia and her son. They had returned to Moscow on 22 December 1931 but had been forced to go and live with Evgenia’s brother for some time because it was apparently difficult for Boris to move apartments or find new ones due to restrictions imposed by the authorities and the requirements of necessary permits. This was not helped by the fact that Pasternak was already encountering restrictions due to the content of his work. ‘All this comes at a time when my work has been declared to be the spontaneous outpourings of a class enemy,’ Boris confided, ‘and I’m accused of regarding art as inconceivable in a socialist society, that is, in the absence of individualism. Verdicts like these are quite dangerous, when my books are banned from libraries.’
Probably Boris and Zinaida’s happiest time was the period they spent together in Georgia. In the summer of 1933 Pasternak had been commissioned to translate some Georgian poetry, and in order to master the language properly, and familiarise himself with the native tongue and colloquialisms, he visited the country.
To many Russians, Georgia, with its ‘abundance of sunshine, its strong emotions, its love of beauty and inborn grace of its princes and peasants alike’, was a place of enchantment and inspiration. Georgians were considered earthier and more passionate than their strait-laced Russian cousins. Pasternak made great friends with the acclaimed Georgian poets Paolo Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze. Of Yashvili he wrote: ‘Talent radiated from him. His eyes shone with an inner fire; the fire of passion had scorched his lips and the heat of experience had burnt and blackened his face, so that he looked older than his years; and as though he had been worn and tattered by life.’ Pasternak’s love affair with the Caucasus would continue throughout his life, and he referred to Georgia as his second home.
According to Max Hayward, the Oxford academic who would later be recruited to translate Doctor Zhivago into English, the poems Pasternak composed to describe his journey over the Georgian Military Highway to Tbilisi (‘probably the most breath-taking mountain road in the world’) have not been equalled in calibre since Pushkin and Lermontov wrote on the same theme. For Pasternak the Caucasian peaks, receding in an infinite panorama of unexampled grandeur, offered a simile
for a vision of what a socialist future might look like. But even in this prodigious setting, Pasternak favoured images that were domestic and intimate: the rugged lower slopes, for instance, reminded him of a ‘crumpled bed’.
Pasternak’s translations of Georgian poetry would be greatly admired by Stalin – a fact that may have saved the writer’s life. Over a decade later, in 1949, as the secret police became increasingly aware of the controversial, anti-Soviet nature of the novel Pasternak was writing, a senior investigator in the prosecutor’s office claimed there were plans to arrest him. However, when Stalin was informed, the leader began to recite: ‘Heavenly colour, colour blue,’ one of the poems that Pasternak had translated. Stalin, who was born in Gori in Georgia, was moved by Pasternak’s lyrical translations of Georgian poetry. Instead of having him imprisoned or killed, as was the fate of many of Pasternak’s contemporaries, Stalin is supposed to have said: ‘Leave him in peace, he’s a cloud dweller.’ And on Pasternak’s KGB file the immortal words were stamped: ‘Leave the cloud dweller alone.’
In the early flush of happiness at his newfound stability, and possibly because he had anticipated from the start that she would play that role, Boris saw Zinaida as the facilitator of his craft. He wanted and needed her to be indispensable to his functioning as an artist. ‘You are the sister of my talent,’ he told her. ‘You give me the feeling of the uniqueness of my existence … you are the wing that protects me … you are that which I loved and saw, and what will happen to me.’
When Evgenia finally cleared her belongings from the Pasternak apartment on Volkhonka Street in September 1932, and Boris moved back in with Zinaida, they found the house in a dilapidated condition. The roof leaked, rats had gnawed and ripped the skirting boards, and many window panes were cracked and missing. A month later, when Boris returned from a three-day trip to Leningrad, Zinaida had wrought an amazing transformation. The windows were repaired. She had hung curtains, fixed herniated mattresses and fashioned a new sofa cover from one of the spare curtains. The floors were polished, the windows were washed and sealed for the winter. Zinaida had even added various rugs, two cupboards and an upright piano which, extraordinarily, came from her ex-in-laws, Neigaus’s parents, who had moved to Moscow and were now living with the abandoned Genrikh.
In 1934, Boris married Zinaida in a civil ceremony. So caught up was he in his fantasy image of Zinaida that he failed to see her shortcomings. Zinaida may have been a dab hand in the house, but for a man as impassioned as Boris, she was not the champion and soul mate he yearned for. Not only did Zinaida not understand his poetry, she could not fathom her husband’s creative courage. Worse, she increasingly feared his poetry’s power to upset the equilibrium of her well-managed household by provoking official disfavour.
A considerable strain in their relationship was caused by the arrest of Boris’s friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam. One evening in April 1934, Boris bumped into him on a Moscow boulevard. To his consternation – even ‘the walls have ears’ he warned – Mandelstam, a fearsome critic of the regime, proceded to recite an incredibly scathing poem he had written about Stalin. (Lines included: ‘His fingers are fat as grubs,/And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips …/His cockroach whiskers leer,/And his boot tops gleam.’)
‘I didn’t hear this; you didn’t recite this to me,’ Boris said to him, agitated. ‘Because, you know, very dangerous things are happening now. They’ve begun to pick people up.’ These were the early ominous beginnings of what would become the Great Terror, when hundreds of thousands of people accused of various political crimes – espionage, anti-Soviet agitation and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups – were quickly executed or sent to labour camps. Boris told Mandelstam that his poem was tantamount to suicide and implored him not to recite it to anyone else. Mandelstam did not listen and inevitably, was betrayed. On 17 May he was arrested by the NKVD.
When he found out, Pasternak valiantly tried to help his friend. He appealed to the politician and writer Nikolai Bukharin, recently appointed editor of Izvestiya newspaper, who had commissioned some of Pasternak’s Georgian translations. In June, Bukharin sent Stalin a message with the postscript: ‘I’m also writing about Mandelstam because B. Pasternak is half crazy about Mandelstam’s arrest, and nobody knows anything …’
Pasternak’s entreaties paid off. Instead of being sent to almost certain death in a forced labour camp, Mandelstam was sentenced to three years’ internal exile in the town of Cherdyn, in the north-east Urals – Stalin having issued a chilling command that was passed down the chain: ‘Isolate but preserve’. Boris was astonished to be called to the communal telephone in the hallway at Volkhonka Street and told that it was Stalin on the line. According to Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda:
Stalin said that Mandelstam’s case was being reconsidered and that everything would be all right with him. An unexpected reproach followed – why didn’t Pasternak turn to writer’s organisations or ‘to me’ to plead for Mandelstam? Pasternak’s answer was ‘writer’s organisations haven’t been dealing with this since 1927, and if I hadn’t pleaded, you might not have got to know about it’.
Stalin stopped him with a question: ‘But he is an expert, a master, isn’t he?’
Pasternak answered, ‘That’s not the point.’
‘Then what is the point?’ Stalin asked.
Pasternak said that he would like to meet and speak with him.
‘What about?’
‘About life and death.’
Stalin hung up the phone.
When word of the telephone conversation with Stalin got out, Pasternak’s critics claimed he should have defended his friend’s talent more vigorously. But others, including Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, felt happy with Boris’s response. They understood his caution and thought he had done well not to be lured into the trap of admitting that he had, indeed, heard Osip’s ‘Stalin Epigram’. ‘He was quite right to say that whether I am a master or not is beside the point,’ Osip declared. ‘Why is Stalin so afraid of a master? It’s like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him like shamans.’
In 1934, Pasternak was invited to the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union. He was disquieted by the official praise and by efforts to turn him into a literary public hero who had not been politically compromised. His work was increasingly being recognised by the West and he felt uncomfortable with this attention. Ironically, his writing was becoming more difficult to publish, so he concentrated on translation work. In 1935 he wrote to his Czech translator: ‘All this time, beginning with the Writers’ Congress in Moscow, I have had a feeling that, for purposes unknown to me, my importance is being deliberately inflated … all this by somebody else’s hands without asking my consent. And I shun nothing in this whole world more than fanfare, sensationalism, and so-called cheap “celebrity” in the press.’
Pasternak and his family now accepted accommodation in the Writers’ Union apartment block on Lavrushinsky Lane in Moscow and a dacha in Peredelkino. Pasternak acquired the rights to one of the properties, shaded by tall fir trees and pine trees, with the money he had received from his Georgian translations. In 1936 he still held high hopes that his parents would return to Russia and live with him there. This writers’ colony, built on the former estate of a Russian nobleman outside Moscow, had been created to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent authors with a retreat that provided bucolic escape from their city apartments. Apparently, when Stalin heard that the colony was to be called Peredelkino, from the Russian verb peredelat, which means to re-do, he suggested it would be better to call is Perepiskino, from the verb to rewrite. Kornei Chukovsky, the Soviet Union’s best-loved children’s author, described the system of the writers’ colony as ‘entrapping writers with a cocoon of comforts, surrounding them with a network of spies’.
Such state controls did not sit comfortably with Pasternak. Nikolai Bukharin once said that Pasternak was ‘one of the most remarkable masters of verse of our ti
me, who has not only strung a whole row of lyrical pearls on to the necklace of his talent, but has produced a whole number of revolutionary works marked by deep sincerity’. But Pasternak pleaded: ‘Do not make heroes of my generation. We were not: there were times when we were afraid and acted from fear, times when we were betrayed.’
At a writers’ meeting in Minsk, Pasternak told his colleagues that he fundamentally agreed with their view of literature as something that could be produced like water from a pump. He then put forward the view for artistic independence, before announcing that he would not be part of the group. Almost an act of literary suicide, the audience were stunned. No one risked so public a speech as this until after Stalin’s death. After this, there were no more efforts to draw Pasternak into the literary establishment. For the main part he was left alone, while the purges on writers continued with terrifying frequency and force. In October 1937, his great friend Titsian Tabidze was expelled from the Union of Georgian Writers and arrested. Paolo Yashvili, rather than be forced into denouncing Tabidze, shot himself dead at the offices of the Writers’ Union.
When in 1937 Osip Mandelstam was allowed to return from exile, Zinaida feared having any contact with him and his wife, in case it threatened her family’s safety. Boris abhorred what he saw as such moral cowardice. On several occasions, Zinaida prevented him from receiving friends and colleagues at Peredelkino for fear of contagion by association. Once, when Osip and Nadezhda turned up at the Peredelkino dacha, Zinaida refused to receive them. She forced her husband back onto the verandah to tell his friends lamely and with considerable embarrassment: ‘Zinaida seems to be baking pies.’ According to Olga Ivinskaya, Zinaida always ‘loathed’ the Mandelstams, who she considered were compromising her ‘loyal’ husband. Olga claimed that Zinaida was famous ‘for her immortal phrase: “My sons love Stalin most of all – and then their Mummy.”’
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