Around early 1944, Olga bravely set out for the camp, travelling to the Sukho-Bezrodnaya station, 1,500 kilometres east of the Volga. This was the station for the forced-labour camp complex known as Unzhlag. Without a ticket, Olga had to lie down under the seats of a cattle train, where, wrapped in a greatcoat, soldiers helped hide her behind their bags and boots. Amazingly, Olga made it to her destination, where she found her mother ‘more dead than alive’. She gave Maria the special ration that Olga had received as an official state blood donor and managed to get her out of Unzhlag, persuading the authorities that her mother was a liability, an ageing invalid incapable of any useful work. She brought her back to Moscow, illegally – along with many stories of the soldiers’ bravery in helping her, which she later shared with her children. This would not be the last time that Olga ‘would travel in a cattle train’, and ‘it would not be the last time that she would meet soldiers, but their kindness would become rarer’.
Olga’s courage set sharply against Zinaida’s apathy and caution; it was something that Boris applauded and was drawn to. Yet while he himself was fearless professionally, as a writer, his personal courage became sorely tested as his affair with Olga developed.
Before long their moments of bliss became punctuated with rows and demands. Olga recalled a particular pattern to their conflict: ‘No, no, Olia, it’s all over,’ Boris kept repeating, during one of his attempts to ‘break free’. ‘Of course I love you, but I must stop seeing you because I cannot go through with all the horrors of leaving my family. Unless you can accept that we must exist in a kind of higher world and wait for some still unknown force to bring us together, it would be better not to see each other again. We cannot live a life together on the ruins of somebody else’s.’
Pasternak later recreated this exact inner struggle in Doctor Zhivago. Yury is torn between his fervent longing to be with Lara and his guilty self-disgust at deceiving Tonya. In his head, he wants to break off relations with Lara, but it becomes clear to him that more than flighty romance which could be jettisoned, their union draws on some mythical spiritual connection which his heart cannot overrule:
He had decided to cut the knot and he was going home with a solution. He would confess everything to Tonya, beg her to forgive him and never see Lara again.
Not that everything was quite as it should be. He felt now that he had not made it clear enough to Lara that he was breaking with her for good, for ever. He had announced to her that morning that he intended to confess everything and that they must stop seeing one another; but now he had the feeling that he had softened it all down and not made it sufficiently definite.
Lara had realised how unhappy he felt and had no wish to upset him further by a painful scene. She tried to listen to him as calmly as she could. They were talking in one of the empty front rooms. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she was no more conscious of them than the stone statues on the house across the road felt the rain running down their faces. She kept saying softly: ‘Do as you think best, don’t worry about me. I’ll get over it.’ She was saying it sincerely without any false generosity, and she did not know that she was crying, she did not wipe away her tears.
At the thought that Lara might have misunderstood him, and that he had left her with the wrong impression and false hopes, he nearly turned and galloped straight back to her, to say what he had left unsaid and, above all, to take leave of her much more warmly, more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell. Controlling himself with difficulty, he continued on his way …
In the distance, where the sun was refusing to go down, a nightingale began to sing.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ it called entreatingly; it sounded almost like the summons on the eve of Easter Sunday: ‘Awake, O my soul, why dost thou slumber.’
Suddenly Yury was struck by a very simple thought. What was the hurry? He would not go back on the promise he had given himself, the confession would be made, but who said that it must be made that day? He had not said anything to Tonya yet, it was not too late to put it off till after he had been to town once again. He would finish his conversation with Lara, with such warmth and depth of feeling that it would make up for all their suffering. How splendid, how wonderful! How strange that this had not occurred to him before!
At the thought of seeing Lara once more his heart leapt for joy.
By now, according to Olga, she and Boris were ‘simply powerless to leave each other’. Boris’s son Evgeny saw how ‘an awareness of the sinfulness and obvious doomed nature of their relations imparted a particular glow to them at that time. Pangs of conscience on the one hand, and light-hearted egoism on the other, often faced them with the need to part, but pity and a thirst for emotional warmth drew him towards her again.’ In his poem ‘Explanation’, Boris described the torment and contortions wrought by their love, likening the couple to ‘cables under high tension’:
… Again I rehearse my excuses,
Or again grow weary of it all,
Once more a woman from next door
Skirts the courtyard wall, not to disturb us.
Don’t cry, don’t purse your swollen lips,
Don’t draw them together like that –
You’ll make them just as sore and cracked
As they were from last spring’s fever.
Take your hand from my breast:
We are cables under high tension
Watch out – or once again
We shall again be thrown together
…
But strongly as I may be bound
By the aching shackles of our nights,
The pull away is stronger still,
And I’m beckoned by the passion to break free.
The sense of pressure mounting on Boris was heightened by egregious oppression and political pressure. He was under constant surveillance from the authorities due to the anti-Soviet nature of his work, while his contemporaries who were not seen to serve the interests of the new Soviet system were executed, exiled to prison camps or tortured. He had already received news that his dear friend Osip Mandelstam had perished somewhere in the gulag, while his confidante Marina Tsvetaeva had hanged herself in 1941, soon after her return from exile.
Personal disappointments caused volatility, pressure and rifts too. According to Olga, ‘by this time Zinaida Nikolayevna had heard about me, and was also beginning to make his life a misery’. As Zinaida was practised in fending off young admirers who threatened her husband’s matrimonial and artistic equilibrium, it is likely that initially she did not take rumours of his liaison with Olga that seriously. A rational, robust character, she would not have let a mere infatuation dent her cast-iron sense of self.
Although Boris had consistently warned Olga that he could not leave Zinaida for her, as their affair continued Olga began to make more demands on him. Maria did not help matters by constantly nagging her daughter, saying that Boris should make a clean break from his family, posing the age-old question: if he loves you so much, why doesn’t he leave his wife for you? She became interfering, ringing Boris and berating him for making Olga ill, or for not being dutiful enough to her.
Due to the terrors of the political climate, Maria had been transformed from ex-prison camp inmate into an overseer who made it her business to uphold Soviet petty-mindedness. Given that she had been sent to the gulag once, it was hardly surprising that she was afraid that Olga’s affair with Boris would lead to another prison sentence. This resulted in hysterical rows between Olga and her mother, amid a general atmosphere of fetid secrecy, typical of Soviet society of the day. Boris stood his ground. ‘I love your daughter more than my life, Maria Nikolayevna,’ he told her, ‘But don’t expect our life to change outwardly all at once.’
‘Our household was bubbling with hidden passion,’ Irina remembered of this time. ‘I was ten years old and confused as I could feel the undercurrent. A year went by and there were many uproars and sputters.’ She recalls Olga crying in her bedroom or throwing bow
ls and spoons at her mother’s husband, who did not care for Boris nor his poetry. Irina felt sorry for him: ‘My poor grandfather, whom my brother and I loved so much.’
Olga and Boris continued to tramp the streets together, rowing in doorways of strange houses, before making up again. Irina watched as her mother returned from meeting after meeting with Boris, and if they’d had a row, she would take his photograph down from the wall. Inevitably, it would soon be put back up. ‘Where’s your pride, Mama?’ Irina once asked her. Far from blaming Boris for putting her mother in a precarious position by not instantly leaving Zinaida for her, Irina felt acute sympathy for the writer’s domestic plight. ‘This genius, this sensitive, troubled soul, created exactly the same scene with his second wife that he did with his first,’ she said. ‘He was incapable of divorcing twice and because of that, he suffered a lot.’
As with Boris, Olga put her heart before her young family. Her parenting took a back seat to her love affair. She was impassioned, neurotic and undoubtedly selfish in pursuit of her love of Boris, as their relationship brought her family into a dangerous spotlight. She was however grateful for and touched by Boris’s affection for her children. ‘I thought of Boris as more than a husband,’ Olga admitted. ‘He had entered my life and seized possession of it entirely, leaving no corner untouched. I was overjoyed by his tender, loving treatment of my two children, particularly Irina, now rapidly growing up.’
It must have been incredibly painful for Boris’s sons, Evgeny and Leonid, from his first and second marriages, as Boris developed a closeness to Irina, the daughter he never had. There was definitely the feeling from the Pasternak family that Boris mistreated his first family at the expense of the second. Equally, there were similar feelings of injustice from Zinaida and her son, Leonid, as Boris spent more and more time with Olga, Irina and Mitia. Charles Pasternak, Boris’s nephew, vividly remembers as a young boy the ‘long arguments’ in the family over Boris’s favourable treatment of his second son Leonid over his first-born, Evgeny. Natasha Pasternak, who married Boris’s son Leonid, said that Boris had ‘little time for Evgeny’ and that his son visited Peredelkino ‘infrequently, and when he came, he came as a guest, not a family member’.
Irina believes it was impossible for Boris to forsake his love for Olga, despite the pain and trouble he caused. ‘Although Boris went through immensely hard times and was often at the end of his tether, he had the capacity to rebound very quickly. My mother had a very optimistic nature and she always cheered him up and soothed him. He appreciated those qualities very much and so he needed her. She became indispensable to his work, his life and his happiness.’
Boris, true to form, was working extremely hard during this time, channelling his personal angst into his writing. As the Soviet authorities had passed a resolution on 9 September 1946, denouncing him as ‘an author lacking in ideology and remote from Soviet reality’, and as attacks on him continued into 1947, his paid translation work was drying up. Novy Mir even rejected some of his poems. He fuelled his ire and frustrations into Zhivago, which he knew, under the existing political conditions, would bring him no income at all. ‘I started to work again on my novel when I saw that all our rosy expectations of the changes the end of the war was supposed to bring Russia were not being fulfilled,’ he told his friend, the playwright Alexander Gladkov. ‘The war itself was like a cleansing storm, like a breeze blowing through an unventilated room. Its sorrows and hardships were not as bad as the inhuman lie – they shook to its core the power of everything specious and unorganic to the nature of man and society, which has gained such a hold over us. But the dead weight of the past was too strong. The novel is absolutely essential to me as a way of expressing my feelings.’
Daily he wrote about Yury Zhivago’s passion for Lara interlaced with guilt over his infidelity to his dutiful wife, Tonya. ‘Life became converted into art and art was born of life and experience,’ he said at that time. He was living the same double life with Zinaida in Peredelkino, while Olga waited for him in Moscow. In Doctor Zhivago he wrote:
The nearer he was drawn to Lara and her daughter, the less he ventured to take domesticity for granted and the stricter was the control imposed on his thoughts by his duty to his family and the pain of his broken faith. There was nothing offensive to Lara or Katya in this limitation. On the contrary, this attitude on his part contained a world of deference which precluded vulgar familiarity.
But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.
It seems foolishly naïve or wantonly brazen, given the authorities’ surveillance of Pasternak, that as he wrote Doctor Zhivago, he gave regular readings of his work in progress. As word grew of these illustrious readings, his literary fans coveted an invitation. On 6 February 1947 the pianist Maria Yudina held a reading at her home, which she and her friends were looking forward to ‘as a feast’.
The day before, when Boris was walking Olga home from her Novy Mir offices, he had invited her to join him: ‘Let me take you to see a woman pianist I know. She will play the piano and I have promised to read her a little from a new prose work of mine,’ he urged her. ‘It won’t be a novel as the word is generally understood. I shall skim through years and decades, perhaps dwelling on trivialities. I think I may call this new thing “Boys and Girls” or “Pictures from Fifty Years of Daily Life!” I have a feeling that you will write your page in it as well!’
The event was packed, in spite of a raging blizzard outside. Boris had worried that he might not make the reading, as the snowdrifts made it difficult for him to reach Yudina’s apartment. He was driven with Olga in a friend’s car and they got lost. Olga sat in the back of the car, admiring Boris’s profile as he turned to talk to the driver. Boris, wearing felt boots that were ‘grotesquely oversize for him’, kept jumping out of the car, trying to work out where they were. Suddenly, among the houses whitened with snow, they saw the flickering light of a lamp shaped like a candle in the window. This drew them to the right apartment and was to become a familiar leitmotif in Doctor Zhivago; the flickering candle behind the frozen window pane: ‘As they drove through Kamerger Street, Yura noticed that a candle had melted a patch in the icy crust on one of the windows. Its light seemed to fall into the street as deliberately as a glance, as if the flame were keeping a watch on the passing carriages and waiting for someone.’
The image of a burning candle also inspired a poem, which would become Yury Zhivago’s ‘A Winter Night’. Boris wrote this poem the following morning and brought it to Olga at her office later that day.
The evening was a resounding success. Maria Yudina, dressed in her best black velvet dress, played Chopin. According to Olga, ‘BL was particularly affected by the music and his eyes shone. I was beside myself with happiness.’ Boris then read from chapter three of his draft novel. He delighted the packed room with the passage about the young student Zhivago dancing with his fiancée, Tonya, and the Christmas tree lights at the Sventitskys’ house: ‘Yura was standing absent-mindedly in the middle of the ballroom, watching Tonya as she danced with a stranger,’ Boris read out. ‘She swept up to him, flounced her short satin train like a fish, and vanished’:
She was very excited. During the interval, she had refused tea and had slaked her thirst with innumerable tangerines, peeling them and wiping her fingers and the corners of her mouth on a handkerchief the size of a fruit blossom. Laughing and talking incessantly, she kept taking her handkerchief out and putting it back inside her sash or her sleeve or the frilled neck of her dress.
Now, as she brushed past him, spinning with her unknown partner, she caught and pressed Yura’s hand and smiled. The handkerchief she had been holding stayed in his fingers. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief smelled equally enchantingly of tangerines and of Tonya’s hand. This was something new in Yura’s life, something he had never felt before, something sharp and piercing that went thr
ough his whole being from top to toe. This naively childish smell was like a friendly, sensible word whispered in the dark. He pressed the handkerchief to his eyes and lips, lost in its kindly smell. At that moment a shot rang out inside the house.
Everyone turned and looked at the curtain which hung between the ballroom and the sitting-room. There was a moment’s silence. Then uproar broke out. Some people rushed about screaming, others ran after Koka into the sitting-room from which the sound of the shot had come, and from which still other people were emerging, weeping, arguing and all talking at once.
‘What has she done, what has she done?’ Komarovsky kept saying in despair.’
Inside Maria Yudina’s stiflingly hot house, wiping perspiration from his face, Boris answered endless questions from his rapt audience about how the story would unfold. The passage continues to describe Yury’s realisation that it is Lara who has fired the shot at the lawyer Komarovsky. As she faints, the keen young doctor attends to her, instantly drawn to and mystified by her character and circumstance. Tonya’s innocence is in contrast to an otherworldliness of the intriguing Lara.
When Josephine Pasternak was in her late teens, she and Boris had an impassioned conversation, sitting on her brother’s bed in their Moscow apartment, about female beauty. ‘He said that there are two very different kinds of beauty. One – a beauty that was there for everybody to see, more tangible, so to speak, easier to grasp, to understand, and another one – a noble one, retiring, and in fact much more impressive, though one had to be up to the standard of such beauty in order to appreciate it.’ Boris cited his first love, Ida Vysotskaya, as an example of the ‘noble’ type of beauty, and her sister Lena Vysotskaya’s beauty as more accessible and open to understanding. ‘It also seems to me that Lara “the girl from a different world” also belonged to this other, albeit perfect in its own way, more accessible type of beauty,’ said Josephine.
Lara Page 9
