Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  Tonya in Doctor Zhivago would definitely have been considered the more noble kind of beauty, yet it was the other kind of allure that fascinated Boris. A beauty that reflected emotional suffering. As he writes in Zhivago: ‘I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.’

  Irina’s description of her mother’s ‘tired beauty’ explains Boris’s instant attraction to Olga. ‘It wasn’t the beauty of a brilliant victor,’ said Irina, ‘it was almost the beauty of a defeated victim. It was the beauty of suffering. When Boris looked into my mother’s beautiful eyes, he could probably see many, many things in them …’ When Yury Zhivago first sets eyes on Lara, he is instantly bewitched: ‘Here was the very thing which he, Tonya and Misha had endlessly discussed and had dismissed as “vulgar”, the force which so frightened and attracted them and which they controlled so easily from a safe distance by words. And now here it was, this force, in front of Yura’s very eyes, concrete, real, and yet confused and veiled as in a dream, pitilessly destructive, and complaining and helpless – and where was Yura’s childish philosophy now and what was he to do?’

  After the reading at Maria Yudina’s house, as Boris was seeing Olga home, he told her that a candle seen from the outside in the cold, leaving the mark of its breath on a frosty pane of glass, had been a much-needed symbol in his poetry. And now there had been this window gleaming in the night, like a portent of what was to come. Boris had felt, he confided in Olga, exactly the same about it as the young Zhivago; beyond this window with its candle there was a life certain to be linked in the future with his own life, though for the time being it was only beckoning. But he clearly had a vivid sense that Olga was to become his destiny.

  As he made progress with Doctor Zhivago, he continued to read drafts to small gatherings at apartments in Moscow, and at Peredelkino, noting comments from the guests which would lead him to make adjustments to the text. At a reading in May 1947, the audience included Genrikh Neigaus, with whom he had rekindled his friendship. Boris embraced and firmly kissed Genrikh before starting the reading, to an elite group which included Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter. Pasternak’s protégé, the poet Andrei Voznesensky, attended many of the readings at Peredelkino. They ‘took place in his semi-circular beacon-like study on the upper floor. We’d gather together. Chairs would be brought up from downstairs. There were usually about twenty present. We’d fall silent. Pasternak sat down at his table. He wore a light silvery service-type jacket. As he read, Pasternak stared at something above our heads, visible to him alone. His face became longer, thinner. The readings usually lasted about two hours. He was considerate of his audience. Afterwards, he would ask each person in turn which poem they’d liked best. Most would answer “all of them”. And the evasiveness of the reply would annoy him.’

  Guests would then be invited to the dining room downstairs, the pale pinkish walls of which were covered by Leonid Pasternak’s paintings and some of his sketches for Resurrection. On the window sills were rows of geranium plants, kept inside during the winter, giving the dining room the light feeling of a conservatory. ‘Oh those Peredelkino meals!’ Voznesensky recalled fondly. ‘There were never enough chairs. Stools were pulled up. Pasternak would preside, Georgian fashion, relishing the ritual. He was a kind host. A departing guest would be reduced to confusion, he always handed everyone their coat himself. At our first meeting, this astonished me. And awestruck, I tore my coat from his grasp.’

  Unfortunately, these literary soirees were also attracting unwelcome attention. The deputy editor of Novy Mir described them as the ‘underground readings of a counter-revolutionary novel’. The secret police were also monitoring the literary gatherings, noting the book’s contents for the moment when they would strike.

  While Olga was able to attend some of the Moscow readings, she was not present at the Peredelkino soirees, as the dacha was Zinaida’s domain. Zinaida, who didn’t understand or particularly like her husband’s work and constantly counselled him against attracting further controversy with his prose, would not have been upstairs, listening, as Olga would. She was downstairs, chain-smoking. It must have been a considerable comfort for Boris when Olga, a champion of his work, was among his devoted audience, radiating support.

  The young poet Evgeny Yevtushenko remembers seeing Olga at Boris’s public reading of his translation of Faust: ‘in the auditorium, wearing a white stole over her shoulders, sat the beauty Olga Ivinskaya’. The literary historian Emma Gerstein was less generous. Present at Maria Yudina’s gathering for Boris, she damningly described Olga as a ‘pretty but fading blonde’ who, during an interval in the reading, ‘hurriedly powdered her nose, hiding behind a cupboard’ – hardly a sin, considering how hot it was in Maria Yudina’s packed apartment. Straight after the evening Gerstein wrote to Boris’s friend Anna Akhmatova, informing her in slightly caustic terms, perhaps even with a touch of envy, of ‘Pasternak’s new love story’ – an allusion to his relationship with Olga as well as a reference to the novel he was writing.

  If Zinaida had her suspicions about her husband’s new love story the previous year, they were painfully confirmed in April 1948.

  Every morning, before Boris climbed the stairs for his working day, Zinaida would enter his study to vigorously dust and clean. Although she rarely read her husband’s prose or poetry, she understood how essential his daily writing routine was to him, jealously guarding him from contact with boisterous family life. Her two sons by Genrikh were disciplined by her to live in the dacha ‘almost noiselessly’ so as not to disturb their stepfather’s creativity. She allowed no one upstairs into his study, which, Boris told his parents, she ‘personally polishes with a foot-cloth every morning’. Pasternak’s working space was atypical of many writers. ‘I personally do not keep heirlooms, archives, collections of any kind, including books and furniture. I do not save letters or draft copies of my work. Nothing piles up in my room; it is easier to clean than a hotel room. My life resembles a student’s.’

  Unlike a student’s, his working routine never varied. Over that he exercised cast-iron discipline. His personal regime was similarly rigid. He rose early and washed outside at the pump in the garden. On bitter winter days, his torso bare, he would crack the ice and push his head into the frozen water. After his writing day, he would take a long, brisk walk, his pockets bursting with sweets to proffer to children he might meet in the village. Andrei Voznesensky said of him: ‘Nothing was allowed to interfere with his daily routine of work, lunch, rest. By his evening stroll, as by the sun, the people of Peredelkino checked the time.’

  It would have been in the early morning as he completed his outdoor ablutions (the lavatory was in its own small shed in the garden at Peredelkino), when Zinaida was tidying her husband’s desk in readiness for the day’s writing that lay ahead, that she found a love letter to him from Olga. Given Boris’s minimalist approach and clutter-free desk, along with his admission that he did not keep letters, it seems even more extraordinary that his billet-doux from Olga was found there. Whether Zinaida moved a book to dust and discovered it, or whether it was exposed, lying wantonly open before her, she stood there and read it.

  Regardless of her previous suspicions, the truth of the situation must have come as a biting shock. It was inevitable that from Moscow circles, abuzz with chatter about Boris and Olga, word had filtered back to Zinaida. However, on reading this passionate letter, Zinaida realised once and for all that she had wholly underestimated the strength of the union. Zinaida was forced to see the relationship for what it was – the first genuine threat to her familial and domestic stability. She ‘understood immediately that this was a great love’.

  Boris knew that Zinaida was fastidious in her cleaning, so it seems a textbook case of a man wanting to be caught. Had he subconsciously left the letter to be found, hoping it would force a solution? Boris may have been courageous in his art, but in his personal life he was d
isappointingly weak. He desperately sought a resolution to his situation, but found he did not possess the strength to make the necessary break with either Zinaida or Olga. When he was with Olga, he was drawn to her sensitivity, emotional intelligence and femininity. When he was back at Peredelkino, working, he appreciated Zinaida’s lack of emotionalism and her robust practicality. He told his family: with Zinaida ‘words and moods play almost no part in her make-up, being replaced by actions and real situations’. In Doctor Zhivago he wrote:

  At home he felt like a criminal. His family’s ignorance of the truth, their unchanged affection, were a mortal torment to him. In the middle of a conversation he would suddenly be numbed by the recollection of his guilt and cease hearing a word of what was being said.

  If this happened during a meal, his food stuck in his throat and he put down his spoon and pushed away his plate. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Tonya would ask, puzzled. ‘You must have had some bad news when you were in town. Has anyone been arrested? Or shot? Tell me. Don’t be frightened of upsetting me. You’ll feel better when you’ve told me.’

  Had he been unfaithful to her because he preferred another woman? No, he had made no comparison, no choice. He did not believe in ‘free love’ or in the ‘right’ to be carried away by his senses. To think or speak in such terms seemed to him degrading. He had never ‘sown wild oats’, nor did he regard himself as a superman with special rights and privileges. Now he was crushed by the weight of his guilty conscience.

  ‘What next?’ he sometimes asked himself, and hoped wretchedly for some impossible, unexpected circumstance to solve his problem for him.

  A misplaced letter left to be found, perhaps?

  Boris’s heart-breaking indecision was taking its toll on Olga. Until one day, at the family apartment, ‘all the screams and scenes came to an end’, recalled Irina. Olga’s nerves could no longer bear Boris’s endless vacillations and it appears that she made some sort of weak suicide bid. The details around it are extremely shaky. Irina claims that shortly afterwards her grandmother arranged for Olga to be committed to a psychiatric institution. ‘All we could see was my grandparents whispering and looking guilty,’ says Irina.

  The days went by and Olga did not reappear. The children listened at the door to their grandparents talking in hushed tones and learned that Maria had had their mother committed. ‘Mum’s empty bedroom became our playroom,’ and the children’s grandparents took on the role of parents. Irina’s independence had been fostered early. She learned not to rely on her mother for emotional support. More, it was the other way around. Irina knew too young that Olga’s romantic life took priority. No wonder she felt much closer to her grandmother and to her grandfather, whom she and her brother ‘loved so much’.

  Whether Olga had in fact attempted suicide or was just having an extreme episode, is unclear. It is quite likely that Maria thought that life for everyone would be a lot safer and a lot more peaceful if Olga was securely kept away from the family home. It was certainly more tranquil. ‘The house was calm again,’ remembers Irina.

  But just as the family had ‘got used to the idea of not having her around anymore’, Olga reappeared out of the blue. ‘She looked pale and was wearing a headscarf as you did in hospital,’ Irina recalled. ‘She appeared very calm and much smaller. She remained motionless in the house for a long time until one day things got back to normal.’

  Boris’s reaction to news of his lover’s ‘cry for help’ was to send Zinaida to tell her that their affair was over. This seems extraordinarily heartless and cowardly. Boris had of course attempted a similarly theatrical ‘suicide bid’ in front of Zinaida eighteen years earlier. But given Boris’s narcissistic nature, there was only room for one drama queen: him.

  Zinaida quickly swung into action, her mind focused by the fact that their son, Leonid, was seriously ill with pneumonia. She had already suffered a terrible loss a few years earlier when her eldest son, Adrian, died from tuberculosis meningitis, aged just twenty. The illness had kept him in hospital throughout the war and caused him to have a leg amputated as doctors battled to save him. ‘That’s life,’ wrote Boris to his sisters, of this time. ‘His mother, who adored him, knowing he was at death’s door and that every minute counted, tore herself in half between Sokolniki (the hospital) and Peredelkino (us and the dacha) and on the day before he breathed his last, she came to us to dig up the potato beds so as not to miss the harvesting season.’ Practical to the last, Zinaida displayed an obdurate rationality and practicality that Boris admired, feared and possibly also secretly abhorred. Boris wrote to Olga Freidenberg: ‘Yesterday Zina and I brought the ashes of her elder son from Moscow and buried them under the currant bush he had planted as a little boy in our garden.’

  Zinaida had always protected her sons with a ferocity that alarmed Boris. ‘When it’s a question of her children, she’ll bare her teeth like a she-wolf, even when there’s no need,’ he once told his parents. Three years later, as Zinaida and Boris stood by Leonid’s sickbed, Zinaida extracted a promise from her husband that he would never see Olga Ivinskaya again. Determined to keep her family together, staunch Zinaida went to personally see off her rival.

  She found Olga at the house of her friend Liusia Popova, a former actress who had studied at the Moscow Institute of Drama, whom Olga had been introduced to through Boris. Pretty and petite, Liusia had first seen Pasternak at one of his poetry recitals, waited for him at the exit and introduced herself. They later struck up a friendship and it was to Liusia that Boris had first confided his love for Olga. Both women were astounded when Zinaida appeared at the house on Furmanov Street, Moscow. Presumably Boris had told Zinaida of his mistress’s whereabouts.

  ‘Zinaida didn’t make a scene. She was very dignified and composed,’ says Irina. She stood there and delivered a short speech: ‘You are young,’ Zinaida told Olga. ‘You should get married. I am old. I am at the end of my life. You have everything to live for. This is the end of my life.’ Zinaida was fifty-four years old. Yet she presented herself to Olga, twenty years her junior, as decrepit, almost finished. Olga later described the encounter with the ‘heavily-built, strong-minded woman’ to her family. She said that she ‘didn’t give a damn’ for Olga and Boris’s love and although she no longer loved Boris herself, she would not allow the family to be broken up.

  Zinaida later described meeting Olga in equally unflattering terms. ‘I found her appearance very attractive but her manner of speaking quite the opposite,’ she said. ‘Despite all the coquettishness there was a certain hysteria about her.’

  The encounter was cut short by more high drama: Olga suddenly became so ‘ill through loss of blood’ that Liusia and Zinaida had to rush her to hospital, the bleeding apparently caused by medication Olga had been prescribed by the psychiatric clinic.

  When Olga was discharged from hospital Boris came to visit her ‘as though nothing had happened’. He made his peace with Maria, and he and Olga carried on their affair as before. Zinaida’s visit appeared to have had the opposite effect. It merely drove the lovers back into each other’s arms.

  As spring turned to summer Boris was once again a frequent visitor to Olga’s home, allowing Irina to grow even closer to him and fonder of him. Irina’s nickname for him was ‘Classoosha’, an affectionate take on the word classic, as Pasternak was considered one of the great Russian classic writers.

  One day, Boris arrived to take ten-year-old Irina out. ‘It was the first time that I was alone with this man who remained an enigma to me and who had turned our life upside down,’ said Irina, who remembers feeling ‘intimidated’ by him. As Boris had been paid for some translation work, he wanted to take her to buy her a present. The snow was thawing, creating streams of running water in their street, and Irina felt self-conscious in a coat cut from her grandmother’s old fur-lined coat. ‘I am soaking wet, the snow is melting and we are likely to get our feet wet,’ Irina said to him, awkwardly.

  ‘Do you feel that you always need to sa
y something?’ Boris boomed. ‘That you cannot stay without saying a word and that you must entertain me? I so understand that, I know this feeling so well.’

  Irina was struck by the blatant honesty of his retort. It was as if he had ‘removed her armour’. She was touched that everything she did, however gauche, seemed to make sense to him. They took a taxi to a bookshop where Boris greeted everyone loudly and introduced Irina. ‘He filled the already cramped shop with his voice and his movements.’ She felt reassured that he seemed well loved in the shop and that nobody considered him an eccentric, as she did. They bought the works of other classic writers – ‘Goncharov, Ostrovsky, Turgenev and Chekhov’. When they returned home, Irina heard Boris exclaim to Olga: ‘Isn’t it wonderful, Olioucha, she asked for some Chekhov!’

  On 25 May 1948, Boris sent Irina a copy of Chekhov, adapted for children. On the flyleaf, in his big flowing hand, he had written: ‘Dear Irochka, my treasure, please forgive me for not coming to see you on your birthday yesterday. I wish you happiness for the rest of your life. Keep up with your studies and hard work. That’s all that matters in life. Your B.L.’

  Boris was certainly working hard on his novel. On 12 December he wrote to Frederick, Josephine and Lydia from Moscow, addressing them as: ‘My dear Fedia and girls!’ In the letter he makes it clear that he is doing everything he can to get the first half of Doctor Zhivago, already in manuscript form, to them. Did they know of a good Russian copy-typist? he asks. And if he is owed any money in England from translation work, could they pay the typist to make three copies and check them? He wanted the manuscript to be sent to Maurice Bowra (the eminent English literary historian), Stefan Schimanski (an English critic and translator of Pasternak’s works in Russian) and their friend, the English historian and philosopher, Isaiah Berlin.