Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  ‘Printing it – I mean, publishing it in print – is absolutely out of the question, whether in the original or in translation – you must make this absolutely clear to the literary people whom I should like to show it to,’ he continued, updating them about his work in progress: ‘Firstly, it isn’t completed, this is only half of it, needing a continuation. Secondly, publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to say fatal, dangers. Both the spirit of the work itself, and my situation as it has developed here, mean that the novel can’t appear in public: and the only Russian works allowed to circulate abroad are translations of those published here.’ Fearing criticism from his sisters, he wrote: ‘You won’t like the novel because it lacks cohesion, and was written in such haste. One reason is that I couldn’t drag it out, I’m not young any more, and anyway, anything could happen from one day to the next, and there were a number of things I wanted to get written down. And I was writing it in my own time, unpaid and in a hurry so as not to overstretch my budget, but to try and make time to get down to some paid work.’

  In spite of his self-deprecation with his family, praise was mounting from literary friends to whom he had managed to send the first typescript. On 29 November 1948 he received the following letter from his cousin Olga Freidenberg, from St Petersburg, who was a distinguished scholar and later a university professor:

  Your book is above any judgement. Everything that you say of history as the second universe can be referred to in your book … It is a special variation of Genesis. It makes my skin tingle to read the philosophical discourses in it. I am just afraid that I am on the verge of discovering the final mystery that one hides inside himself and all his life he wishes to express it and waiting for its expression in art or science and is frightened to death of this because it must remain an eternal mystery.

  Pasternak felt intense pressure to get his work read by those he respected, as he was inordinately proud of his book. It was his answer to a lifelong dream to produce a long prose work about his generation and its historical fate. All writers are prone to frustrations and fears that their work will not get published, let alone stand the test of time. Pasternak, who had already been working on the novel for thirteen years, knew that he was taking monumental risks in privately distributing the politically controversial material. At first, he had been optimistic about the Bolshevik revolution, believing it would liberate the masses, but when he saw the reality of the war it created, he became a fierce opponent of the Soviet regime. He blamed collectivisation for ruining the rural economy and destroying the lives of millions. Pasternak could not have made his scorn for the political elite any clearer. As Yury Zhivago states: ‘Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to the truth.’ As Pasternak had no idea that Stalin had issued orders to protect him, and ordinary citizens were killed or sent to the gulag for expressing anti-Stalinist views in their own homes, to be circulating his trenchant views in his novel was literally flirting with death.

  Pasternak recognised the dangers, describing them in what would be his last letter to his family for almost a decade. (Due to the ‘era of suspicion’, he was forced to halt all correspondence with his sisters; he resumed contact with them in the summer of 1956, during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’.) ‘Even if you should hear one day that I’ve been hung, drawn and quartered,’ he told them, ‘you must know that I’ve lived a most happy life, better than I could ever have imagined, and my most solid and stable state of happiness is right now, and in all the recent past, because I have finally learned the art of expressing my thoughts – I possess this skill to the degree that I need it, which was never the case before.’ He wrote this letter at the zenith of his affair with Olga. As his son Evgeny explained: ‘The impact of their happy relations during the first three years was revealed in Lara’s image, her appearance and the lyric warmth of the chapters devoted to her. My father always believed that it was the awakening of “an acute and happy personal impression” that gave him the strength to cope with the difficulties of the work on the novel.’

  Little did Olga know that due to widespread knowledge of her affair with Boris, and her unflinching support of the book that he was writing, it was not Boris who would be ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ but she herself who would shortly receive unwelcome visitors.

  On the evening of 6 October 1949, the secret police arrived at Olga’s home with a summons that held terrifying ramifications. The authorities had hatched a plan that would strike right to the heart of the ‘cloud dweller’. They would send his mistress and muse to a prison camp, and torture her instead.

  5

  Marguerite in the Dungeon

  Earlier that day, 6 October, Boris and Olga had met at the editorial offices of Goslitizdat, the state publishing house for literature, where Boris was due to collect some money. Afterwards, he had sat down with his beloved on a bench in the nearby public gardens. Enjoying the autumnal beauty, Boris asked Olga to come to Peredelkino that evening: they could be alone there, he told her, and he wished to read her another chapter of his book. ‘By this time our relations had settled into an extraordinary phase of tenderness, love and understanding,’ said Olga. ‘He was now wholly absorbed by the novel, by the need to complete Doctor Zhivago as his main life’s work – a design summed up in one sentence in a letter to a correspondent in Georgia: “One must write in a way never known before, make discoveries, so that unheard-of things happen to you – that is life and the rest matters nothing.”’

  As they were idly chatting in the gardens Olga became aware that a man in a leather coat had sat down near them and seemed to be closely monitoring their conversation. She leaned in closer to Boris to whisper that she had heard that morning that the authorities had arrested Irina’s lovely, elderly English teacher at school, due to his wife’s shady dealings with money. As Boris and Olga walked together to the Metro station, they noticed the man in the leather coat following them. Olga had a premonition that she did not want to leave Boris that day. However, she was in the middle of translating a volume of Korean lyrics and the author was coming to see her later that evening with his corrections. She had also promised Boris that she would type out one of her own poems for him.

  Early in 1948, Olga had told Boris that she was unhappy at Novy Mir, as she was receiving unwanted comments about her unprofessional relationship with the famous writer. He encouraged her to leave her job, telling her he would support her and would help her to become proficient in the art of literary translation in her own right. Olga, who adored poetry and had written her own poems since she was a young girl, was only too happy to agree. In her small room on Potapov Street, Boris tutored her in the basic principles. At first, Olga, clumsy in the art, would pad out a dozen lines into at least double, and Boris would laugh affectionately at her for taking such liberties. He taught her how to ‘preserve the sense by discarding words – how to strip an idea bare and clothe it in new words, as concisely as possible, without striving to prettify it’. Olga could have had no better guide than Pasternak, a dedicated and patient teacher, who showed her how to pick her way gingerly along the delicate boundary between translation in the strict sense and improvisation on the essence of the material. As Olga began to master her translations, she entered into a working partnership with Pasternak. He used to refer to the Potapov apartment as ‘our shop’. Often he would start a translation, before Olga would take over and finish it, freeing him up to work on his novel. As well as loving the sense of collaboration, she was also making ‘a good living’ out of her translations. Like Boris, she began to hold literary soirees at home, evenings of poetry and discourse among writer friends.

  ‘The work of our “shop” had its moments of comedy,’ Olga wrote. ‘When editors began to accept and recognise my wor
k and I was receiving, with pride, my first payments for it, BL one day put a translation done by himself among some of mine and submitted it under my name with the rest. He was as happy as a small boy when the publisher turned down this particular one and sent it back to me for revision!’ Boris was generous in his praise of Olga’s abilities. She was constantly astounded and touched that a poet of his genius behaved towards her – a mere beginner in the art of translating – as though they were professional equals. ‘Everything seemed just then to be going very well for us, and I was enjoying the peculiar feeling of freedom which came from the closeness that had grown up between us,’ she remembered. ‘He had just dedicated his translation of Faust to me, and I had said I would give him a poem by me in return.’

  As soon as she returned to her apartment in Potapov Street, she sat down at the typewriter. As she was typing out her poem for Boris, she was overcome by a feeling of deep anxiety very much at odds with her earlier exuberant happiness.

  At around eight, the door burst open and a dozen uniformed police entered. These were Stalin’s state security men – the MGB (later renamed the KGB). They proceeded to ransack Olga’s apartment. She was so stunned and terrified that she was initially unable to swallow due to a pain in her throat. She could not grasp what was happening. In her confusion, she wondered if they were there in connection with the corrupt wife of Irina’s English teacher. Then the ‘quite preposterous’ thought dawned on her – could they be there ‘on account of Boria?’ The officers, smoking heavily, rifled through her books and private papers, throwing her belongings around, setting aside for seizure any book, letter, document or scrap of paper that mentioned Boris Pasternak. She looked on in disbelief as her son Mitia, with his sweet mop of curly hair, arrived home from school and proceeded to feed his pet hedgehog, which he kept on the balcony. One of the MGB men approached him, put his hand on Mitia’s head and said ‘good boy’. Olga noted how Mitia, in an unchildlike gesture, pushed his hand away.

  Olga was now in no doubt that they were there due to her association with Pasternak. ‘The many books that Boria had given me, with the unstinting, generous dedications in his hand, often covering all the blank pages were now being pawed by these strangers. They also seized all my letters and notes.’ She could only watch, helpless, as they seized the red volume of verse that Boris had sent her after they consummated their relationship, the one he had inscribed: ‘My Life, my angel, I love you truly’. They also took the confessional notebook in which she had written out her life history to Boris, which he had returned to her for safekeeping. While some of the men continued to search the apartment, others grabbed Olga. She was told that they had a warrant for her arrest for ‘expressing anti-Soviet opinions of a terrorist nature’. Their warrant also declared: ‘it is proven that her father fought alongside the Whites in 1918 and that her mother was convicted in 1941’, the words barely registering as terror pounded in her ears. Impotent to defend herself, she was taken away.

  ‘At that moment, they broke the thread of my life,’ she wrote. She looked around the room and the last thing she remembered was seeing her poem to Boris, unfinished, in the typewriter.

  On hearing of Olga’s arrest, Boris immediately contacted Liusia Popova, who went to meet him on Gogol Boulevard. She found him sitting on a bench near the Metro station. He began to cry. ‘Everything is finished now,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken her away from me and I’ll never see her again. It’s like a death, even worse.’

  Irina was still at school on the second shift (in the postwar years, because of severe overcrowding, Soviet schools worked in two shifts), so Olga had no way of saying goodbye to her daughter. As Olga was dragged down the stairs, her stepfather, who had lived through the terrible business of his wife’s arrest, stood weeping on the staircase, calling after Olga: ‘You’ll soon be back, you haven’t robbed or killed anyone.’

  When Irina came home from school on that dark October night, trudging through the frozen streets, she glanced up as she neared the family apartment. She knew something was not right: the ceiling light had been switched on in her mother’s bedroom. As this rarely happened, it was with mounting dread that she rang the doorbell. Her worst fears were confirmed when the door was flung open by a policeman in military uniform. Irina looked past him to the row of elegant greatcoats with epaulettes and matching military caps hanging on the coat stand in the hall. The schoolgirl diligently hung up her own modest coat and peered into the sitting room. Through the fog of cigarette smoke from the chain-smoking guards, she saw her grandmother sitting, ashen, her face swollen from crying. She saw her Aunt Nadia and her stricken grandfather. The room seemed packed. As well as family, she realised that other people connected to her mother had been summoned by the authorities as ‘witnesses’. They too were stunned by the shock of it all. Their kindly caretaker with his large bushy moustache still had his apron on over his quilted jacket. He remained with his head bowed low. A friend of Olga’s, Alexei Kruchenykh, a futurist poet who attended her literary soirees, perched on a nearby sofa, also visibly frightened. Irina’s great-uncle, Uncle Fonia, had been innocently paying the family a visit, only to be caught up in the drama. He sat ‘with his light-blue eyes almost starting out of their sockets with terror’.

  Irina went to her bedroom where Mitia was being comforted by their great-aunt, Milia. Aunt Milia explained to Irina that her mother had been taken away to the Lubyanka prison an hour before. In a bid to quell her fears, or merely to detach herself from the unfolding horror, Irina picked up a book, lay down on her bed and started to read. She shrugged at Aunt Milia: what else do you expect me to do? She then became agitated, as she started to think about her pet fish. She worried that they might die if she didn’t go into the kitchen and change their water. Haunted by the image of the huge fish dying alone in the tank, Irina got up and went to remonstrate with the guards, who refused her entry to the kitchen and sent her back to her room.

  She lay back on her bed, straining to listen as the tension mounted in the sitting room. When Uncle Fonia was asked for his official papers, he was thrown into confusion. At that time he was working as a night-watchman at the Cocktail Hall on Gorki Street. This was an institution frequented by foreigners and members of the Soviet elite, which served as a useful listening post for the secret police. Uncle Fonia used to bring Irina and Mitia cocktail straws and paper napkins from the bar as little gifts. In his blind panic he assumed that the police were investigating him for stealing from work; when asked for his papers, he pulled reams of paper napkins out of his pockets, to the officers’ great derision.

  Similarly tragic-comic was Alexei Kruchenykh. As the poet’s writing day was divided up according to a rigidly strict timetable, which Irina remembered as being ‘simply a mania with him’, he boldly announced that he must go home at all cost to take his sleeping pills. It was essential to his work, he added, that he spent the night in his own bed. When the officers prevented him, he became obstreperous. The rest of the group watched, anxious that Kruchenykh should not escalate matters. They tried to calm him down in urgent whispers. Eventually, he took a sleeping tablet and agreed to lie down on the sofa, folding his frame awkwardly onto his side, to everyone’s relief. Doors continued to bang and hearts leapt as officials came and went late into the night.

  After a few hours, the officers began to leak slivers of news. Irina’s grandfather heard that Olga had had a ‘bad journey’ across Moscow to the Lubyanka, and had cried hysterically all the way there. By four in the morning, the official business seemed to be over and the guests in the sitting room were released. Irina and Mitia were tucked into their beds by their grandparents, who did their best to soothe them. The children lay back in the dark, silent yet united in one thought. Would they ever see their mother again?

  As dawn broke, Irina listened to her grandparents negotiating with the police. Under Soviet law, the officers explained, Irina and Mitia would have to be put in a children’s home because they had no resident mother or father. The o
fficers tried to persuade them that the children would be better off in a home because they could not all live off their grandfather’s cobbler’s wage. Maria could not tell them the truth. That Boris Pasternak was already helping them financially. She was quite sure that Pasternak would come to their rescue and would not let the children be sent to an orphanage. To Irina’s relief, the following morning she found that her grandparents had signed papers saying they would look after the children and that they would not be taken away.

  Across Moscow, at the MGB’s yellow-brick headquarters on Lubyanka Square, Olga found herself in an isolation unit. The Lubyanka was only five storeys high, but – so ran the Russian joke – it was the tallest building in Moscow because ‘you could see Siberia from its basement’. Olga had been placed in solitary confinement while the authorities processed her. She was then strip-searched by female guards and subjected to a ‘humiliating examination’. Further indignities continued as everything she valued, her ring, her wristwatch, even her bra, was taken away from her. They later explained that they had confiscated her bra in case she tried to hang herself with it.

  Sitting in her tiny, dark cell, she was consumed with thoughts only of Boris: ‘What if I don’t see Boria?’ she fretted. ‘How terrible it will be for him, that first moment when he learns I’m gone! And then the thought flashed through my mind that he too must surely have been arrested – they would have picked him up on the way home after we parted!’ Astonishingly, all Olga could think about at this time was her lover. Not her children. It didn’t seem to occur to her that if anything happened to her, they would be orphaned.