Semionov: Let’s get back to your statement about Pasternak’s anti-Soviet views.
Olga: It is true that he was shocked by the living conditions in the USSR. I think this was because he felt that he had been deprived unfairly of his audience but he has never admitted to any slander about soviet reality and nothing in his opinions leads us to believe that he was capable of treason.
Semionov: Talk to me about his pro-British feelings.
Olga: It is true that he likes Britain as he is always very keen on translating British literary work.
And so on. After one of these relentless sessions, Olga was asked to write a summary of Doctor Zhivago. She was given a few sheets of paper, so she leaned forwards, resting the paper on the desk in front of her and began to write. She described the burgeoning novel as the story of an intellectual, a doctor, who had found life difficult in the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. He was a man of artistic temperament, a poet. Zhivago himself would not survive the present day, but some of his friends would. There would be, she explained in her barely legible handwriting, nothing discreditable to the Soviet system in the novel. What was to be written was the truth. It was an account of the whole era written by a genuine writer, who, instead of retreating into his own personal world, decided to bear witness to the times.
Semionov picked up her pages of handwritten scrawl, glanced across them and scoffed: ‘It is no good, what you are writing. You must simply say that you have actually read this work and that it constitutes a slander on Soviet life …’
Later, Semionov focused on Pasternak’s poem ‘Mary Magdalene’ and the possibility that it might refer to Olga. The poem begins:
As soon as night falls my tempter is beside me.
He is the debt I pay to my past.
Memories of debauchery
Come and suck at my heart,
Memories of myself, a slave to men’s whims,
A fool, out of my mind,
To whom the street was shelter.
‘What era does it refer to?’ he asked Olga. ‘And why have you never told Pasternak that you’re a Soviet woman, not a Mary Magdalene, and that it is simply not right to give such a title to a poem about a woman he loves?’
‘What makes you think it’s about me?’ Olga asked.
‘But it’s obvious – and we know all about it, so there’s no point in denying it! You must speak the truth: this is the only thing that might make things easier for both you and Pasternak.’
Another time, confusing Mary Magdalene with the Madonna, Semionov asked Olga: ‘Why are you trying to make yourself out to be a Magdalene? You’ve been the death of two husbands, both of them honest communists, and now you turn pale at the very mention of this scoundrel who eats Russian bacon but sits at the table with the British …’ So sick and tired was Olga of hearing about the wretched ‘Russian bacon’ that she angrily retorted that the Russian bacon had actually been paid for by Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare and Goethe.
Semionov often returned to ridiculing the romance itself. ‘But what have you got in common?’ he jeered. ‘I can’t believe that a Russian woman like you could ever really be in love with this old Jew – there must be some ulterior motive here! I’ve seen him myself. You can’t love him. He’s just mesmerised you, or something. You can almost hear his bones creak. A fine specimen! You must have some ulterior motive.’
During one interrogation, when a loud banging was suddenly heard on the iron gates of the Lubyanka, Semionov said with a mocking smile: ‘Hear that? It’s Pasternak trying to get in here! Don’t worry, he’ll make it before long …’
It was true, Boris would indeed soon be summoned to the Lubyanka, but for reasons Olga could never have guessed.
Ironically, while Olga was vigorously defending her lover and his novel during her nightly interrogations at the State Security headquarters, Boris was left alone in Peredelkino, free to continue writing. By the autumn of 1949 he had completed five chapters. His writing was subject to long periods of suspension, when he worked on his poetry and translations in order to earn necessary funds. In Soviet literary circles, attacks were mounting and he had begun to realise how serious and precarious his situation was. If he wasn’t allowed to write, how could he earn a living? And how soon would it be before the authorities came for him? It was inconceivable to Boris, refusing to toe the party line by writing pro-Soviet original material, that he would not be arrested. He found this an incredibly challenging and unstable period, always living as if on borrowed time.
In March 1947 a critique by the poet A. Surkov had appeared in the newspaper Culture and Life, ‘violently denouncing’ Boris’s work. Pasternak’s poetry, said Surkov, ‘clearly shows that scant spiritual resources are not capable of creating real poetry, that reactionary ideology will not let the poet’s voice become a voice of the epoch … Soviet literature cannot put up with his poetry’. Surkov was shortly to become the secretary general of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Olga later described this as a case of a ‘literary bureaucrat against a poet of genius in a shameful campaign’. Surkov, who Olga added ‘hated Boris’ due to bitter envy of his talent, alleged that Pasternak wished to undermine the existing political system. The following April, 25,000 entire copies of Pasternak’s Selected Works of poetry, printed and ready for distribution, were pulped on ‘orders from above’, the day before publication day.
Pasternak knew that public appearances by him were regarded as undesirable and due to the restrictions under which he was placed, he could only be conceived of as a translator. He spent the latter part of 1948 putting Doctor Zhivago on hold to translate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part 1 and 2, which he finished in February 1949. Translating Faust gave him as much a sense of spiritual freedom as Hamlet had earlier; he told the sculptor Zoya Maslennikova that it helped him ‘to become bolder, freer, to break bonds of some sort, not just of political and moral prejudice, but in the sense of form’.
It is clear that working on Goethe’s Faust, a tragic play about selling your soul to the devil, would have appealed to the tortured Boris; not least because here at least he could express himself creatively, without having to worry that he was antagonising the authorities. In Part 1, Faust does not seek power through knowledge, but access to transcendent knowledge denied through the rational mind. Goethe’s themes of mysticism would have resonated with Pasternak, as would the blend of psychology, history and politics in Part 2: themes he was also wrestling with in Doctor Zhivago.
Pasternak saw Olga as his Marguerite – an enchanting, innocent maiden. In one of his letters to Josephine he writes that if she wants to know what Olga looks like, she should look at the illustration of Marguerite in his translation of Faust. ‘It’s almost her likeness,’ he said. Boris even used to correspond with his sisters, using the name ‘Marguerite’ to refer to Olga, to conceal her identity from Zinaida. Goethe’s Marguerite was the embodiment of soft femininity and purity, as Olga was to Boris. He later dedicated his translation of Faust to his lover, writing: ‘Olga get out of this book, take a seat and read it.’
If Pasternak thought that he was relatively safe in translating Faust, in that he could not be accused of antipathy towards the state, he was wrong. Almost predictably, in August 1950, his translation of the first part of Faust led him to be attacked in Novy Mir. ‘The translator clearly distorts Goethe’s ideas … In order to defend the reactionary theory of “pure art” he introduces an aesthetic and individualist flavour into the text. He attributes a reactionary idea to Goethe and distorts the social and philosophical meaning.’
Pasternak wrote to Ariadna Efron, the exiled daughter of his dear late friend, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva: ‘There has been much concern over an article in Novy Mir denouncing my Faust on the grounds that the gods, angels, witches, spirits, the madness of poor Gretchen, and everything “irrational” has been rendered much too well, while Goethe’s “progressive” ideas (what are they?) have been glossed over. But I have a contract to do
the second part as well! I don’t know how it will all end. Fortunately, it seems that the article won’t have any practical effect.’ At least the work was bringing in some money: he wrote to his sisters in England that ‘Zina is able to indulge Lyonia [their son, Leonid] and we’re not suffering deprivation.’
When circumstances allowed he returned to Zhivago. The immense guilt he felt at Olga’s incarceration – and his awareness that the Soviet authorities sought to manipulate and punish him through her suffering – seemed to revive him, producing in him tremendous bursts of creative energy. He could write fearlessly, convinced that the novel would never be published in Russia. So while Olga was defending his book, denying that it was anti-Soviet, Pasternak was channelling his fury against the political machinations and privations of the day into a brave and decidedly anti-Soviet book. Writing to his friend Zoya Maslennikova, he defended his position explaining that his novel could be seen as ‘anti-Soviet’ only if ‘by Soviet one is to understand the desire not to see life as it is’. In Doctor Zhivago he writes:
Such a new thing, too, was the revolution, not the one idealised in student fashion in 1905, but this new upheaval, today’s born of the war, bloody, pitiless, elemental, the soldiers’ revolution, led by the professionals, the bolsheviks.
And among his new thoughts was Nurse Antipova [Lara], caught by the war at the back of beyond, with her completely unknown life, Antipova who never blamed anyone, yet whose very silence was almost a reproach, mysteriously reserved and so strong in her reserve. And here too was Yury’s honest endeavour not to love her as whole hearted as his striving throughout his life until now to love not only his family or his friends, but everyone else as well.
What Pasternak did not yet know, as he wrote about Lara, was that reality was exceeding even his reaches for fiction. While in the Lubyanka, Olga discovered that she was pregnant. She was carrying Boris’s child.
Olga was delighted by this discovery, not least because as soon as the pregnancy was confirmed, conditions for her eased. She was allowed to receive white bread, salads and puree instead of kasha, the daily gruel of porridge made from buckwheat. Her extra food rations were handed to her through the hatch in the cell door. She was also allowed to buy twice the usual amount of food rations from the prison store. She was able to take a daily twenty-minute walk. However, the chief and most tangible concession was that she was allowed to sleep during the day after interrogations. While her cellmates were not permitted any rest after nightly interrogations, and were forced to pace the cell or sit and brood, Olga was allowed to go back to sleep. The warder on duty would come in, prod her with his finger and say in a respectful tone: ‘You are allowed to sleep. Lie down again.’
‘And I would go back to sleep,’ Olga recalled, ‘a sleep without dreams, into which I fell as though into an abyss, interrupting in mid-sentence anyone who happened to be telling me about her interrogation during the night. My kind cell-mates talked in whispers so as not to disturb me, and I would wake up again only to eat the mid-day meal.’
After lunch, the prisoners whiled away the afternoon, their ‘leisure hours’. ‘These too exist in hell,’ Olga noted wryly, sewing with a fishbone needle in which an eye had been made for the thread, or ‘ironing’ their dresses. This they did in preparation for the next interrogation by sprinkling them with water and sitting on them. Any time that remained they spent talking and reciting poetry.
Olga knew that some contact had been made with her mother, Maria, because she had received her parcel (containing the blue crepe de chine dress, plus money for food). What Olga cannot have known then was that her interrogator, Semionov, occasionally rang Maria to update her on her daughter’s situation. Irina described Semionov’s calls to her grandmother: ‘He was extremely polite – of which grandmother was very glad indeed, since we were now social outcasts and such politeness seems like a gift or a favour. Because of it we went on hoping …’ He also permitted Olga to keep a rare book from the prison library – a one-volume edition of Pasternak’s poetry.
One evening, a few months into Olga’s imprisonment, Maria got a call from a woman called Lidia Petrovna, who had just been released from the Lubyanka. She said that she had been in the same cell as Olga and had some information. She asked to meet with Maria. The situation for Olga in the Lubyanka is becoming ‘very bad’, she told her; her daughter was pregnant and ill.
Olga was around six months pregnant when, during one of Semionov’s interrogations, a new interrogator suddenly came into the the room. She noted that Semionov spoke more sharply to her in his presence. ‘Well now,’ the stranger said, ‘you have so often asked for a meeting, and we are going to let you have one. Get ready for a meeting with Pasternak.’
Olga was absolutely ‘overcome with joy at the thought of being able to embrace him, of being able to say a few tender words of encouragement’. Both her interrogators signed a piece of paper, wrote out a pass and handed it to a guard. Olga, ‘giddy with happiness’, followed her escort out of the Lubyanka. She was put in a prison van with blacked-out windows and driven through the city to another government building. There she was led along endless long corridors, with many staircases leading upwards, yet she was always taken downstairs. Deeper and deeper down she was marched, until she reached a poorly lit basement. Feverish, exhausted and disorientated, she could go on no longer. Suddenly, she was pushed through a metal door that clanged shut loudly behind her. She looked back in terror but no one was there.
It was difficult to see through the gloom and there was a sickly strange smell. When Olga’s eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, she could just make out a whitewashed floor with pools of water, zinc-topped tables and what appeared to be cadavers partly covered by tarpaulins. Suddenly she realised that the smell was ‘the unmistakeable sweetish smell of a morgue’. Semionov had promised her she would see Boris. She had spent every day of her long incarceration worrying that he was being mistreated in some other cell, convinced that he had been arrested. ‘Could it be that one of those corpses was the man I loved?’ she wondered.
After being locked inside the morgue for some time, Olga’s legs gave out and she collapsed onto the floor, her feet in one of the icy pools of water. Oddly enough, her sense of terror then passed. ‘I suddenly felt completely calm. For some reason, as though God had put it in my mind, it dawned on me that the whole thing was a monstrous hoax, and that Boria could not possibly be here.’
Eventually, the metal door clanged open again and Olga was dragged to her feet and led back along a series of corridors and stairs. Her belly ached and she could not shake off the interminable inner chill or the sickly sweet smell. The authorities’ attempts to reduce her to flailing despair may have failed, but in other ways, far more sinister, Olga would soon discover that they had succeeded in their aim.
Her next destination was a room containing Semionov. ‘Please forgive us,’ he said, with a smile playing over his face, ‘we made a mistake and took you to the wrong place altogether. It was the fault of the escort guards. But now prepare yourself: we are waiting for you.’
Olga was astonished when a door opened and it was not Boris who entered, as she was still naively expecting, but an elderly man who after a few moments she recognised: Sergei Nikolayevich Nikiforov, Irina’s English teacher. Olga was aghast – so this was it – another sick joke. This was her ‘meeting’ with her beloved.
Nikiforov was being interrogated by a glib and brazen young officer with a pimply face. Olga was about to be subjected to a ritual of Soviet interrogation: a staged confrontation with a witness who had been primed, almost certainly after torture, to offer evidence of her treachery. Olga was astonished by his appearance. Usually neat and tidy, he was unkempt, he had a straggly beard, his trousers were unbuttoned and his shoes had no laces.
‘Do you confirm the evidence you gave yesterday that you were present at anti-Soviet conversations between Pasternak and Ivinskaya?’ asked Semionov. Olga, who shouted out in astonishment – as Nikiforov had
never even seen her together with Boris – was immediately reprimanded not to speak out of turn.
‘Now you told us that Ivinskaya informed you of her plan to escape abroad together with Pasternak, and that they tried to persuade an airman to take them out of the country on a plane. Do you confirm this?’
‘Yes, that is so,’ said Nikiforov.
Olga could not contain herself, she was so outraged by this complete fiction. ‘Aren’t you ashamed Sergei Nikolayevich?’ Semionov motioned for her to be silent by putting his finger to his lips.
‘But you confirmed it yourself, Olga Vsevolodovna,’ he mumbled.
It was then that Olga understood. The old man had been induced to give false information after he was told that Olga had already confessed to crimes that had never even occurred to her, let alone actually happened.
‘Tell us how you listened to anti-Soviet broadcasts at the home of Ivinskaya’s friend Nikolai Stepanovich Rumiantsev,’ continued the bullish young interrogator.
Nikiforov became confused and began to shift his ground. ‘That’s not actually so, I think …’ he stammered.
‘So you were lying to us?’ his interrogator snapped at him.
Poor Nikiforov began to whine and prevaricate. It was unbearable for Olga to witness the old man’s distress; her family had all been so fond of him. Olga tried to come to both their defences, stating that he had seen Pasternak in the flesh only twice, and that was only at the public poetry readings which Olga had arranged for him to attend.
Nikiforov was ushered out of the room with his interrogator. Semionov turned to Olga and said smugly: ‘You see, not all interrogators are like yours.’ Then added: ‘Let’s go home. There’s no place like home …’
Years later, Nikiforov the school teacher wrote to Olga, ‘I have pondered for a long time whether to write to you. In the end, the conscience of an honest man … prompts me to account for the situation in which I put you – believe me, against my will, given the conditions then existing.’
Lara Page 13
