Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  During that first night, as he drifted in and out of consciousness on a gurney in the hospital corridor, Pasternak had contemplated his proximity to and fear of death. On 6 January 1953 he was back at Peredelkino. ‘Ninochka! I am alive, I am at home …,’ he wrote to Nina Tabidze:

  When it all happened I was taken to hospital and for some five evening hours I was lying in the casualty ward and then in the corridor of a common overcrowded municipal hospital. Between swoons and attacks of vomiting and nausea I was seized with such a feeling of peace and bliss! And by my side everything was going on in such a familiar course, things were grouped so distinctly and prominently, and shadows were falling so abruptly. A verst-long corridor with sleeping bodies, all dark and silent, with a window at the end looking on the garden lost in an ink-like turbidity of a rainy night, and behind the trees the gleam of the Moscow glow was seen.

  And this corridor and a green globe of the lampshade on the table and the nurse on duty, and silence and the shadows of nurses and the proximity of death behind the window and behind one’s back. In its concentration it was such a bottomless, such a superhuman poem.

  At that moment, which seemed the last in my life, more than ever did I wish to speak to God, glorify everything one sees, grasp and imprint it.

  ‘Dear God,’ thus I was whispering. ‘Thank you for your language which is majesty and music, for making me an artist, for your school of creative power, for all my life being a preparation for this night.’ And I exulted and cried with happiness.

  It was just like Boris to be erudite and lyrical in the face of death. Yet he was practical too. ‘Was it culpability he felt towards us when he scribbled a note on a message for his secretary, Marina Baranovich, while waiting on a stretcher in one of Botkin’s hospital corridors asking her to find a way to raise a thousand roubles and have the money delivered to our address?’ asked Irina. ‘The money was handed over to us and this is how we were able to survive. Pasternak survived too.’

  In his two-and-half-month stay in the Kremlin ward, Boris also underwent dental surgery. His long equine teeth were replaced with a gleaming set of American dentures, giving him a more distinguished appearance.

  At Peredelkino, Zinaida once again nursed and nurtured Boris back to health, which only increased his feelings of guilt and despair. Now he owed both women his life.

  On 2 January, as soon as Boris was physically able, he wrote Olga’s mother a long, detailed letter about how he had arranged authorisation of payment for his translation work at Goslitizdat to come straight to her. Thoughtfully, yet aware of his duplicity, he urged Maria to ring the editor ‘so he can arrange payment and speed things up, and find out … how much will be paid, and when. Tell both of them not to phone me at home about these earnings, say I have a friend (a man) who has been in trouble and has been away for four years, his children are still at school and on their own, you are their grandmother and this money has been earmarked by me especially for them.’ Towards the end of the letter he added rather insensitively: ‘Z. N. [Zinaida Nikolayevna] saved me. I owe my life to her. All this, and everything else as well – everything I have seen and gone through – is so good and simple. How great are life and death, and how insignificant the man who does not know it!’

  His letter to Maria was full of love and gratitude, however: ‘Dear Maria Nikolayevna! I took the liberty of asking Marina Kazimirovna [Baranovich] to open your letter and read it to me over the telephone. How I recognised and felt you in it!’ he wrote. ‘How much of your warm-hearted self there was in it, how much feeling and life! I send lots and lots of kisses for it! I could hardly refrain from phoning you right away – I am still trying to keep myself in hand now, because I am not supposed to get worked up. Thank you, thank you! Irochka, my darling girl, thank you, and thank you as well, Mitia, for all your concern and tears. I owe part of my recovery to both of you, dear children and to your hopes and prayers, Ira.’

  On 5 March 1953, Josef Stalin died of a cerebral haemorrhage. When the leader’s death was announced, Boris declared to Zinaida that ‘a terrible man died, a man who drenched Russia in blood’.

  ‘On the day of Stalin’s death, Boria and I were still separated from each other,’ Olga wrote. ‘I was in the Potma camp, and he was in Moscow. In both places – in Potma as well as in the capital city, and in the country at large – there were waves of panic. The vast majority, millions of people, wept for Stalin and asked each other through sobs: what will happen now? Others rejoiced – but in silence, furtively, and looking over their shoulders. Only very few were bold enough to give open expression to their joy. BL had been right to say: “men who are not free always idealise their bondage”.’

  A report, based on the testimonies of two Polish women prisoners who were released after Stalin’s death, describes Olga’s behaviour in Potma. They believed Olga to be Boris Pasternak’s wife. The report reads: ‘Ivinskaya impressed them by her unwavering patriotism, and surprised them by improvising literary readings after work time for intellectuals in the camp, at which she usually recited Pasternak’s poems.’

  When news broke that amnesty was to be given to some gulag prisoners after Stalin’s death, Boris was hopeful that Olga would be released. He quickly sent another postcard to her from ‘Mama’:

  April 10, 1953. Olia, my little girl, my darling! How close we are now, after the decree they’ve just published, to the end of this long and terrible time! What a joy that we have lived to see the day when it is behind us! You will be here with the children and with us, and your life will stretch out before you again like a broad highway. That’s the main thing I wanted to say and share our delight in. The rest is so unimportant! Your poor BL has been very ill – I have written to you about this before. In the autumn he had a heart attack and spent three months in hospital. After that he stayed in a sanatorium for two more months. Now, more than ever, he is possessed by only one thought: to finish his novel, so that nothing is left undone, in case the unforeseen happens. We just met him on Chistye Prudy [Metro station]. This was the first time after a long while that he has seen Irochka. She has grown a lot, and become very pretty.

  …

  April 12, 1953. Olia my angel, my baby girl! I am finishing the card I began the day before yesterday. Yesterday Ira and I sat with BL on the boulevard. We read your letter, wondering when we may expect you here, and going over our memories. How marvellously you write, as usual, and what a sad, sad letter! But when you wrote it, the decree on the amnesty had not yet come out, and you did not know the joy awaiting us all. Our only concern now is that this longed-for happiness should not cause us to pine away with impatience, that the deliverance about to come should not overwhelm us by the very fact of being so near at hand and momentous. So arm yourself with patience and remain calm. At last we are nearly at the end of the way. From now on everything will be so wonderful. I am feeling fine and am glad to see BL looking well. He thinks Irochka’s eyes, which used to turn up at the corners, have evened out now. She has become very pretty. Forgive me for writing such silly things.

  Your Mama.

  The day before, Boris had arranged to meet Irina on a bench in a Moscow boulevard, as he was not able, after his illness, to climb the five flights of stairs to their apartment. It was an emotional rendezvous, heightened by the ecstatic news that Olga would indeed be included in the prisoner amnesty. Irina had also been terrified that she would never see Boris again, that he would succumb to a heart attack. ‘[I] saw a dark silhouette sitting on a bench, wearing a familiar hat, his sergeant cap,’ she said of their meeting. ‘I ran towards this individual for whom, for the first time, I felt a really vibrant and burning sense of family connection, closeness, tenderness and joy … I will never forget the black compacted snow of the boulevard, his brand-new face (he had lost some weight since his illness and had had his teeth fixed ) the bells of the tramways, our kisses and a bit later on my neighbour’s exclamations who had seen everything: “But who were you kissing so passionately?”’


  Rather unexpectedly, their conversation took an unpleasant and almost farcical turn. With his peculiar brand of insensitivity, Boris told Irina that, while he would never abandon her mother, his relationship with Olga could not continue in the same vein. Completely inappropriately, he asked the sixteen-year-old to tell Olga that the couple could no longer be together. He implored Irina that she needed to make her mother see and accept this new reality. That so much time had gone by, during which they had both suffered so much, that she would undoubtedly understand that going back to where they had broken off would only be a ‘pointless constraint’. With breath-taking tactlessness, Boris continued to explain to Irina that Olga must free herself from him and only count on his devotion and faithful friendship. He just did not see how he could leave Zinaida, who had worked so hard to nurture him back to health after his two heart attacks. He must therefore sacrifice his personal feelings to her on the ‘altar of devotion and gratitude’.

  Irina might reasonably have asked where his devotion and gratitude were to her mother, who had just risked three precious years of her life in hell, due to him. But, having experienced so many of Boris’s histrionics, Irina refused to take his ‘strange mission’ too seriously. She found his request ‘a typical blend of candour, splendid naivety and downright cruelty’, and perceptively decided to dismiss it. It was a mark of her loyalty to both Boris and to her mother that she only told Olga about the bench conversation many years after Pasternak’s death. Of the future of their relationship, Irina shrugged pragmatically: ‘They would just have to deal with it themselves. And that’s what they did.’

  Equally accommodating of Boris, and intuitive to his anxieties, Olga continued to worry that he might find her altered. She knew that he had a horror of changes in people who were dear to him. He had been reluctant to see his sister, Lydia, who wanted to come and visit him in Russia, as he almost preferred to preserve her in his memory as the beautiful young girl he grew up with. ‘How terrible,’ he had once said to Olga, ‘if she turns out to be an awful old woman, someone completely foreign to us.’

  Olga anticipated that Boris expected her to return from the camp like that. ‘But then he saw that I was just the same – though a little thinner perhaps. And my love for him and closeness to him somehow always brought me back to life in an astonishing way. In short, our life, after being torn apart by sudden separation, now bestowed an unexpected gift on him – so once more nothing mattered except the “living sorcery of hot embraces”, the triumph of two people alone in the bacchanalia of the world’. As Irina predicted, when Olga returned to Moscow that April, passion, loneliness, and guilt, drove Boris straight back into her mother’s outstretched arms.

  7

  A Fairy Tale

  Reunited after three and a half years apart Olga and Boris were both ‘seized by a kind of desperate tenderness’, and a resolve to stay together for the rest of their lives. ‘It is impossible for me to reproduce all that he said to me during those extraordinary first minutes after my return from the camp,’ Olga recalled. ‘Or to convey the manner in which he spoke. He was ready to “turn the earth upside down”, and we were to “kiss like two worlds”.’

  Boris was only just strong enough to slowly climb the stairs to her Moscow apartment, where, in her bedroom, they could finally be alone to reclaim each other. In the safety of his embrace, Olga pressed her head against her lover’s chest and without saying a word, listened to his heart beating. Every time they subsequently met after being apart, she would carry out this affectionate ritual. ‘While I was with him, it was not given to him to grow old.’ Their renewed attraction, after such a long separation, seemed urgent and more potent. They simply could not, and would not, exist without the other.

  A report written by Pasternak’s future publishers, Collins Harvill, in 1961 gives an insight into Olga’s situation on her release:

  The position of persons who returned under these conditions to normal life, after their prison camp experiences, is not generally understood in the West. The authorities which had tormented them and disrupted their family life immediately became their assiduous benefactors. They provide them with the means of recuperations in sanatoria, they secure living quarters for them when necessary, even in the centre of Moscow, they see to it that they obtain adequately paid employment, and they sometimes, as in the case of Mme Ivinskaya, provide them with domestic help. In exchange they expect from the ex-detainee a certain amount of co-operation, on the one hand by refraining from recrimination, complaints and the publishing of their experiences, and on the other, a cheerful, positive and creative attitude to Soviet reality and occasionally a little assistance to the security organs in the performance of their delicate tasks.

  Mme Ivinskaya accepted this situation, as did so many others, for the sake of her union with the children and with Pasternak. Her return to life meant for Pasternak a return to creative work, and at last the great saga on which he had been working for most of his life, started taking definitive shape.

  Olga’s reappearance in Boris’s life inspired and lifted him. He returned to writing Zhivago with a passion and gusto that he had not experienced since the traumatic first few months of Olga’s incarceration. Having spent almost eight years writing the first half of the novel, he drafted the second half (ten parts) in a speedy twelve months and completed the final draft of the whole novel two years later. Of Yury Zhivago’s reunion with Lara, he wrote:

  Even more than by what they had in common, they were united by what separated them from the rest of the world. They were both equally repelled by what was tragically typical of modern man, his shrill textbook admirations, his forced enthusiasm, and the deadly dullness conscientiously preached and practised by countless workers in the field of art and science in order that genius should remain extremely rare.

  They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.

  To them – and this made them unusual – the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of ever greater understanding of life and of themselves.

  He goes on to describe the intense emotions of reunion, as Lara and Yury are holed up together in Varykino: ‘that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or hope – it’s utter madness. Let’s be mad if there is nothing but madness left to us.’ So they ‘burst in like robbers’ to the empty, icy house. Aware that their days together are numbered as ‘death is really knocking at our door’, they prepare to be alone together for the last time. ‘We’ll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and peaceful like the name of the eastern ocean,’ Yury tells Lara. The sense of their doomed passion is heightened that night. As the wolves bay outside, Yury gets up before dawn and sits amid the stillness at a bare desk, inspired to write his poetry. ‘At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him.’

  Boris always liked to see himself in a heroic light; after all, his archetype, Yury Zhivago, is a noble man: a poet and a doctor. He believed that it was in some way due to the influence of his name that Olga was released from the gulag two years early. ‘It was I who unwittingly brought it on you, Olia,’ he told her, ‘yet as you say yourself, they were afraid of going too far – five years is nothing, after all, by their standards, when they measure sentences in tens of years! They wanted to punish me through you …’ Far from reproaching him for all she had suffered, Olga was ‘overjoyed’ to feel that Boris now thought of her as part of his family.

  To commemorate his lover’s liberation, Pasternak penned the allegorical poem ‘A Fairy-Tale’, and included it as one of Yury’s poems at the end of Zhivago. In the novel, Pasternak describes how Yury bases the poem on the legend of Saint George and the Dragon; the gruesome dragon presiding over a dark forest represents Stalin and his labour camps: ‘Last night he had tried to convey,
by means so simple as to be almost flattering and bordering on the intimacy of a lullaby, his feeling of mingled love and anguish, fear and courage, in such a way that it should speak for itself, almost independently of the words.’ Boris/Yury then describes the intricacies of the writing process itself: ‘The writing was livelier but still too verbose. He forced himself to still shorter lines. Now the words were crammed in their tetrameters and Yury felt wide awake, roused, excited; the right words to fill the short lines came, prompted by the measure. Things hardly named assumed form by suggestion. He heard the horses’ hooves ringing on the surface of the poem as you hear the trotting of a horse in one of Chopin’s Ballades. St George was galloping over the boundless spaces of the steppe.’

  Light scattered

  From its blazing mouth.

  It had trapped a girl

  In three coils of its body.

  Its neck was swaying

  Over her shoulder

  Like the tail of a whip.

  The custom of that country

  Allotted a girl,

  Beautiful

  Prisoner and prey,

  To the monster of the forest.

  Pasternak clearly saw himself as the knight riding to the maiden’s rescue, traversing ‘fords, rivers and centuries’ to reach her. He slays the dragon yet is injured in battle. At the end of the poem, the knight and his maiden are bound together for eternity:

  At times excess of joy

  Triples their tears,

  At times a dead sleep