Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  Holds them in its power.

  At times his health

  Comes home to him,

  At times he lies motionless,

  Weak with loss of blood.

  But their hearts are beating.

  Now he, now she

  Struggles to awake,

  Falls back to sleep.

  Eyes closed.

  Hills. Clouds.

  Rivers. Fords.

  Years. Centuries

  Inseparable from Olga, Boris now only left her side to go to work. He spent much of his time commuting between his study at Peredelkino and her cramped Moscow apartment. During the winter of 1953, his dacha had been extended and ‘turned into a palace’, equipped with a gas supply, running water, a bath and three new rooms. Before Olga’s release from Potma, Boris had begun to live at the dacha all year round, at the request of his doctors, keen for him to remain in more restful surroundings than Moscow. He gardened keenly; his abundant vegetable patch had always been a source of relaxing pleasure for him, as he once told his father: ‘Last year we got out of our spacious kitchen garden, – the fruits of our own, esp Zinaida’s labours – half a cellar of potatoes, two casks of sauerkraut, 4,000 tomatoes, and a great deal of peas, French beans, carrots and other vegetables to be consumed in a year.’ Yet once Olga was back in Moscow, if Boris had had a particularly productive working day, he would return to her in the evening ‘as though to share in some richly earned festivity’.

  For Olga, although she now knew she was Boris’s ‘chosen one’, she still was not his official chosen one: his wife. After the loyalty she had shown, did he not owe her that? Their moments of grateful togetherness soon became punctuated by her ‘female tantrums’. ‘[I] longed for recognition and wanted people to envy me,’ she wrote. Boris, true to form, placated her with ardent declarations of his inimitable, mystical love, yet refused to leave Zinaida. He claimed that he saw Zinaida as a subject of pity and tried to reassure Olga that she had so much more of him. She may not have had the status of his wife; but she could lay true claim to his heart. She understood the essence of him. Olga oscillated between being content with this and becoming frustrated, yearning for a public acceptance of her role and status in his life. Why couldn’t he act decisively, leave Zinaida and publicly claim her? She remembered a typical discussion – or rather, a Boris soliloquy – on the subject:

  You are a gift of the spring, my love – how good that God created you a woman … Let it always be like this: we fly to each other, and never want anything so much as to meet! And we need nothing else. Let’s not look ahead, or complicate matters, or hurt other people’s feelings … Would you want to be in the place of that unfortunate woman? For years now we have been deaf to each other … and of course she is only to be pitied – she has been deaf all her life – the dove tapped at her window in vain … And now she is angry because something real has come to me – but so late in life! …

  Boris was adamant that they must not force the pace of their relationship. He continued, rather weakly, to rely on external circumstances to shape their lives.

  In spite of this, the summer of 1954 became one of the most contented times for the pair. After nearly four years in prison, Olga was ‘beginning to take in, with some difficulty, the joy of return to the world after being excluded from it’. As Boris did not wish to force a resolution to his crowded marriage, he was delighted when fate dealt them a new card. Olga found out she was pregnant again. ‘This is just as it should be,’ he reassured her, relieved. ‘It will make everything fall into place, bring things to a head, and a solution will somehow suggest itself. In any case, surely there can be no question that the world is large enough for your and my child?’

  As the pregnancy progressed, Olga worried that Irina would take the news badly, that she would disapprove. When it became impossible to hide the fact that she was pregnant any longer, she sent her mother, Irina and Mitia to spend the summer with her aunt in Sukhinichi, west of Moscow. Zinaida conveniently took their son Leonid on holiday to Yalta.

  This gave Olga undiluted time with Boris in Peredelkino, providing emotional support as he surged ahead with the novel. Copies of the near-completed manuscript were circulated among various acquaintances; many were awaiting its publication in book form and in serial. The name of an editor was also frequently mentioned, for a larger volume of Pasternak’s poetry was being simultaneously prepared for publication.

  Pasternak was keen to get what he saw as his life’s work read by as many people as possible, partly because he feared the novel might never be published and partly because, like all artists, however brightly they shine, he hungered for external validation. His friend Ariadna Efron once noted that Boris ‘had the vanity of any man of true talent who, knowing he will not live to see himself acknowledged by his contemporaries, and hence snapping his fingers at them for their failure to understand him, nevertheless craves their recognition more than any other – he knows perfectly well that the posthumous fame of which he is assured is about as much use to him as a wage paid to a worker after his death’. Boris was disquieted when shown a copy of a British newspaper in which there was a double-paged feature under the title ‘Pasternak keeps a courageous silence’. It said that if Shakespeare had written in Russian he would have written in the same way that he was translated by Pasternak, whose name was much respected in England, where his father had lived before his death. What a pity, the article continued, that Pasternak published nothing but translations, writing his own work only for himself and a small circle of intimate friends. ‘What do they mean by saying my silence is courageous?’ Boris asked Olga sadly: ‘I am silent because I am not printed.’

  Irina recalls the final occasion, in 1954, that Pasternak gave a poetry recital and answered questions in front of an audience. It was in a vast hall in the Moscow School of Engineering and the theme of the evening was ‘Hungarian poetry’. The audience consisted of Hungarian poets and translators as well as students. Irina was sitting next to her mother, whom she described as still having ‘that bronzed glow with people who spend time in the camps’. Olga was wearing the same dress she had been wearing on the day of her arrest and looked especially slim. They were both, however, ‘full of apprehension’ for Boris, as the evening was poorly organised, with no posters circulated promoting the event. Irina was ‘scandalised by the half-empty room, the thud of conversation and the obvious indifference’. Boris looked ‘vulnerable and clumsy in the suit he had inherited from his father’, she recalled, ‘the one he wore to all special occasions until his very last day. There he was, in this gloomy room, standing on top of a badly lit podium, his only public a handful of students. He reminded me of a big bird thrown onto the shore, its big wings dragging on the floor powerless.’ It was a far cry from Pasternak’s poetry recitals ten years earlier, when huge, besotted crowds hung on his every word, then roared his poetry in unison back to him.

  As Pasternak walked towards the lectern, a man sitting near Irina called Gidas, who had just been released from the labour camps, whispered loudly: ‘My God, it is true that Geniuses do not age!’

  Pasternak recited some poems that he had translated, his voice heavy. He then delivered his own poems in an equally sombre tone. But most of the students seemed oblivious. There was a weak round of applause, but Pasternak was unable to hide his resentment once he realised that he was not asked to perform more. He clearly expected and was accustomed to a clamouring encore.

  Earlier in April 1954, after eight years of his enforced silence, ten of Pasternak’s poems from Doctor Zhivago were published in the journal Znamia. The poems were prefaced by an explanatory note from Boris: ‘The novel will probably be completed in the course of the summer. It covers the period from 1903 to 1929, with an epilogue relating to World War II. The hero, Yury Andreyevich Zhivago, a physician, a thinking man in search (of truth), with a creative and artistic bent, dies in 1929. Among his papers written in younger days, a number of poems are found, which will be attached to t
he book as a final chapter. Some of them are reproduced here.’

  Official reaction to the poems was at best lukewarm, yet Boris became jubilant that ‘the words “Doctor Zhivago” have made their appearance on a contemporary page – like a hideous blot!’ He told his cousin Olga Freidenberg: ‘I have to and want to finish the novel, and until it is finished I am a fantastically, manically unfree man.’

  At the start of the year, one of Pasternak’s ‘small circle of intimate friends’, the poet and prose-writer Varlam Shalamov, received a copy of the manuscript to read. Shalamov had spent seventeen years in the gulag, later publishing accounts of the most notorious camps of Kolyma in the far north-east of Siberia. He wrote a long letter to Pasternak after reading his work-in-progress: ‘I never thought, and could not imagine to myself even in my most distant hopes of the last fifteen years, that I would read your unpublished, unfinished novel, and what is more in a manuscript which I received from you yourself … it has been a very long time since I read a work of Russian literature that lives up to Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky. There is no doubt that Doctor Zhivago is of this calibre.’

  After observations and reflections on the opening of the book, and Pasternak’s descriptions of faith and Christianity, Shalamov devoted page upon page to a detailed discussion of the character of Lara:

  So what is the novel, and, moreover, who is Doctor Zhivago, who at least until the middle of the novel does not really exist and is still not apparent when Lara Guichard, the genuine heroine of the first half of these pictures, has already reached her full stature in all her charm, a charm only partly borrowed from Turgenev–Dostoevsky – clear, like crystal, sparkling, like the stones of her wedding necklace. Her portrait is a great success, a portrait of such purity that could not be slandered or soiled by the filth of the Komarovskys of the world.

  I used to know such Laras, well not the same, a little less, a little smaller. She is alive in the novel. She knows something more elevated than all the other characters in the novel, including Zhivago, something more real and important than she could share with someone, much as she might want to.

  The name you gave her is very good – Lara is the best Russian name for a woman. It is the name of women who suffered a sorrowful Russian fate – the name of the bride without a dowry, the heroine of a remarkable play and it is also the name of a woman, the heroine of my youth, a woman whom I loved to distraction like a boy, with a love that cleansed and lifted me …

  But I do not want to talk about her, but about Larisa Guichard. Absolutely everything is upright in her. Even the very difficult scene of Lara’s fall does not call up anything except tenderness and purity … Your women come off better for you than your men – it seems this is inherent in our greatest writers …

  Your words about the second revolution which is so personal for each of us are very good, as is this whole piece in general. And only Larisa, with her imponderable look, Larisa, inwardly richer than Doctor Zhivago and much more so than Pasha – Larisa is a magnet for everyone, including Zhivago.

  I have read 200 pages of the novel – where is Doctor Zhivago? This is a novel about Larisa …

  That August the author’s real-life Larisa suffered a tragedy worthy of the pages of his novel. Olga was out driving a pick-up, in the countryside west of Moscow, looking for potential dachas to rent, somewhere where she and Boris could spend time together. The drive turned out to be across rough dirt tracks and roads. Feeling unwell, she stopped to ask for help at a pharmacy in Odintsovo. An ambulance was called for her and on the way to the hospital, Olga went into premature labour, but the child was stillborn. ‘One might have thought that no one would have been particularly upset by this,’ Olga wrote later. ‘Ira, whose reaction to my having a child I had feared most of all, would have no cause for concern, or so I imagined. BL had shown no sign of wanting to change his mode of existence and was happy enough for us to live from meeting to meeting – something which would obviously have been complicated by the birth of a child.’

  But she was ‘quite wrong. Everybody was cross with me. Ira was distressed that I had lost my baby, and Boria sat weeping at the foot of my bed, repeating bitterly what he had said before: “Do you really think there would have been no room in the world for our child? How little faith you have in me!”’

  The following spring, after the frustration of going through the long winter without a place of their own – their trips to and from Moscow having been curtailed when the weather was harsh and the snowdrifts particularly bad – Olga did something ‘unbelievably foolish’. On the advice of a girlfriend, she rented out a dacha on the Kazan road, leading east out of Moscow, which made it much harder for her and Boris to meet. There was no easy train route and every time Olga arrived at Peredelkino station, Boris would be waiting, miserably pacing the platform.

  By the summer Olga decided to take matters into her own hands. She boldly rented half a dacha for her whole family on the lake shores of Izmalkovo, in a village adjacent to Peredelkino; just for a few months initially. The place was idyllic, with canopies of silver birch and weeping willow cascading over the water. Olga’s proximity was a welcome relief for Boris, who could walk the twenty minutes from his dacha, over the long wooden plank bridge that crossed the lake. Maria, Irina and Mitia settled into the two rooms of the dacha, while Olga moved into the glassed-in veranda. Gnarled roots provided uneven yet charmingly bucolic steps to the door of the veranda.

  On his first visit, Boris was taken aback: ‘But I asked you to find us a refuge, not a glass-house – you must admit, it looks very odd, Olia!’ Dutifully, Olga hurried back to Moscow to purchase some red and dark-blue chintz to cover the whole of the glass-sided veranda. For Olga, the security of finally having their own domestic space – her first nest with Boris – gave her newfound joy. But Boris was still unhappy. He hated the lack of privacy and the large panes of glass through which you could hear every sound.

  Nevertheless, the summer of 1955 was glorious: baking hot and sunny with frequent thunderstorms. The wild roses blossomed luxuriantly. As the summer came to an end Boris began to worry that Olga would move back to Moscow and he would be left in Peredelkino, ‘alone’ again.

  So when Maria and the children returned to the Potapov apartment, Olga decided to stay on at Izmalkovo, where Boris could come to visit her twice a day. She would simply travel to Moscow for necessary visits. She tried to persuade her landlady to let her continue renting part of the house for the winter but she herself advised Olga to take another place nearby which was properly insulated against the cold, and equipped with a cooking stove. Her husband helped Olga move, carrying her blue-painted outdoor table, typewriter and canvas chairs.

  Her new landlord was called Sergei Kuzmich. Olga later said that the best years of her life were spent at the Kuzmich property, a little house surrounded by tall poplars. She loved the small room leading out onto a veranda which doubled as a dining room in the summer and a porch in winter. Once furnished, with its ottoman covered in her favourite red and dark blue chintz, matching curtains and a thick red carpet, it was a cosy home with the stove crackling away in the corner. ‘If there had been any part of my life which could be described as truly happy, it was during those years between 1956 and 1960,’ she said: ‘It was the happiness of daily communion with someone I loved, of all the mornings and winter evenings spent together, reading to each other or entertaining people we liked. It seemed like one long, never-ending feast. We shared blissful years of walks together, shared joys and anxieties, working on translations, meeting friends, learning from him and listening to everything he had to say.’

  By this stage, with Boris no longer making regular trips into Moscow, the whole of his literary business was entrusted to Olga. She edited his manuscripts, twice retyping the entire manuscript of Doctor Zhivago for him. She acted as his secretary and read proofs for him.

  Brief separations, such as when Olga needed to go to Moscow, began to alarm the writer. He arranged for a telephone t
o be installed inside the Potapov apartment, ringing Olga at 9 p.m. sharp to enquire about her day and inform her of his. The children were not supposed to use the phone at this time, leaving the line free for Boris’s call. He would always begin the call with: ‘Olia, I love you! and ended it with: ‘Don’t get stuck there tomorrow!’

  Every Sunday, Irina, Mitia and Olga’s friends from Moscow would visit. Olga and Boris would host these informal Sunday lunches, which soon turned into regular literary gatherings.

  For Irina too, the days spent at the ‘Little House’ at Izmalkovo were among the most blessed times and the source of her fondest memories. ‘All it would take for my adolescent melancholy to disappear was for me to see Boris Leonidovich by the village well, wearing his wellies, standing in the mud, wearing his cap and oilskin designed for this kind of weather,’ she recalls. ‘Whenever I saw him rushing to meet my mother at Kuzmich’s house, I would be at peace with myself. “Quickly go and make yourself an omelette” he would tell me with authority, which made him sound even more important. “You need to eat. What did your mother prepare you for lunch?” He thought I was too skinny and would keep on repeating in his humming voice: “Olioucha, you need to make her eat.”’

  ‘I loved meeting Boris then, where he looked and felt so well,’ continued Irina. ‘Someone once said of him “In Pasternak, even his appearance is a piece of art”.’ This even remained true as he aged. It was like some sort of miracle. His grey hair, arranged in a mess would light up his bronzed face which would give him a tanned look all year round. In Peredelkino, with the fresh air of his morning walks no matter the weather, the gardening in his vegetable patch, his swims in the Setourne river – all of this made him into a lively country man who feared inactivity. He was always busy, elegant and driven.’

  The summer of 1955 was a ‘time of great happiness’. Every evening at six o’clock, Boris would appear, while Olga busily typed up passages of Zhivago he had brought over the night before. ‘My mother never took the job of typist very seriously,’ said Irina, ‘her typewriter was not very good and it was not her profession. Boris only asked her to help him when his typist was away or if we needed to see an extract he needed to work on. I was once entrusted with this very sacred task as my mother was busy receiving guests and Boris was due to arrive any minute. But I made so many spelling mistakes, especially with the Siberian characters, that I was never asked again.’