Of their joyful family times together at Kuzmich, on the rush-grown banks of the River Setourne, Olga wrote: ‘We had a room of our own, a home, an anchorage. I often reproached myself for not setting up house like this earlier, so we could have lived and worked together from the beginning in complete independence … At Christmas we got a tree which took up almost the whole of the table at which I worked. We laughed when Dinkie, our cat, stole decorations from it and took them off to her hideaway outside. We were so happy at the thought of it all; our Christmas tree, our table, a place to call our own.’
Sadly, Boris was still torn. Split between the easy-going atmosphere of the Little House and the tensions up at the dacha, the ‘Big House’. Although Olga never directly encroached on Zinaida’s territory, only visiting the dacha if Zinaida was away, arranging to meet Boris in the woods around Peredelkino, Zinaida would have known instantly about her presence in Izmalkovo. (Years later, however, writing to his sister Josephine, Boris still was happy to declare: ‘Z does not know that O is renting a room in a peasant house of a neighbouring village.’) When Olga was released from Potma, Zinaida’s friends closed ranks, attempting in vain to thwart any further temptation from ‘this temptress’. Zinaida, all too aware of her rival’s presence across the lake, became ever more hostile to Boris, making ‘many demands’ on her husband and constantly reminding him about his divided loyalties.
Many nights, Boris would lie alone in his small bed in his study, yearning for the soft comforts of Olga. During one sleepless night, blighted again by his old foe insomnia, he got up to write. The following morning, he brought his fresh poem to Olga – a billet-doux in pencil – for her to type up:
What is the hour? It’s dark. Must be three.
Again, I fear, I shall not sleep a wink.
The cowherd in the village will crack his whip at dawn,
And a cold breeze blow through the window
That looks out onto the yard.
And I’m alone.
But no: engulfing me in all your whiteness
You are with me here.
A friend of Boris and Olga’s, Nikolai Liubimov, a Spanish and French translator, visited the writer at Peredelkino. Afterwards he told Olga that Pasternak seemed ‘heart-rendingly lonely’, coming down the stairs from his study to join Liubimov in the drawing room, where Zinaida and her women friends were playing bridge. ‘They all cast disapproving glances at him.’
Zinaida’s trump card, according to Olga, was that she ‘managed to create a kind of “Olympus”’ at the Big House in Peredelkino – ‘everything there could not have been better arranged for living and working’.
Yet Boris did not want material luxuries. The only luxuries he required were the peace and quiet to write. A desk to work at and a study were essential to him. Not as mere creature comforts but for the sake of his writing, which demanded an orderly way of life.
‘I think Zinaida Nikolayevna understood very well that by making a good home for BL, she strengthened her position as his legal wife and the mistress of the “big” house,’ said Olga. ‘This made it easier for her to reconcile herself to the open existence of the “little” house and she knew that any ill-considered attempt to put pressure on BL would have meant disaster for her.’
Although Boris did the bulk of his writing in his study, he would visit Olga a few times a day, and always early evening, with the pages he had written. Or he would sit at the table with the pages he was working on spread out before him, while Olga curled up with a book on the sofa. This cosy domesticity was in complete contrast to his state of solitude in his large upstairs study in the Big House, which Zinaida only entered to clean. Yet, to Olga’s consternation, Boris refused to leave Zinaida or further unsettle the status quo.
‘BL was so tormented by compassion and pangs of conscience because he no longer loved Zinaida Nikolayevna,’ said Ariadna Efron. She told Olga that ‘this uncouth woman who had failed to respond to his love, reminded him of Little Red Riding Hood who had lost her way in the forest, and he wept tears of pity about her’. Speaking about Zinaida, Boris would say to Olga: ‘I do not pity you, and I hope to God it will always be like that with you and me. Let us save our pity for others. I saw that ageing woman standing by the fence and thought: “You wouldn’t want to change places with her, would you?” So let us bestow the blessing of mercy on those around us.’ Olga later wrote of Boris’s dual lives – split between the two women and two homes:
It is absurd to imagine that he sat in an ivory tower, preserving an Olympian calm. If he never took desperate steps, it was only because of this sense of pity, particularly in regard to someone he had ceased to love – and thereby wronged, as he felt.
Even at a particularly difficult time, when the alien spirit of the ‘big’ house had become intolerable, and we both felt so stifled by the hostility emanating from it that we had decided to clear out and settle in Tarusa [a small town south of Moscow, on the River Oka], Boria simply could not bring himself to – again, it was not a question of putting his own well-being first, but of the overwhelming compassion he felt for those who could only suffer uncomprehendingly.
It may well have been a question of not putting himself first and fully considering Zinaida’s feelings. More likely though, the novel came first. To upend his domestic status quo would threaten his writing routine. He may not have had ideal working conditions with the tensions between the two houses, but they served his creativity and emotional needs well. He could craft in peace in the day, before bringing his manuscript to his most ardent supporter each evening.
Every conversation with Boris seemed to lead back to Doctor Zhivago. Irina paints a sweetly affectionate picture of the way in which she and her mother teased him about his obsession with the novel, mother and daughter catching each other’s eye, humorously:
Before he finished the novel, every conversation brought itself back to the novel. It became a bit of a joke amongst us as he would use any excuse to get back to this subject. All he thought about was that book and everything around him was evaluated through it. My mother would joke: ‘Come on, Boris, what has this got to do with Doctor Zhivago? I’m starting to get bored with this book!’ They would be standing by a peaceful pond where ducks were paddling around and it would not be long before ‘this book’ would be brought into the conversation.
For all her gentle ribbing, Olga could hardly have given more of herself, in supporting, loving and encouraging the tortured writer. From the tremendous amount of effort that Olga offered to the creation of Doctor Zhivago, she derived almost as much satisfaction as if she had written the novel herself. She was generous to the core in assisting her beloved to fulfil his literary dream. Boris’s close friend Alexander Gladkov described Olga’s attitude to the book as ‘a settlement of accounts with everything she lived through, a devastating blow delivered to a hateful foe … the apotheosis of her life, her favourite child, delivered in pain and tears’.
Olga was back in the Moscow apartment one evening, attending to business, when she received a call from Boris at Peredelkino. Sounding shaken, he began to speak in a voice choked by tears. ‘What’s wrong?’ Olga asked him. ‘He’s dead, he’s dead, I say!’ Boris groaned several times over.
It turned out that he was talking about the death of Yury Zhivago. ‘This harrowing chapter was now over,’ concluded Olga crisply.
By the summer of 1955, copies of the first part of the novel had been bound in a handsome brown binding. According to Olga, ‘Boris was as pleased as a child with it.’ Soon after, the second book was bound as well. The conversations around the supper table in the Little House between Olga, Irina and Boris focused on where the novel would be published. In 1948 Boris had signed a contract with the literary journal Novy Mir for publication. However, as his work progressed, due to its ‘anti-revolutionary’ content, he began to doubt that they would ever be able to publish it. He cancelled the contract and paid back the advance. Now Olga acted as Boris’s literary agent, hauling thre
e of the impressive-looking brown volumes round to Moscow publishers. The fully edited and corrected copies were ready for publication.
One warm October evening in 1955, after one of Olga’s regular trips to Moscow, Boris met her from the Peredelkino station and walked her back to the Little House. As they crossed the long bridge spanning Izmalkovo Lake, Boris said to her: ‘You mark my words, they will not publish this novel for anything in the world. I don’t believe that they will ever publish it. I have come to the conclusion that I should pass it round ready to be read by all and sundry – it should be given to anyone who asks for it, because I do not believe it will ever appear in print.’ He explained his reasons, having read through the two handsomely bound volumes. ‘The Revolution is not shown at all as the cake with cream on top,’ he reflected. In his long letter to Pasternak in January 1954, his friend Varlam Shalamov had written:
Your novel raises a great many questions, too many to enumerate and develop in one letter. The first question is about the nature of Russian literature. People learn from writers how to live. They show us what is good, what is bad, they frighten us, they do not allow our soul to bog down in the dark corners of life. Moral pithiness is the distinctive feature of Russian literature.
I do not know how official critics will like the novel. The reader who has not yet been weaned from genuine literature is waiting for just this sort of novel. And for me, an ordinary reader who has long yearned for genuine books, this novel will remain a great event for a long, long time. Here questions which no self-respecting person can ignore are posed with force. Here living heroes of our tragic time, which is after all also my time, have emerged in their full lyric charm. Here the remarkable eye of the artist saw so much that is new in nature, and his brush used the most delicate colours in order to bring out the spirited condition of humanity.
In his conclusion to An Essay in Autobiography, which Pasternak was preparing to have published by the Goslitizdat, he wrote: ‘I have just finished my chief and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and for which I take full responsibility, a novel with prose with a section in verse, Doctor Zhivago. The poems scattered over the past years of my life and collected in the present book are steps preparatory to the novel. And it is as a preparation for the novel that I regard their publication in this book.’
Shortly after completing the manuscript, Boris went for a walk in the woods in Peredelkino with his neighbour, Konstantin Fedin. A veteran Soviet novelist, Fedin would later succeed Alexei Surkov as secretary of the Writers’ Union. Hidden amidst the silver birch trees, away from prying eyes and ears, Boris read his friend the novel, chapter by chapter. Fedin listened rapt, even weeping at certain passages. Yet later, when the editorial board of Novy Mir voted against the publication of Doctor Zhivago, having seen the completed edition, Fedin voted in accordance with his fellow board members.
Goslitizdat never published extracts from the book or the poetry. The journal Znamia also turned down the manuscript. By May 1956, the novel, rejected by the three Russian publishing houses who had been sent the bound manuscripts, remained unpublished. Little did Boris, Olga and Irina know that the book was to have the most remarkable life of its own.
‘The book was going to take us down a spiral,’ wrote Irina. ‘It would be the centre of a universal glory that would also pillory us; it would lead us both to triumph and to Golgotha. The price of this novel would be humiliation, not to forget my mother’s incarceration as well as mine, and it was most certainly responsible for Boris Leonidovich’s death too.’
8
The Italian Angel
At the beginning of May 1956, the Italian section of Radio Moscow broadcast the following news: ‘The publication of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is imminent. Written in the form of a diary, it is a novel that spans three quarters of a century, ending with the Second World War.’
A young Italian, Sergio D’Angelo, who had left his native Rome two months earlier to work at the station, translated the cultural news bulletin with heightened interest. The Italian Communist Party had suggested he leave Rome to work at Radio Moscow, as a member of the team involved in Italian-language broadcasts. D’Angelo also agreed to act as a part-time literary agent for a Milanese publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The scion of one of the wealthiest business families in Italy, with interests in construction, lumber and banking, Feltrinelli embraced socialism and communism as a young man. He had recently started a publishing company and was particularly interested in contemporary literature from the Soviet Union. His ambitions were to secure worldwide publicity for his publishing house with a major literary coup.
D’Angelo asked a Russian colleague at Moscow Radio, Vladlen Vladimirsky, if he would contact Pasternak to set up a meeting. Vladimirsky, who was not only keen to meet the famous poet but to practise his Italian with D’Angelo, was eager to accompany the handsome emissary on his visit to Peredelkino.
On 20 May, Vladimirsky and D’Angelo took the electric train from Moscow’s Kiev station and alighted 50 kilometres south-west at the writer’s colony of Peredelkino. They walked along the narrow dirt roads, marvelling at the glories of spring in the countryside. Passing isolated dachas, they eventually found the one they were looking for: Pasternak’s dacha, No 3, Pavlenko Street.
Boris was in his vegetable garden, dressed in his work clothes, pruning bushes. When he saw the unexpected visitors he ‘approached with a broad smile, threw open the little garden gate and extended his hand’; according to D’Angelo, ‘his grip was nice and firm’. He invited the pair to sit with him in the sunshine on a couple of wooden benches. Boris asked about the derivation of Sergio’s last name – literally translated as ‘of the angel’. D’Angelo explained that it was of Byzantine origin and not that unusual a surname in Italy. This prompted a conversation on his homeland, or more accurately, a Boris soliloquy. Boris explained that he had visited the country in 1912, when he was a student at Marburg University. He had seen Venice and Florence and would have liked to have travelled on to Rome but ran out of money, so had to return to Germany. Characteristically, he then interrupted himself and asked the young men what they wanted to see him about.
D’Angelo launched into his pitch. He spoke proficient Russian, only occasionally turning to Vladimirsky for help with a word or phrase. He explained that he was acting as an agent for Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s new company, Feltrinelli Editore, and that they were interested in publishing Boris’s novel. Pasternak interrupted him with a dismissive gesture of his hand. ‘In the USSR,’ he said, ‘the novel will not come out. It doesn’t conform to official cultural guidelines.’ D’Angelo believed that this prediction was ‘far too pessimistic’. He countered that the book’s publication had already been announced on Soviet Radio and that since the death of Stalin there had been a relaxation on the restrictions to publishing and a greater receptivity to new ideas. He explained to Boris that everyone in the West was talking about a ‘thaw’, a loosening of repression and control now Stalin was dead, under the party chairmanship of Nikita Khrushchev. (The term was coined from Ilya Ehrenburg’s novella, The Thaw, which found publication in 1954, having originally appeared as ‘Ottopel’ in Novy Mir.)
D’Angelo made his ‘reasonable’ proposal to Pasternak. ‘You will give me a copy of Doctor Zhivago to pass on to Feltrinelli, who will immediately begin its translation into Italian, so as to gain advantage over other Western publishers,’ he said. ‘On his [Feltrinelli’s] part, he will agree not to issue the Italian edition until after the Russian version has been published.’
In his eagerness to secure the manuscript and justify his allowance from the wealthy Italian, D’Angelo clearly had no real idea of the risk Pasternak would be taking by placing the manuscript in foreign hands. Boris, however, knew only too well that the unsanctioned publication of the novel in the West, before it had appeared in the Soviet Union, could lead to charges of disloyalty, endangering himself and his family. And, of course, Olga.
Bo
ris fell silent. ‘All of a sudden, I realised that the author, who was barely listening to me, was completely lost in his own thoughts,’ said D’Angelo. ‘I therefore spelt out my proposal once again, this time trying to be even more precise and persuasive.’
After a suspenseful pause, Boris said: ‘Let’s not worry about whether or not the Soviet edition will eventually come out. I am willing to give you the novel so long as Feltrinelli promises to send a copy of it, shall we say within the next few months, to other publishers from important countries, first and foremost France and England. What do you think? Can you ask Milan?’ D’Angelo reassured him that it was not only possible but inevitable, since Feltrinelli would be keen to sell foreign rights to the book.
Boris excused himself and walked slowly towards his dacha. A short time later he emerged carrying a package wrapped in a covering of newspaper. The manuscript was 433 closely typed pages, divided into five parts. Each part, bound in soft paper or cardboard, was held together by twine threaded through rough holes in the paper and knotted. The first section was dated 1948 and the pages were annotated with the author’s handwritten corrections.
‘This is Doctor Zhivago,’ Pasternak said, handing the package over. ‘May it make its way around the world.’ D’Angelo took the package, explaining the good fortune that he would be able to personally deliver the manuscript to Feltrinelli, as he had planned a trip to Europe in the next few days.
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