Polikarpov picked up the telephone in front of Olga and rang Anatoli Kotov, the director of Goslitizdat. He ordered Kotov to draw up a contract with Pasternak and to appoint an editor. ‘The editor should think about what passages to change or cut out, and what can be left unchanged.’
When Olga reported this conversation to Boris, his response was unequivocal. ‘I am by no means intent on the novel being published at the moment, when it cannot be brought out in its original form.’
Olga was instructed to keep talking to D’Angelo and to secure the return of the manuscript by offering Feltrinelli first option on a revised text that would be released in Russia. Feltrinelli remained intransigent; he doubted the likelihood of a Soviet edition. ‘It seems self-evident that the novel ought to have been published in the Soviet Union,’ said Olga. ‘But the fact is that those who should have made the crucial decision were simply paralysed by fear.’
Boris clearly felt the same. Despite the KGB closing in on him – from November 1956 to February 1957 almost all of his incoming and outgoing mail was intercepted – he continued to hand over copies of the manuscript to various foreign visitors to Peredelkino. This was reckless in the extreme. When he gave the French scholar Hélène Peltier a copy of the manuscript he entrusted her to take a note from him to Feltrinelli. Typed on a narrow strip of paper, it was undated. ‘If ever you receive a letter in any language other than French, you absolutely must not do what is requested of you – the only valid letters shall be those written in French.’
That August, Isaiah Berlin travelled with Zinaida’s first husband, Genrikh Neigaus, to Peredelkino, where they were given Sunday lunch. On the train out of Moscow, Neigaus pleaded with Berlin to make Boris see that he should halt foreign publication. He said: ‘It was important – more than important – perhaps a matter of life and death.’ Berlin agreed that ‘Pasternak probably did need to be physically protected from himself.’
Far from being dissuaded from any Western publication, Pasternak pressed the manuscript into Berlin’s hands and asked him to read it, before taking it back to England to give to his sisters, Josephine and Lydia, in Oxford. The following day, Berlin read the novel: ‘Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the West, I thought it was a work of genius. It seemed – and seems – to me to convey an entire range of human experience, and to create a world, even if it contains only one genuine inhabitant, in language of unexampled imaginative power.’
During lunch, Zinaida took Berlin aside and, weeping, begged him to persuade Boris not to publish abroad. Ever the protective mother, she did not want their children to suffer further. She believed that Leonid had been deliberately failed on his exam for entry to the Higher Technical Institute because he was Boris Pasternak’s son. She also told Berlin that in May 1950, Boris’s eldest son, Evgeny, was prevented from finishing his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Military Academy and sent to Ukraine for compulsory military service during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign.
Berlin delicately raised the issue of the consequences for the Pasternak family if Boris continued to defy the authorities. He reassured Boris that even if it were not published in the immediate future, the book would stand the test of time. He said that he would have microfilms of it made and buried in all four corners of the globe so that the novel would survive even nuclear war. Boris was infuriated, retorting that he had spoken to his sons ‘and that they were prepared to suffer’. Berlin concluded that Boris chose ‘open-eyed’ to pursue publication. For all of his affectations of naivety, the writer seemed to be playing his own adroit game of Russian roulette.
On 14 August Boris wrote to Lydia, Josephine and Frederick a joint letter from Peredelkino (this was the first time in almost ten years that Boris was able to do so, restrictions having been eased in ‘the Thaw’). He told his family that Isaiah Berlin had visited and would bring one copy of the manuscript back to them in Oxford. He asked that they have it transcribed into no less than twelve copies which he implored them to send to the ‘principal Russians over there’ and ‘very importantly, to [Maurice] Bowra’. (Or ‘My dear and more than dear, thrice dear Bowra’ as Boris referred to him. The classical scholar, professor of poetry and warden of Wadham College, Oxford was an influential champion of Pasternak’s work, who repeatedly nominated the poet for the Nobel Prize for Literature.)
Pasternak told his family about the novel. After repeating his concerns that they would not like much of it, he concluded: ‘It’s an important work, a book of enormous, universal importance whose destiny cannot be subordinated to my own destiny, or to any question of my well-being. Its existence and publication, where that is possible, are more important and dearer to me than my own existence. That’s why the arguments based on caution and common sense which B[erlin] was putting to me, following certain things that had already happened in the book and which he’ll tell you about, carry no weight with me.’
At the beginning of September, Sergio D’Angelo was summoned by the director general of Radio Moscow’s foreign news bureau for what he nervously anticipated would be a dressing-down. His ‘exalted employer’ was seated behind an ‘immense desk covered with a variety of cumbersome desktop items in marble and bronze’. He asked D’Angelo, with studied casualness, if he happened to have an unpublished novel by Pasternak in his possession. D’Angelo responded that he had had a copy of Doctor Zhivago with him for a few days and then – ‘since it was to be published in the USSR, as was announced on the radio, which he will undoubtedly recall’ – he gave it to a friend in the Italian publishing business, who was interested in printing it in Italy as well. D’Angelo was surprised by the director general’s reaction. Far from castigating him, his boss simply bade him a polite farewell.
He travelled to Peredelkino for a brief visit, where he found Pasternak ‘in good spirits and as expansive as ever’. Boris confirmed that he had signed the contract with Feltrinelli before mentioning his meeting with Anatoli Kotov, the director of Goslitizdat, who had assured him that they would publish Doctor Zhivago, but only after it had ‘literally been picked apart’. Such a compromise was ‘completely absurd’, shrugged the disgruntled writer. The two men then discussed why Goslitizdat would have concocted such a proposal in the first place. Pasternak remained convinced that the editors knew full well that they would never persuade him to bowdlerise his work. They were merely biding their time in the hope that Feltrinelli would cave in to pressures and abandon the idea of publishing the novel.
D’Angelo reassured Pasternak that Goslitizdat’s reasoning had no basis in reality. ‘The fact of the matter is that Feltrinelli, who is bound and determined to launch his publishing house on a grand scale, is looking for a major literary coup,’ D’Angelo told Boris. ‘Should he have any doubts about what this coup will actually be, his colleagues are there to make sure that he understands that it is none other than Doctor Zhivago.’ D’Angelo also reminded Pasternak that despite his undying loyalty to the Communist Party, Feltrinelli would never subject himself to such a blatant form of censorship. On the contrary, he would proudly claim his right to stand up for the cause of artistic freedom. Pasternak shrugged his shoulders in resignation. “I hope that’s the case”, was his only response.’
In mid-September, the editorial board of Novy Mir formally rejected the novel in a long, stinging rebuke: ‘The thing that has disturbed us about your novel is something that neither the editors nor the author can change by cuts or alterations. We are referring to the spirit of the novel, its general tenor, the author’s view on life … The spirit of your novel is one of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution. The general tenor of your novel is that the October Revolution, the Civil War and the social transformation involved did not give people anything but suffering, and destroyed the Russian intelligentsia, either physically or morally.’
This hatchet job was written mainly by Olga’s former colleague Konstantin Simonov. Four other board members, including Boris’s next-door neighbour, Fedin, signed the documen
t. They condemned the ‘viciousness’ of Yury Zhivago’s conclusions on the Revolution: ‘There are quite a few first-rate pages, especially where you describe Russian natural scenery with remarkable truth and poetic power. There are many clearly inferior pages, lifeless and didactically dry. They are especially rife in the second half of the novel.’
The letter was hand-delivered to Pasternak’s dacha, along with the manuscript. Typical of Boris, who batted the criticism off, was his generous invitation to Fedin for Sunday lunch a week after receiving the toxic letter. He told fellow guests: ‘I have also asked Konstantin Aleksandrovich [Fedin] – as wholeheartedly and unreservedly as in previous years – so don’t be surprised.’ When his neighbour arrived he asked Fedin not to mention the rejection, and the two men embraced.
By the new year, 1957, Soviet officials were increasingly agitated that Feltrinelli had rejected all invitations and commands to return the manuscript. In a bid to increase pressure on the Italian publisher, Goslitizdat sent Feltrinelli a letter saying that the novel would be published in the Soviet Union in September, asking him to delay publication until then. Feltrinelli replied in conciliatory fashion that he had no difficulty in complying with this request. Yet as Olga observed: ‘that the letter from Goslitizdat was nothing more than a manoeuvre to gain breathing space is evident from its timing’.
On 7 January, Pasternak signed a contract with Goslitizdat. Neither he nor Olga believed its editor, Anatoli Starostin, when he said of the novel: ‘I shall make this into something that will reflect the glory of the Russian people.’ Starostin was a pawn and the contract a ruse to endeavour to get Feltrinelli to return the manuscript. One thing was clear. The Soviet authorities did not want the novel published: in Russia or abroad.
Later that year, on 16 December, Boris wrote to a friend: ‘About a year ago Goslitizdat made a contract with me for the publication of the book. If it had been really published, curtailed, and censored, then half the trouble and problems wouldn’t have existed. Thus Tolstoy’s Resurrection and a lot of other books were published here and abroad in two differing editions before the Revolution, and nobody was afraid or ashamed of anything, and people slept quietly and houses didn’t come tumbling down.’
In mid-February, as the strain over preventing publication escalated, Boris became ill. He had been suffering a tormenting illness, widely believed to be arthritis in his right knee, the same leg he had fractured in the riding incident in childhood. He was first treated in the Moscow hospital, before being sent to a branch of the Kremlin Hospital at Uzkoe – reserved for eminent Soviet figures – and was away from Peredelkino for over four months.
That winter, the Moscow Art Academic Theatre had begun work on a new production of Mary Stuart, the German verse play by Friedrich Schiller, about the last days of Mary Queen of Scots. Pasternak had translated the play at the theatre’s request. Before he fell ill it had given him great pleasure to attend rehearsals, with one of Moscow’s leading actresses, Alla Tarasova, in the lead role. On 7 May he wrote to Tarasova from the Kremlin Hospital. ‘On March 12th I was just going to the city to see one of the last rehearsals, the dress rehearsal. I had already seen you in several scenes, so I rather clearly imagined what a revelation your Stuart as a whole would be. And suddenly, coming down the front step of our cottage porch, I cried out with intolerable pain in the same knee I was going to bend before you in the nearest future, and I couldn’t walk another step.’
According to Olga, Boris ‘found the terrible physical pain very hard to bear, and thought that he was dying’. (Nevertheless, this still did not prevent him from working on a one-volume edition of verse, whenever the pain died down sufficiently for him to be able to hold a pencil.) Frightened for his own life and that he might never see Olga again, he wrote her nine letters from his hospital bed:
Night of 1–2 April
I will tell you when to visit me. I must see you one last time, give you my blessing for the long years of life you will live in me and without me, and see you make your peace with all the others and look after them. I kiss you. Thank you for an infinity of things. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
April 6, 1957
Oliusha dear,
The night was appalling. I couldn’t sleep a wink and just twisted and turned, unable to find any position at all bearable. It can’t go on like this of course. We have behaved like spoiled children – I am an idiot and a scoundrel without equal, and now I have been given the punishment I deserve. Forgive me, but what else is there I can say? I have a pain in my leg. I feel weak and sick. You really can’t imagine how ill I am – not in the sense of danger, but of suffering. If I feel better on Thursday, I’ll send for you, but in my present state life is not worth living, and the idea is unthinkable. I kiss you. Don’t be cross with me. Thank Irochka for her letter.
[Undated]
Oliusha, tell your mother and the others; I am not afraid to die – I want it terribly, and the sooner the better. Everything is getting worse and worse and more and more difficult. All my vital functions are dying away – except for two: the capacity to suffer pain and the capacity not to sleep. Whatever position I lie in I get no rest. Even you can’t imagine what misery it is.
Boris’s self-absorption here is breathtaking. How could he question Olga’s facility to imagine misery, suffering and pain after her sleep deprivation in the Lubyanka and torturous years in the gulag?
He concluded his letter: ‘Keep calm. Don’t come here unannounced. I’ll send for you again out of the blue – when I don’t know. I kiss you. Yesterday you saw for yourself! I have no strength left from the pain.’
Zinaida, who visited Boris every day, was upset during one visit when a hospital official asked who she was. When she presented her identification papers, the employee said that there was a blonde woman in an hour before who had also said that she was Boris’s wife.
By July, Pasternak had recovered enough to be moved to the Uzkoye sanatorium, south-east of Moscow, where he received a course of rehabilitation treatment. Before the Revolution, Uzkoye was the estate of the Trubetskoy brothers, acclaimed philosophers. Boris had known their sons since school in Moscow. Evgeny Pasternak wrote of a visit with his half-brother, Leonid:
We saw our father in Uzkoye, where he had been sent after hospital. The sight of his face with its black circles under his eyes, his weakness and thinness were a shock to us. But he tried to calm us down, saying that it was just a reaction to penicillin and that he felt much better now. We took walks in the park with him and he told us about Vladimir Soloviev, who had lived here with the Trubetskoys; and showed us the room where he had died. Uzkoye was situated amid fields; a huge city, so familiar from childhood, was seen in the distance. In 1928, Father took Mother here and liked this house and park very much.
Boris returned to Peredelkino in early August. His friend Alexander Gladkov visited him and they took a long, gentle walk together in the woods: ‘I remember everything as if it were yesterday,’ Gladkov wrote of the encounter:
the light-grey waters of the lake with the purplish-pink glint on them, the embankment with its branch willows and the black-edged white posts going all the way round, the beautiful old lime trees, cedars and larches in the surviving part of the former estate to which Pasternak took me, and his beloved voice, with the intonation I knew so well.
His manner of talking too had not changed – that is, his sentences piled up rapidly in dense, urgent clusters, he interrupted himself, wandered off into digressions before getting back to the subject – always seeming to lose the thread of what he was saying until you got used to it and understood the relentless logic behind it. He seemed rather agitated and in need of relieving his feelings.
The two men strolled and talked for two hours. Or, as was characteristic, Pasternak talked while his companion listened. At first, Gladkov assumed that Boris must be exaggerating the precariousness of his situation: ‘On that beautiful summer morning in the peaceful, familiar countryside near Moscow his forebodings
of troubles and persecutions to come seemed to me the product of excessive imagination. A year and two months later I understood that it was not he who had been over-apprehensive but I who had been too complacent. He told me that the storm clouds were gathering over him. His novel was shortly going to appear in Italy.’
Boris recounted how, on the previous Friday, he had been summoned to a meeting of the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union. It was supposed to be behind closed doors, he told Gladkov, but because he had refused to attend, they took ‘great offence’ and ‘passed a fearful resolution denouncing’ him. ‘I suddenly find I have a lot of enemies’ Pasternak confided:
I’m in for trouble this time; my turn has come. You really have no idea – it’s a very complicated business involving the pride and prestige of all kinds of people. It’s a clash of rival authorities. The novel itself is hardly at issue – most of the people concerned with the matter haven’t even read it. A few of them would gladly drop the whole affair – not out of sympathy for me, mind you, only because they want to avoid a public scandal. But this is no longer possible. I’m told that someone at the meeting accused me of being hungry for publicity, of wanting to create a great hullabaloo and scandal. If only they knew how foreign and hateful I find such things! I sometimes wake up feeling horror and misery at myself, at this unfortunate character of mine that demands total freedom of spirit, and at the sudden turn of events in my life which is so distressing for those close to me.
Boris had incensed the Writers’ Union by not only refusing to attend the meeting but sending along Olga with a note in his stead. Ever loyal to Boris, she dutifully took the somewhat baiting missive to Polikarpov and Surkov. It read:
People who are morally scrupulous are never happy with themselves; there are a lot of things they regret, a lot of things of which they repent. The only thing in my life for which I have no cause for repentance is the novel. I wrote what I think and to this day my thoughts remain the same. It may be a mistake not to have concealed it from others. I assure you I would have hidden it away had it been feebly written. But it proved to have more strength to it than I had dreamed possible – strength comes from on high, and thus its further fate was out of my hands.
Lara Page 20
