Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  ‘Spontaneous’ protests against Pasternak were held at the Gorky Literary Institute, opposite the Writers’ Union on Vorovski Street. Carefully orchestrated, great pressure had been put on the students to attend by the institute director. The stance they took against Pasternak, he said, would be a ‘litmus test’ for them. The students were instructed to turn up at the demonstration and sign a letter denouncing the writer in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. According to Irina, who was studying at the institute: ‘The people collecting the signatures came round the dormitories and it was hard to escape them.’ Even so, only just over a third of the 300 students signed this letter. ‘Some of our girls took refuge in the toilets or in the kitchen, and pretended they weren’t in. My friend Alka simply chased them out of her room. But not everybody could afford to do this.’ Meanwhile, in Leningrad, three brave students daubed ‘Long Live Pasternak!’ across the embankment of the River Neva.

  The demonstration itself was a ‘pitiful display.’ Only a few dozen people turned up. They took placards and leaned them against the wall of the Writers’ Union. On one of them there was a caricature using anti-Semitic imagery and depicting Pasternak reaching for a sack of dollars with crooked, grasping fingers. Another said: ‘Throw the Judas out of the USSR!’

  On Sunday 26 October, all the newspapers reproduced in full the materials that had appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta the previous day. Pravda, the official publication of the Communist Party, carried a malicious personal attack on Pasternak written by their favourite hatchet man, David Zaslavsky. Aged seventy-eight, Zaslavsky had been brought out of semi-retirement to savage Boris. The headline read: ‘Reactionary Propaganda Uproar Over a Literary Weed’. Zaslavsky decried: ‘It is ridiculous but Doctor Zhivago, this infuriated moral freak, is presented by Pasternak as the “finest” representative of the old Russian intelligentsia. This slander of the leading intelligentsia is as absurd as it is devoid of talent. Pasternak’s novel is low-grade reactionary hackwork.’

  ‘The novel,’ he continued, ‘was taken up triumphantly by the most inveterate enemies of the Soviet Union – obscurantists of various shades, incendiaries of a new world war, provocateurs. Out of an ostensibly literary event they seek to make a political scandal, with the clear aim of aggravating international relations, adding fuel to the flames of the “cold war”, sowing hostility towards the Soviet Union, blackening the Soviet public. Choking with delight, the anti-Soviet press has proclaimed the novel the “best” work of the current year, while the obliging grovellers of the big bourgeoisie have crowned Pasternak with the Nobel Prize.’ Zaslavsky concluded: ‘The inflated self-esteem of an offended and spiteful Philistine had left no trace of dignity and patriotism in Pasternak’s soul. By all his activity, Pasternak confirms that in our socialist country, gripped by enthusiasm for the building of the radiant Communist society, he is a weed.’

  Alexander Gladkov was sitting in a barber’s shop on Moscow’s Arbat Square that afternoon when he heard Zaslavsky’s article being read out over the radio. ‘Everybody listened in silence – a sullen kind of silence. Only one chirpy workman started talking about all the money Pasternak would get, but nobody encouraged him to go on. I knew that cheap tittle-tattle of this kind would be much harder for Pasternak to bear than all the official fulminations. I had felt very depressed all day, but this silence in the barber’s shop cheered me up.’

  When Irina read these venomous attacks, she thought how glad she was that Boris did not often read the newspapers:

  The monstrous cheapness of it all would have stung him to the quick and wounded him – he would not have been able to treat it aloofly, with contempt, as we could. He might well have taken all this wretched filth to heart, and tried in a desperate (and also comic) manner to justify his actions both to himself and everyone else.

  I had often noticed – and it was particularly evident at this time – that he was unable to take an ironical view of things that seemed almost idiotic to others. For example, someone thought to cheer him up during those days by telling him about an exchange between two women in the Metro: ‘Why are you shouting at me like that?’ said one to the other. ‘Do you take me for a Zhivago or something?’

  When he later re-told the story to us, BL put on a great show of finding it very funny, but I, for one, sensed – and I had an unusually heightened capacity to enter into his feelings during those days – that it was in fact all very painful to him.

  Irina left immediately for Peredelkino with two young writer friends from the Literary Institute, Yura and Vania. It was clear that Pasternak was going to be hounded, that a witch hunt had been mounted against him, and it was impossible to say where it might end. Irina’s friends, ‘afraid and quaking in their shoes’ about going to visit Boris Pasternak, nevertheless seemed eager to help.

  At the Little House, Olga greeted them at the door. She was not expecting her daughter. Boris was delighted to see Irina but less so her visitors. He wanted to be left alone. He told her guests that he was ready to ‘drink his cup of suffering to the end’, and despite the terrible weather – it had been raining non-stop for five days – tried to appear cheerful. Irina explained that the members of the Writers’ Union had arranged to meet the next day, Monday 27 October, to decide Boris’s fate. ‘He was devastated,’ Irina recalled. ‘I could see how much he would have liked to have been spared this trophy. That he wished that all of this was a bad dream and that if only his life could go back to normal; his work, his walks, his correspondences and his visits to my mother.’

  Irina and her two friends accompanied Boris back to his dacha. His loneliness was tangible. When he said goodbye and thanked the two young students for coming, he pulled out a checked handkerchief to stem his tears. ‘It was a loneliness born of great courage,’ remembered Irina. ‘He was still dressed in his usual get-up – a cap, a mackintosh, and wellingtons – which Mama and I loved so much. He was wearing this cap and raincoat when he was photographed on the bridge by a Swedish photographer, his hand on his chest. The caption written in our village newsletter read: “Hand on my heart, I can say I have done something for Soviet Literature”.’

  Later that night, Boris confided to Olga that Irina’s two friends, Yura and Vania, had told him that if they refused to sign a letter demanding his expulsion from the country, they would be thrown out of the Literary Institute. They asked Boris what they should do. He had told them to sign it: after all it was an empty formality. When they left him at his dacha, he described watching them walk away hand in hand, ‘skipping with joy’, clearly relieved that they had Pasternak’s personal permission to sign. Olga saw how much this had hurt Boris. ‘How strange young people are now. In our time such things were not done,’ he said to her, lamenting their lack of loyalty and backbone.

  Mark Twain once wrote that a man is admitted to the Church for what he believes, and is expelled from it for what he knows. ‘The time had now come for Boris to be expelled from the Church because of what he knew,’ wrote Olga. ‘He had broken the basic rule of the age in which we live; the rule that requires you to ignore realities. And he had usurped the right, claimed by our rulers for themselves alone, to have an opinion, to speak and think one’s own thoughts.’

  10

  The Pasternak Affair

  At midday on Monday 27 October, 1958, the Writers’ Union met to consider ‘the Pasternak affair’. Boris went into Moscow early that morning, wearing the cherished three-piece suit he had inherited from his father. He went straight to Olga’s Potapov apartment with Vyacheslav ‘Koma’ Ivanov. He was the son of Boris’s Peredelkino neighbour Vsevolod Ivanov, who remained bedridden after the terror of the Writers’ Union summons.

  Boris and Koma were greeted by Olga, Irina and Mitia. Over strong black coffee they discussed whether Boris should attend his own ‘execution’ or not. Koma was adamant that he should not. They agreed that Boris would send the committee a letter instead. Boris went into Irina’s bedroom and wrote the letter in pencil. ‘It was an unusual kind o
f letter in which he had listed all his points in summary form,’ recalled Olga. ‘There were twenty-two points. It was quite undiplomatic, without any beating about the bush or compromises, and had been dashed off without a moment’s hesitation.’

  Boris proceeded to stand in front of them. He read the letter out in his slow, booming voice, gravely pausing after each point. They included:

  1. I have received your invitation, and intended to come, but knowing what a monstrous display it will be, I have decided against it.

  2. I continue to believe that it was possible to write Doctor Zhivago without ceasing to be a Soviet writer – particularly as it was completed at the time of the publication of V. Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone – which created the impression of a thaw, of a new situation.

  3. I gave the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to an Italian Communist publisher, and expected that the translation would be censored. I was willing to cut out (unacceptable) passages.

  4. I do not regard myself as a parasite.

  5. I do not have an exaggerated opinion of myself. I asked Stalin to let me write as best I can.

  6. I thought that Doctor Zhivago would be the object of friendly criticism.

  7. Nothing will induce me to give up the honour of being a Nobel Prize winner. But I am ready to hand over the money to the Peace Committee.

  8. I do not expect justice from you. You may have me shot, or expelled from this country or do anything you like. All I ask of you is: do not be in too much of a hurry over it. It will bring you no increase of either happiness or glory.

  His letter ended with the words: ‘I forgive you in advance.’

  His audience listened in astonished silence. After he finished there was an anxious pause before Koma, who adored Boris, said encouragingly: ‘Well now, it’s very good!’ Olga suggested that Boris cut out the reference to Dudintsev. Dudintsev’s novel had provoked fierce controversy in 1956 due to its outspoken portrait of a Stalinist bureaucrat. But Boris being Boris, he refused to alter his letter in any way. Koma and Mitia took the inflammatory missive to the Writers’ Union by taxi, to ensure that it was safely delivered for the start of the meeting.

  It was a packed, excitable audience who argued Boris Pasternak’s fate at the White Hall on Vorovski Street. All the seats were taken and writers were crammed in, lined up against the walls. Pasternak’s letter was read out and greeted with ‘anger and indignation’. Polikarpov’s summary of the meeting for the Central Committee described it as ‘scandalous in its impudence and cynicism’.

  The meeting went on for hours yet, in the end, the vote to expel Boris from the Writers’ Union was unanimous. A long, formal resolution was printed in the Literaturnaya Gazeta the following day, accompanied by a headline in huge print: ‘On Actions by Member of the Union of Writers of the USSR B.L. Pasternak Incompatible with His Calling as a Soviet Writer’. The text of the resolution savaging Boris repeated the accusations of his betrayal of the Soviet people. It included coruscating lines such as ‘Doctor Zhivago is the cry of woe of a frightened Philistine who is aggrieved and dismayed because history has not followed the crooked paths which he would have liked to dictate to it …’ and concluded that the board ‘divest B. Pasternak of the title of Soviet writer, and expel him from membership of the Union of Writers of the USSR’.

  The KGB immediately tightened its grip on Boris and Olga. They were followed wherever they went. ‘Our footsteps were dogged by suspicious-looking characters,’ said Olga. ‘Their methods were extremely crude – they even dressed up as women, and sometimes pretended to hold drunken parties (together with dancing!) on the landing right outside our apartment in Potapov Street.’ A bugging device was installed at the Little House. ‘Good day to you, microphone!’ Boris would say, hanging his cap on a nail next to the place they discovered it had been hidden.

  ‘There was the feeling of being harassed on all sides,’ said Olga, ‘so we spoke mostly in whispers, frightened of our own shadows, and constantly glancing sideways at the walls – even they seemed hostile to us. Many people turned their backs on us and did not want to know us anymore.’

  When Olga returned to her apartment late on 27 October, she could see the KGB agents, some of whom she already knew by sight, hanging around the entrance. Given her previous experience, when the KGB ransacked her apartment before arresting her, she decided that the time had come to try and save some letters and manuscripts and to burn other items. So the following day she and Mitia took as many of her papers as they could out to the Little House. Boris arrived soon after them and began speaking, his voice trembling.

  ‘Olia, I have to say something very important to you, and I hope Mitia will forgive me. I cannot stand this business any more. I think it’s time to leave this life, it’s too much.’ He then proceeded to make the shocking suggestion that he and Olga write a joint suicide note, then take their lives together. ‘We’ll just sit here this evening, the two of us – and that’s how they’ll find us. You once said that eleven tablets of Nembutal is a fatal dose – well, I have twenty-two here. Let’s do it. It will cost them very dearly. It will be a slap in the face.’

  Mitia, understandably upset by the conversation, ran outside. Boris followed after him. ‘Mitia, forgive me, don’t think too badly of me, my precious child, for taking your mother with me, but we can’t live and it will be easier for you after our death … But we can’t go on – what’s happened already is enough. She can’t live without me and I can’t live without her. So please forgive me. Now tell me, am I right or not?’

  All three of them now stood on the doorstep, oblivious to the snow and the rain. Understandably terrified, Mitia blanched. But such was his regard for Pasternak and love for his mother that he replied stoically: ‘You are right, Boris Leonidovich, Mother must do what you do.’

  Olga sent Mitia to fetch a basket of wood chips so they could build a fire to burn certain papers. She led Boris inside, sat him down and tenderly asked him to wait a little longer before taking any sort of drastic action. ‘Our suicide would suit them very well,’ she said, taking him in her arms as he wept against her. ‘They will say that it shows we are weak and we knew we were wrong, and they will gloat over us into the bargain.’ She gently persuaded Boris to return home to his study and to try and write a little to soothe himself. She reassured him that she would go and find out exactly what the authorities wanted from him, she would start by asking Fedin – ‘and if it’s something we can laugh at, then better just laugh at it and bide our time. But if not, and I see there is really no way out, then I’ll tell you honestly and we’ll put an end to it. We’ll take the Nembutal. Only wait until tomorrow and don’t do anything without me.’

  ‘Very well,’ Boris agreed. ‘Go wherever it is today, and stay the night in Moscow. I will come out tomorrow morning early with the Nembutal, and we’ll decide then. I cannot stand up anymore to this hounding.’

  Olga and Mitia accompanied Boris back across the long bridge to Peredelkino, to within sight of his dacha. It was sleeting heavily, but Boris could not make himself go in. He stood in the road, holding Olga tight. She felt desperate for him. Eventually, he was persuaded to go inside.

  Olga and Mitia trudged on through deep slush to Konstantin Fedin’s house. They arrived soaking wet, their shoes covered in mud. Fedin’s daughter, Nina, refused to let them in any further than the hallway. She said her father was ill and was not to be disturbed. When Olga remonstrated that her father would be sorry if he did not see her immediately, Fedin appeared on the upper landing and called them to his study.

  Olga told Fedin that Boris was on the verge of suicide. ‘Tell me,’ she asked Fedin, ‘what do they want from him? Do they really want him to commit suicide?’ As Fedin walked to the window, Olga thought that she saw tears in his eyes. But then he faced her and his tone was that of an austere party official. ‘Boris Leonidovoch has dug such an abyss between himself and us that it cannot be crossed,’ he said. Fedin phoned Polikarpov in Olga’s presence and arranged
a meeting for the following afternoon. As he showed the pair downstairs, he turned to Olga and said: ‘You do realise, don’t you, that you must restrain him. He mustn’t inflict a second blow on his country.’ Leaving muddy footprints on Fedin’s spotless parquet floor, Olga and her son left, and headed immediately for Moscow.

  ‘Mama came [back] from Peredelkino completely distraught that day,’ remembers Irina. ‘She looked so old, she looked awful, she was in tears. She came into the apartment, holding herself against the walls, wailing that she would never forgive the people responsible, that the “Classic” had cried. It was horrendous, she said, that he did not feel able to go home anymore, and that they had stayed outside on the road, incapable of parting. She said that they had talked about letting themselves die, that he was determined to die. Mitia and I took her in our arms, she was covered in mud and she just slumped on the couch, her coat still on, sobbing.’

  Early the next morning, Olga and Boris argued on the telephone. She accused him of being selfish. She knew that the likelihood was that the authorities wouldn’t harm the famous writer and she ‘would come off worse’. Later in the day, Boris arrived ‘still in his best suit’ at the Moscow apartment to ‘announce something startling’. He got everyone together – Olga, Irina, Mitia and Ariadna Efron, who was visiting – and told them that earlier that morning he had sent a telegram to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Anders Österling, renouncing the prize. His brother Alexander had driven him to the Central Telegraph Office near the Kremlin. He had written it in French. It read: ‘In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this underserved distinction which has been conferred on me. Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss – Pasternak.’