Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  ‘We were dumbfounded,’ Olga later wrote. ‘This was just like him – first to act, and only then to speak about it and ask people what he thought. I think it was only Ariadna who went up to him at once and kissed him, saying “Good for you, Boria, good for you!” – not, of course, because this was what she really thought but because it was an accomplished fact and the only thing left was to support him.’

  Pasternak had more in store for them. He then announced that he had sent a second telegram to the Central Committee informing the Kremlin that he had renounced the Nobel Prize and asking that Olga Ivinskaya be allowed to work again. He wanted the restrictions lifted so that she could be paid for her translation work, even if he now had no means to earn a living.

  That afternoon, Boris took Olga in a taxi to the Writers’ Union for the meeting with Polikarpov. He dropped her off and returned alone to Peredelkino to await her news and learn of the union’s next move.

  ‘If you allow Pasternak to commit suicide, you will be aiding and abetting a second stab in the back for Russia,’ Polikarpov told Olga, echoing Fedin’s words. ‘This whole scandal must be settled – which we will be able to do with your help. You can help his way back to the people again. But if anything happens to him, the moral responsibility will be yours.’

  Pasternak’s renunciation of the prize clearly wasn’t enough. They wanted more. Olga thought hard about what exactly the officials sought as she sat on the train out to Izmalkovo that evening. What they really wanted, she understood only later, was to ‘humble’ Boris, ‘to force him to grovel in public and admit his “errors” – in other words, to score a victory for brute force and intolerance. But in moving first as he did, BL took them by surprise’.

  The Swedish Academy responded to Pasternak’s telegram, saying it had ‘received your refusal with deep regret, sympathy and respect’. It was only the fourth time a Nobel award had been rejected. In 1935 Hitler had been incensed when Carl von Ossietzky, a prominent anti-Nazi held by the Gestapo, was awarded the Peace Prize. Hitler subsequently passed a law prohibiting German citizens from accepting Nobel Prizes, thus preventing three other Germans, all scientists, from collecting their awards.

  Olga met with Boris in the Little House. Recounting her meeting with Polikarpov, she observed Boris to be in relatively good spirits. At least he seemed to accept that for him to commit suicide was not a feasible way out – there would be no nobility in that. She then left immediately for Moscow, to reassure her children that all was well. ‘I had felt that death was very close,’ she recalled ‘but once I knew that this was the last thing “they” [the Soviet officials] wanted, I was enormously relieved.’

  Olga retired to bed early, asking the children not to disturb her. She longed to sleep. The strain was taking its toll and she was physically and emotionally exhausted. To her exasperation she was soon woken from a deep sleep by Mitia. Ariadna was on the telephone, he informed her. Apparently it was urgent that they switch on the television.

  Vladimir Semichastny, a high-ranking party official (who was to become head of the KGB a few years later), was making a televised speech before 12,000 people at the Sports Palace in Moscow. The speech, also broadcast live on the radio, was reprinted in various newspapers the following day. The evening before, Semichastny had been summoned to the Kremlin to meet with Khrushchev, who ordered him to include a statement on Pasternak in his forthcoming speech. Khrushchev dictated several pages of notes, laced with insults. He reassured Semichastny that he would visibly applaud when he reached the passage about Pasternak. ‘Everyone will understand it,’ Khrushchev told him.

  Semichastny delivered his diatribe with gusto, pausing to liken Pasternak to a ‘mangy sheep’ and to a pig: ‘As everybody who has anything to do with this animal knows, one of the peculiarities of the pig is that it never makes a mess where it eats or sleeps. Therefore if we compare Pasternak with a pig, then we must say that a pig will never do what he has done. Pasternak, this man who considers himself among the best representation of society, has fouled the spot where he ate and cast filth on those by whose labour he lives and breathes …’ Semichastny was repeatedly interrupted by bursts of applause, as a beaming Khrushchev looked on.

  Pasternak read the blistering attack the following morning in Pravda. It had become clear what more the Kremlin wanted. ‘Why shouldn’t this internal emigrant breathe the capitalist air which he so yearned for and which he spoke of in his book?’ Semichastny had railed. ‘I am sure our society would welcome that. Let him become a real emigrant and go to his capitalist paradise.’ The authorities wanted to hound him out of Russia.

  Boris discussed with Zinaida the possibility of the family emigrating. She suggested that to live in peace he should go. ‘With you and Lyonya?’ he asked her, surprised, referring to their son Leonid. Zinaida replied that she herself would never go, but she wished him honour and peace for the rest of his life. ‘Lyonya and I will have to denounce you, but you’ll understand, that is just a formality.’

  Boris walked over to the Little House to discuss his situation with Olga and her daughter. Irina was shocked by how grey and thin he looked. ‘It was a horrible atmosphere,’ Irina recalled. Peredelkino no longer felt safe. ‘There was one night [after the Semichastny speech] when people threw stones at the dacha and shouted anti-Semitic abuse.’ Pasternak then talked to them about leaving Russia. ‘You should go!’ Irina declared. ‘There is no reason not to.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps I should,’ Boris agreed. ‘And then I’ll get you out through Nehru.’ (There were rumours that India’s prime minister had offered Pasternak political asylum.) Boris sat down and wrote a letter to the Kremlin saying that as he was now regarded as an émigré, he would like to be allowed to leave the country, but did not want to leave ‘hostages’ behind him. He asked therefore for permission for Olga and her children to accompany him. When he finished the letter, he tore it straight up.

  ‘No, Olia, I couldn’t go abroad even if they let us all out together,’ he sighed. ‘I have always dreamed of going to the West as though on holiday, but I couldn’t possibly live like that day in day out. I must have the workaday life I know here, the birch trees, the familiar troubles – even the familiar harassments – and hope. I shall put up with what I have to suffer.’

  ‘During this time, Boris cried a lot,’ said Irina. ‘We all felt so sorry for him, as he was becoming increasingly vulnerable.’ But, she was loath to admit, ‘I reproached him for his vulnerability, his lack of character. I no longer saw in him the perfect rigid strength I had seen in him when I was younger. He became increasingly dependent on other people’s opinion. He would hang onto the smallest details, from the greeting of the post mistress, to the fact that the wood-burning stove driver was still greeting him “as he used to”. I can remember how happy he was the day he had come across a policeman he had known for years and who had taken the initiative of greeting him as if nothing had happened.’

  At the height of the most vicious attacks from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak drew immense comfort from the outpouring of respect and support from around the world. A ban on his receiving post had been imposed after he won the Nobel Prize, and Irina now acted as his covert ‘postmistress’. She would bring him letters which bore no stamps and sometimes no envelopes: ‘People would just slide them under my door, too scared to be identified or convinced their letter would get lost in the post.’ Irina would take them from Moscow to Peredelkino, bringing ‘boxes after boxes’.

  News from the Western press also lifted Boris’s spirits. On 30 October both the International PEN Club and a group of eminent British writers sent telegrams of protest to the Soviet Writers’ Union. ‘International PEN very distressed by rumours concerning Pasternak, asks you to protect the poet, maintaining the right of creative freedom. Writers throughout the world are thinking of him fraternally,’ read the PEN Club wire. The telegram from the British writers – whose signatories included T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, S
omerset Maugham, C. P. Snow and Maurice Bowra – read: ‘We are profoundly anxious about the state of one of the world’s great poets and writers, Boris Pasternak. We consider his novel, Doctor Zhivago, a moving personal testimony and not a political document. We appeal to you in the name of the great Russian literary tradition for which you stand not to dishonour it by victimising a writer revered throughout the entire civilised world.’ The British Society of Authors also sent a cable of protest: ‘The Society of Authors deeply deplore expulsion of Boris Pasternak by the Soviet Writers’ Union and strongly urge his reinstatement.’

  That same day, Olga went to see Grigori Khesin, the head of the department for authors’ rights at the Writers’ Union, to ask for his advice in the wake of the Semichastny speech. In the past he had seemed well disposed towards Pasternak and would always greet Olga warmly and courteously. Now, he was cold, formal and aloof. He bowed stiffly and stared at her. When she asked him, what are we to do, he answered loudly, articulating every word. His strange diction left Olga in no doubt that their conversation was being recorded. ‘Olga Vsevolodovna, there is now no further advice for us to give you,’ Khesin said icily. ‘I consider Pasternak has committed an act of betrayal and become an instrument of the cold war, an internal émigré. There are certain things one cannot forgive, for the country’s sake. No, I am afraid I cannot give you any advice.’

  Olga got up and left, slamming the door. In the corridor, she was approached by a handsome young copyright lawyer by the name of Isidor Gringolts. He was a friend of one of Irina’s lecturers. He told an astonished Olga that he would do anything to help, adding ‘for me, Boris Leonidovich is a saint!’ Grateful for any offer of assistance after the brush-off from Khesin, Olga rashly asked him to come to her Potapov Street apartment in a few hours’ time.

  Already there were Koma Ivanov, Adriana Efron, Irina and Mitia, anxiously waiting to discuss what to do next. Gringolts’s opening words were: ‘You must understand that I love Boris Leonidovich and that his name is holy for me.’ They all agreed that the campaign against Boris was mounting in a dangerous way. He was receiving threatening letters, rumours were circulating that the house in Peredelkino would be attacked by more mobs, and after Semichastny’s speech police reinforcements had had to be called to Peredelkino after a demonstration by young communists looked likely to get out of hand. The group, Boris’s most loyal supporters, sat for hours debating what to do for the best, until Olga’s ‘ears began to ring’. Gringolts was adamant that the only course of action was for Pasternak to write a letter to Khrushchev imploring him not to expel him from the country. Irina was convinced that Boris would baulk at this. She felt that he should not express repentance in any form. Eventually though, genuinely afraid for Boris’s life, Olga knew that Gringolts was right: the time had come to ‘give in’. There was no other way.

  Gringolts drafted a letter, which Olga and Irina reworked to try and make it sound more Boris-like. Irina and Koma then took it straight to Peredelkino for Boris’s signature.

  ‘Looking back,’ Olga later wrote, ‘it seems monstrous that we should have made up this letter, before BL even had any idea of what was going on. But we were in a great hurry, and in the bedlam around us, nothing seemed very extraordinary anymore.’

  Boris met Irina and Koma at the gates of his dacha and the three of them walked to the post office, where Boris phoned Olga. He agreed to the letter, adding a line at the end. He signed it and even signed a few blank pages in case they needed to make further revisions. Poignantly, he attached a note in red pencil saying: ‘Olia, keep it all as it is, only write that I was born not in the Soviet Union, but in Russia.’

  The next day Irina and a friend delivered the letter to the Central Committee building on 4 Staraya Square. They handed it in through a hatch, from which an officer and a soldier leaned out and eyed them with interest.

  ‘Dear Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev],’ it read:

  I am addressing you personally, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Government.

  From Comrade Semichastny’s speech I learn that the government would not put any obstacles in the way of my departure from the USSR.

  For me this is impossible. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and by work. I can not conceive of my destiny separate from Russia, or outside it. Whatever my mistakes and failings, I could not imagine that I should find myself at the centre of such a political campaign as has been worked up around my name in the West.

  Once aware of this, I informed the Swedish Academy of my voluntary renunciation of the Nobel Prize.

  Departure from the borders of my country would be tantamount to death and I must therefore request you not to take this extreme measure against me.

  It ended with the sentence Pasternak had written himself:

  With my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature, and may still be of service to it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Olga would later reproach herself, saying the letter had been a terrible mistake, taking full responsibility and blame for it. However, it is abundantly clear that the trauma of leaving Russia would have been too much for Boris. Already in many ways a broken man, caged in Peredelkino, his only freedom was to continue his daily ritual. Without that and the familiarity of the place he loved so much around him; without his beloved Mother Russia, he had nothing. Exile would have been worse than suicide for him.

  Irina remembered that during those days while a ‘threat was hanging over his life, he carried out his usual routine as normal as a way to stop any chaos entering his life’. Pasternak was still working; he had decided to translate Mary Stuart. This was not the play by Schiller that he had already translated from German, but a drama by the same name by the Polish romantic poet Juliusz Slowacki. ‘He had a little nap after his meals whenever possible, went for walks and would read but he was already considered an outlaw, an accused, someone charged awaiting his verdict every hour, not knowing what it would be.’ Every evening at nine Boris would go to the Peredelkino Writers’ Club to use the phone booth there to make some calls. He would carefully prepare a list of people to ring and the purpose of his call. It could be to discuss a response to a letter, instructions regarding the novel, or to call Irina. ‘This is the kind of thing he would say to me. “I am coming to Moscow on Monday, please buy me a 100 non-illustrated envelopes and make sure that the gum adhesive is of good quality. I will also need some stamps. See if you can get me some with a squirrel on it,”’ Irina recalled.

  Sometimes the people he phoned would rebuff him, at other times their kindness would floor him. ‘That is why those calls were like torture to him. He was scared to hear the voices that might be hesitant or cold, sometimes there were even insults from people he considered friends but despite the hurt that it caused him, he could not stop himself from ringing.’

  Irina remembered Boris’s call to his friend Lili Brik, widow of the literary critic Osip Brik, at the time of the letter to Khrushchev. It was a dank autumn evening, the wind blowing through the pine trees. ‘Mama and I were chatting quietly outside the phone booth while waiting for him, when suddenly we heard a loud sob. We rushed to discover that his conversation had been cut short as his sobs were suffocating him.’ As soon as Lili Brik realised it was Pasternak who was calling her, she started ‘speaking with a tone full of tenderness as she had been waiting for his call. “Boris, my poor Boris, what is happening to you?” Able to cope with indescribable insults, he was incapable of handling such compassionate concern,’ concluded Irina.

  The following day, Friday 31 October, Olga returned to Moscow and, worn out, went to the Potapov apartment that afternoon to try and get some sleep. She had just settled into a grateful slumber when her mother woke her. ‘You are wanted on the phone,’ Maria said. ‘They say it is from the Central Committee, on a very important matter.’ Clearly Olga had been followed to the apartment. The government officials knew of her every move and whereabouts.
Olga took the call. She was surprised that it was Grigori Khesin on the line. He was unusually friendly again, as if their last conversation, when Olga had slammed the door on him, had never taken place.

  ‘Olga Vsevolodovna, my dear, you’re a good girl,’ he oozed. ‘They have received the letter from BL and everything will be alright, just be patient. What I have to say is that we must see you straightaway – we will come right along now.’

  Olga, infuriated by Khesin’s change of tune, told him that she wanted nothing more to do with him after he refused to help her before. There was a pause before Khesin informed Olga that Polikarpov was also on the line. They were coming to collect her, said Polikarpov, before going to Peredelkino to collect Pasternak, so they could appear before the Central Committee of the Communist Party as soon as possible.

  Olga immediately got hold of Irina on the phone and told her to go straight to Peredelkino to warn Boris. It seemed clear to Olga that if Polikarpov was personally coming to collect Boris himself, then Khrushchev intended to meet with him.

  By the time Olga had put the telephone receiver down, a black government Zil had pulled up and was waiting outside, honking the horn. Khesin and the fearsome Polikarpov were inside. Olga tried to stall them, to give Irina time to get to Peredelkino first, but in the end she was forced to get in the car. It was hopeless to think that Irina would reach Boris before them, as the limousine raced ahead in a special lane reserved for government cars and did not stop at a single traffic light.