Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  Boris had promised Polikarpov not to accept requests from foreign correspondents to meet with him: he had written a sign for his door in three languages – English, German and French – which read ‘Pasternak does not receive, he is forbidden to receive foreigners.’ Although Irina wryly noted: ‘this deal took place with some kind of laxity. The press correspondents did not come and see him at his home anymore but nothing stopped them from meeting him when he was out on one of his many walks which were set as clockwork.’

  Evenings resumed at the Little House gave Boris relief from tension and anxiety, especially when Irina brought her young friends from Moscow out to see him. ‘It was very important for him to learn from them that they still loved and respected him,’ said Olga. ‘That he still inspired admiration and pride in them.’ They would sit on the veranda, talking and laughing. When he left to go back to his dacha, Irina and her friends would walk with him, along the path and over the long bridge across the Izmalkovo Lake. ‘BL was always in high spirits, talked a great deal and did not disguise his childlike pleasure at this display of affection.’

  According to Olga, he became particularly attached to Irina during this time. ‘She’s a very clever girl,’ he used to say of her. ‘She is just the kind I have dreamed of all my life. So many children have grown up around me, but I love only her …’ When Olga reproached him, he’d reply: ‘Olia, you mustn’t criticise her. The truth always speaks out of her mouth. You always say that she’s more mine than yours, so listen to what she says.’

  The New Year of 1959 saw Olga and Boris closer than ever. Relieved that they had survived ‘their ordeal’, they sought to resume their intimate, loving life. But antagonism between the Big and Little Houses was escalating. In no doubt that Boris’s health was ailing due to the stress of the turmoil over the Nobel Prize – terrible pains in his shoulder and a general weakening of his nervous system – Zinaida became increasingly protective of her husband. She laid the blame for his deterioration firmly at Olga’s door.

  Zinaida’s daughter-in-law, Natasha, who married Boris’s son Leonid two years after Boris died, said that in the Big House they all considered Olga to be ‘the source of Boris’s decline’. From their perspective, far from saving Pasternak from the authorities, the pressure that Olga put on Boris to be with her was a psychological torment to him.

  Olga, on the other hand, firmly believed that it was the authorities and the wrath of the government that weakened Boris. She wrote ‘by the time BL found himself being forced to go against all his inclinations and desires, and constantly to violate his own nature, he had evidently passed beyond his own limit. The violence done to him was overwhelming. It broke and then killed him. Slowly but surely his strength was undermined, and his heart and nervous system began to fail.’

  That January, Boris announced to Olga that he had finally made up his mind. He would break with Zinaida and marry her. He had made arrangements with his friend Konstantin Paustovski, a novelist and playwright who lived in Tarusa, for him and Olga to spend the winter there. During the Soviet era, many dissidents settled in Tarusa. This small town, in an area of natural beauty, lay 140 kilometres south-west of Moscow.

  As much as Olga wanted to believe that Boris would publicly claim her and take her to Tarusa, intuitively she knew that, aged sixty-nine, he was too old and too weak to ‘face the storm that his departure would provoke’. On 20 January, the day they had planned to leave, Boris arrived at the Little House early in the morning, having walked through a blizzard to get there. ‘Very pale’, he announced that he couldn’t go through with it.

  ‘What more do you need,’ he asked, ‘when you know that you are my right hand, and that I am entirely with you?’ It was impossible, he continued, to hurt people who were not at fault – Zinaida, his son Leonid and others – and who only wanted to preserve the appearance of the life they were used to. There was nothing he could do, he said, but to go on living in two homes.

  Olga exploded with fury. Couldn’t he see, she shouted, that she needed the protection of his surname more than anyone else? After all, she had certainly done everything to deserve it. It was only his name that had kept her alive in the labour camps; without it, she would almost certainly have been killed. Why couldn’t he see that it was crucial that she had the Pasternak surname now, in case anything happened to him? She shouted at him that he only wanted to preserve his peace of mind at her expense. That all he cared about was keeping the status quo. Feeling betrayed, Olga announced that she was leaving immediately for Moscow. In collapsed, self-pitying tones, Boris conceded that now he was a social outcast, it would be easy for her to drop him.

  Incensed that he was missing the point entirely, Olga accused him of being a self-absorbed poseur.

  He turned paler and left. Olga, boiling with resentment, but most of all feeling desperately hurt, travelled to Moscow.

  That night, when Boris rang with his usual ‘Oliusha, I love you’ she hung up on him.

  Three weeks later, Olga received a call from the Central Committee. It was Polikarpov. ‘What Boris Leonidovich has done now is even worse than the business of the novel,’ he spat indignantly.

  ‘I know nothing about it,’ Olga replied. ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Have you two quarrelled?’ Polikarpov asked, knowing full well that they had. ‘A fine time to do that! Every foreign radio station is broadcasting a poem he handed to a foreigner here. All the fuss had died down but now it has started all over again. Go out there and make things up with him – do everything you can to stop him committing some new act of madness.’

  According to Boris, who called Olga later that day from the Writers’ Club in Peredelkino – begging her not to put down the receiver – after her departure he went home and wrote a poem about winning the Nobel Prize. In disbelief that she had really left him and gone back to Moscow, he went to the Little House to see if she was there. En route, a journalist, Anthony Brown, who worked for the English newspaper the Daily Mail, tracked Boris down. He ended up giving Brown an interview in the woods. ‘I am a white cormorant,’ he told the journalist. ‘As you know, Mr Brown, there are only black cormorants. I am an oddity, an individual in a society which is not meant for the unit but for the masses.’

  The Mail published the poem on 12 February 1959 under the headline ‘Pasternak Surprise: His Agony Revealed in “The Nobel Prize”’.

  I am caught like a beast at bay.

  Somewhere are people, freedom, light.

  But all I hear is the baying of the pack,

  There is no way out for me.

  Over there is the dark wood, the lake-shore

  And the trunk of a felled fir tree,

  Everywhere my road is barred.

  Let it be so. I care no more.

  How dare I write such stuff

  – I, scoundrel and evil-doer,

  Who made the whole world weep

  At the beauty of my native land?

  The pursuit draws ever closer,

  And now I’m guilty of another thing:

  My right hand is no longer with me –

  My dear friend is with me no more.

  As the noose tightens round my neck,

  At the hour when death is so near,

  I should like my right hand near me

  To wipe away my tears.

  When Olga heard the poem, the extent of Boris’s pain and anguish laid bare, she went straight back to him in Peredelkino. ‘You don’t think I would ever leave you, whatever you did?’ she told him as they reunited. She might have been bruised that he reneged on his word to marry her, but she would never abandon him. ‘Peace,’ she said, ‘was now restored in our little house by the Izmalkovo Lake.’

  Personal harmony may have been re-established but politically, matters were escalating once more. Although Boris repeatedly maintained that ‘The Nobel Prize’ poem was never meant for publication, and that he had merely asked the Mail journalist to pass it on to his French translator, Jacqueline de Proyar
t, he knew full well that showing such contentious material to a foreign correspondent was an act of pure defiance. ‘The falling of a small stone sometimes precipitates an avalanche,’ Olga later wrote, ‘and it was only in this sense that our quarrel was the cause of “The Nobel Prize” being published. The real reason was the hounding of BL, the fact that he had been put in the situation of a “beast at bay”.’

  The publication of the poem created a strong current of sympathy for Pasternak among the millions of readers in the world press. The Kremlin was furious with him for his unbowed impudence. The Daily Mail commentary that accompanied the poem said that ‘sections of the Government and the Soviet Writers’ Union press for Pasternak’s ejection from his house, forfeiture of all royalties on his poems and translations in the Soviet Union – which would make him penniless – and possible imprisonment for literary deviation’. The article concluded that ‘Pasternak has become an outcast’.

  The ever-threatening presence of Polikarpov loomed once more. He summoned Olga to tell her that the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was coming to Moscow for the last two weeks of February. It was advisable, he said, for Pasternak to leave Moscow during this time. The authorities wanted to prevent foreign journalists from seeking Pasternak out and they knew that they could not guarantee that he would not give controversial and potentially damaging interviews. He was, said Polikarpov, genuinely seen as a danger to himself. Polikarpov also insisted that Olga refuse any contact with the foreign press.

  Initially Boris was indignant, saying he had no intention of going anywhere. Then he and Zinaida received an invitation to stay with Nina Tabidze in Tbilisi. Zinaida jumped at the chance; she wanted her husband away from Olga, the foreign press, the stress and the scandal. Olga was outraged, feeling once more cast aside. Olga had strong suspicions that as a friend of Zinaida’s, Nina did not like her, nor approve of her relationship with Pasternak. There was a terrible row when Boris rang Olga to say goodbye. She lashed out at him verbally. He kept on repeating: ‘Oliusha, it’s not you, it’s not you saying these things. This is something out of a bad novel. It’s not you and me.’

  Olga left in a ‘cold fury’ for Leningrad and refused to take his calls. Boris asked Irina to forward his letters to her mother. Letters, Irina said, he wrote to her in both ‘a crafty and sincere way. He did not want to cause pain as he feared an unnecessary upheaval would create an abnormal situation.’ Irina decided that as her mother was only to be in Leningrad for a short time, she would not forward the letters but would let her read them all at once when she came back. ‘I told her on the phone about the daily letters that were arriving but her reaction remained very cold. She was truly offended.’

  Later Olga wrote: ‘The misery of this last quarrel in our life still gnaws at me. On all other occasions when he had pleaded with me like this, his voice and hands shaking, I had rushed to his side, covering his hands, his eyes, his cheeks with kisses. How defenceless he was, and how loveable …’

  In the fortnight Boris stayed in Tbilisi, from 20 February to 6 March, he wrote Olga eleven letters, including the following:

  Oliusha, life will go on as it did before. I wouldn’t even know how to live any other way. Nobody thinks badly of you. Only just now Nina’s daughter was rebuking me for taking such risks and then evading responsibility, leaving you to bear the brunt – this, she said, is unworthy of me and ignoble.

  I give you a big hug. How extraordinary life is. How much we need to love and think. Nothing else should concern us. Your B.

  I shall try to phone you today (Sunday 22nd) from the post office. I am beginning to feel that quite apart from the novel, the [Nobel] prize, the articles, scares and scandals, I am also to blame in some other way for our life having recently turned into a bad dream, and that it needn’t have been like this. I suppose as D. A. [Polikarpov] said to you, I really should draw in my horns, calm down and write for the future. Yesterday – when I was reproached for it – I clearly understood for the first time that by involving you in all these terrible affairs, I am casting a large shadow on you and putting you in awful danger. It’s unmanly and contemptible. I must try to see that it doesn’t happen again and that as time goes on only good, joyful, and easy things come your way. I love you and send you lots of kisses. Forgive me. Your B.

  Boris spent his days in Tbilisi reading Proust and walking around the pretty town to ease the pain in his leg. His letters to Olga are full of his remorse at the tangled situation he has created. Her silence and her stay in Leningrad rankled with him. It unsettled him that he did not know her movements. Worried that she might not return to him, the sense of his hollowed-out missing, his vaulting fear of losing her, escalates:

  [28 February] Oliusha my precious girl, I give you a big kiss. I am bound to you by life, by the sun shining through my window, by a feeling of remorse and sadness, by a feeling of guilt (oh, not towards you of course, but towards everyone), by the knowledge of my weakness and the inadequacy of everything I have done so far, by my certainty of the need to bend every effort and move mountains if I am not to let down my friends and prove an imposter. And the better all those around me are than we two, and the nicer I am to them and the dearer they are to me, the greater and deeper my love for you, the most guilty and sorrowful I feel. I hold you to me terribly, terribly tight, and almost faint from tenderness, and almost cry.

  In his letter of 2 March, Boris draws on his deeply held conviction that what he and Olga share is some mythical love that transcends ‘all obstacles and adversities’. He refers to their row as having ‘a bad effect on’ him and challenging her view that if they were married, she would be protected. He will turn out to be completely wrong when he writes:

  Even if your fears for yourself were well-founded – well, that would of course be terrible, but no danger hanging over you arises from the circumstances of my private life, any more than my being permanently together with you could ward it off. We are joined together by subtler ties, by higher and more powerful bonds than those of the intimate existence we lead in full view of the world – and everybody is well aware of this.

  It is almost unfathomable that someone who could be as astute, strategic and knowingly defiant as Pasternak could equally be this unrealistic and idealistically romantic. It may sound noble to make ardent proclamations of a higher love, but outside the pages of a romantic novel, true love requires everyday acts of mundane sacrifice. No one knew this more than Olga, and while she unfailingly acted on this time and again, her frustrations were understandable that Boris refused to match her. While she always watched his back, it cannot be said that he reciprocated.

  On 4 March, home again at Peredelkino, Boris wrote to her:

  One day things may be as you (perhaps mistakenly and wrongly) want them to be. But meanwhile, my beloved and adored one, for the very reason that I am pampered by the happiness you give me and lit by the light of your angelic sweetness, for the sake of the charity in which you yourself are always unwittingly instructing me, let us be generous to others – and if needs be, let us be even more generous and forbearing than before – in the name of everything warm and bright that so inseparably and permanently joins us together.

  I kiss you, my white marvel, my fond love, you drive me to distraction by making me so grateful to you.

  He had every reason to be grateful. On his return from Tbilisi, Olga once again took him straight back into her open, loving arms.

  That summer, Boris presented Olga with a copy of the American edition of Doctor Zhivago for her birthday. Inside he dedicated it: ‘To Oliusha on her birthday, June 27, 1959, with all my poor life. B.P’.

  Despite earning millions in the West for Feltrinelli, Pasternak still had the problem of how to make money. His translation of Maria Stuart, which was about to be published, was suspended, while the production of the Shakespeare and Schiller plays he had translated was stopped. No new translation work was commissioned. Pasternak even wrote to Khrushchev to point out that he couldn’t eve
n take part in the ‘harmless profession’ of translation. It is ironic that in a Swiss bank account lay burgeoning funds that Feltrinelli had been depositing from royalty payments from publishers around the world. Despite some Russians carping that Pasternak was a millionaire, Boris knew that if he sought to transfer any of this money to Moscow, he would face ‘the perpetual accusation of treacherously living off foreign capital’.

  He was forced to borrow money – from friends and even his housekeeper. Contacts of Feltrinelli, such as Sergio D’Angelo and the German correspondent Gerd Ruge, smuggled roubles into Moscow and delivered them to Pasternak, but all these transactions were highly risky. Ruge collected about $8,000-worth of Russian roubles at the West German embassy from Russians of ethnic German origin who had been granted permission to emigrate but could not take the money with them. Ruge took their cash in exchange for the payment of Deutschmarks when they reached Germany. Irina was even once asked by Boris to act as a go-between. Ruge handed her a package of money, wrapped in brown paper, at the metro station Oktyabrskaya, when he amateurishly brushed by her as a signal. Boris knew full well the dangers that both Olga and Irina faced in their secretive efforts to get him money. Yet these precarious ventures continued, like something from a ham-fisted spy caper. For example, Boris told his French translator, Jacqueline de Proyart, that if he wrote and told her that he had ‘scarlet fever’, it meant that Olga had been arrested, and he wanted de Proyart to raise the alarm in the West.

  Feltrinelli also sent seven or eight packages, or ‘rolls’ as they called them, amounting to about 100,000 roubles, with another German journalist, Heinz Schewe. Schewe, who worked for Die Welt, had become friends with Boris and Olga. At the end of 1959 Boris also asked Feltrinelli to transfer $100,000 to D’Angelo, who had assured him that he would purchase roubles in the West and safely smuggle them into Moscow. This money-smuggling was not due to any greed but pure necessity. However, it was typical Boris, as it was reckless. Naturally the KGB were monitoring the situation, watching and biding their time.