Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  ‘These were anxious days,’ Olga wrote later. ‘I sat waiting for people to bring word from BL, and someone came every day – he sent notes with [their friend] Kostia Bogatyrev, Koma Ivanov, or anybody else who would have been to visit him.’

  On Friday 6 May, Boris felt a little better, got out of bed and washed. He then decided to wash his hair, with devastating consequences. He instantly began to feel unwell. His hand shaking, he managed to write Olga one last note. On the night of 7 May, he had another heart attack.

  The USSR Literary Fund sent Dr Anna Golodets and two nurses from the Kremlin Hospital to provide care for Pasternak around the clock. Dr Golodets found Boris with a raging temperature and severe lung congestion, which inhibited his breathing. Yet he rarely complained, determined to hide the full extent of his illness from his loved ones. He asked for the window to the garden to be left open. The lilac, one of his favourite flowers, was in full bloom outside.

  Boris’s instincts about Olga’s determination to see him had been correct. At the beginning of his final illness, she had ‘wanted to make a direct attack on the fortress’; she wanted to go to the Big House, to see her lover and, quite naturally, to be acknowledged there for who she was to him and what she meant to him. One evening she was discussing this with Irina, Mitia and the poet Konstantin Bogatyrev. She was ‘beside herself’, accusing her friend Konstantin of being a coward because he refused to take a letter from Olga to Nina Tabidze, who was staying with Zinaida at the time. In the letter, Olga begged Nina to give her some news about Boris’s health and to act as a go-between. When Konstantin refused to deliver the letter, Mitia took it instead. He returned straight away to report that Nina had read the letter and warned him that there would be no reply.

  Irina’s heart ached for her mother. ‘My poor Mama had the misfortune to experience what it felt like to be a “stranger”. She was faced with the insurmountable barriers which separate those with rights, the legitimate ones, from those without rights. BL tried to reassure her in his last notes but she was at the end of her tether.’

  Even when a doctor that Olga had summoned from Moscow, arrived and was giving his diagnosis, she was excluded. ‘I remember her elusive silhouette in front of the fence of the Big House,’ recalled Irina, sadly. ‘She remained there until the last day, staying on the steps of the house shrivelled in front of the door, stubbornly closed behind.’

  Boris’s eldest son, Evgeny, alarmed that Olga had arranged for a famous cardiologist to visit the house, feared the fracas that Olga’s initiative would create, and took it upon himself to ring the Little House daily with updates. Olga and Irina were profoundly touched by this. ‘We were so grateful to him,’ Irina said. Maybe because Zinaida was his stepmother and his own mother, Evgenia, had been similarly cast aside years before, he was more sympathetic.

  Natasha Pasternak was as vociferous in her dislike of Olga as Zinaida. Natasha witnessed the split between the two households as she was staying at the Big House during Boris’s last weeks. It is easy to see how his second family closed ranks against the threat of the ‘outsider’. ‘Olga was an adventuress, who was very sinful,’ said Natasha. ‘All of Boris and Zinaida’s close friends did not like her. They wouldn’t shake her hand. This put Boris in a very difficult situation. But at the end of his life he was a sick man and he had a weakness – her.’

  Boris was of course fully aware of the simmering cauldron of tensions and jealousies between his family and his lover. Before he realised how ill he was, he had harboured hopes that his sister Lydia would arrive from England and act as an intermediary. ‘The nurses in attendance at his bedside reported him as saying “Lydia will come and see to everything”,’ Olga wrote later. ‘The sense of the words was clear: he believed that Lydia was well disposed towards us, his second family, and not unduly prejudiced in favour of the first one, and that she would be able to achieve a “reconciliation” between me and Zinaida Nikolayevna. He very much wanted this.’

  On 15 May, when Boris realised that Olga was effectively barred from the Big House and that tensions around her were escalating, he put what Irina describes as ‘a communication network’ in place. Olga, accompanied by Irina, was told to go to the Kremlin Hospital in Moscow to meet with Marina Rassokhina, one of the nurses who tended Boris day and night. Marina, who was only sixteen years old, came out to talk with them. This sweet young nurse informed Olga that as soon as Boris was able to speak again after his latest heart attack, he had told her of the ‘tragic state of affairs’ that had arisen from their love for each other; about his ‘double life’. He explained it was incredibly painful for him that his true love was banned from his presence at his bedside and asked Marina to visit Olga every day and report on Boris. The nurse ‘was always smiling’, recalled Irina. ‘She told us with her great big smile that BL was dying; all the nurses loved him and that he had a soft spot for her, which is why he had asked her to contact us.’

  Marina would go straight to the Little House after she finished her shift, often staying the night there. ‘She told me that BL had asked her time and time again to arrange for me to see him – even though nobody was now being allowed to his bedside,’ recalled Olga. Zinaida kept the house in a state of deathly silence.

  At one stage there had been a plan for Marina to bring Olga to the downstairs window, adjacent to Boris’s bed, but it was then postponed due to Boris’s vanity. His false teeth had been taken away from him after his heart attack and he was terribly upset by the effect on his appearance. He could not bear for her to see him in any sort of dilapidated state. ‘Olyusha won’t love me anymore,’ he had told Marina. ‘I look such a fright now.’ Boris was an exceedingly vain man. He did not even like the doctor seeing him unshaven, and when unable to shave himself any more, he asked his son Leonid, or his brother Alexander, to shave him. It is wholly likely that Boris could not bear the thought of Olga seeing him in any decrepit state; that he wanted her to remember him as the robust and shining god that she met in 1946.

  Zinaida later claimed to have offered Olga the chance to see Boris one last time, but that Boris had rejected the idea. If indeed, Zinaida did invite Olga, and Boris overruled her, then it would have been chiefly to spare the family distress, and to avoid a ‘scene’. It is likely that as his earthly demise took place, he was too tired to fight any more. He had nothing left in him.

  News of the gravity of Boris’s illness soon filled the European press. Foreign newsmen stood vigil at the gates of his dacha. On 17 May, Josephine and Lydia cabled Peredelkino from Oxford. Their telegram to Zinaida at Peredelkino read: ‘VERY WORRIED BORIS ILLNESS WIRE DETAILS ALSO ABOUT YOU. LOVING PRAYING SISTERS FREDERICK.’

  Boris’s sister-in-law Irina, who was married to Alexander, replied: ‘19th May 1960. Moscow. BORIS INFARCT. TODAY ELEVENTH DAY ILLNESS ALL MEASURES TAKEN SHURA [ALEXANDER] CONSTANTLY WITH HIM HOPE NOT LOST FAVOURABLE OUTCOME WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED DETAILS BY LETTER KISSES – INA.

  Sadly, the doctors’ prognosis was wrong. Boris’s condition deteriorated and he was diagnosed as having lung cancer.

  Olga ceased to get any further notes from him – he was no longer allowed a pencil. ‘I begged Marina to let him have the pencil stub she said still lay on the table, but she couldn’t bring herself to and there was nobody else to ask,’ Olga recalled sadly. ‘I lived from one visit of Marina’s to the next. I know that on returning to him from me she passed on my words of encouragement, tenderness and love, which were vitally important to him then.’

  ‘We knew that the end was coming soon,’ said Irina. ‘The latest nurse on the shift, if it wasn’t Marina, would wait until she was a reasonable distance from the dacha before briefing us about what had happened during the night. We knew that BL was spitting blood, he kept on losing consciousness and the dacha had been equipped with an oxygen chamber. They had even fitted an x-ray machine which showed that he had cancer on his lungs that was metastasising to other major organs; the heart, liver and bowel.’

  On 25 May, Zina
ida, and her son Leonid sent the following telegram to Boris’s sisters in Oxford: ‘CONDITION UNCHANGED MOSCOWS BEST DOCTORS TREATING ALL NECESSARY DRUGS PROVIDED EARNESTLY REQUEST YOU REFUTE FALSE BBC REPORTS OF BORIS UNSATISFACTORY TREATMENT DETAILS BY LETTER – ZINA LYONIA.’

  The response was wired back the following day: ‘26 MAY 1960 OXFORD PASTERNAK PEREDELKINO MOSCOW ASTONISHED BY TELEGRAM BBC GAVE NO SUCH REPORT INDEED NEWSPAPERS AND RADIO STRESS FIRST-CLASS TREATMENT HOWEVER FORWARDED YOUR TELEGRAM TO PRESS GOD PRESERVE YOU.’

  As well as the young nurse, Marina, Boris was treated by a more experienced, older woman, Marfa Kuzminichna, who had worked as a nurse on the Eastern front during the Second World War. After coming off duty, she too began to visit Olga, to report on Boris’s condition. ‘Marfa Kuzminichna, who had seen everything imaginable during the war, spoke with astonishment of the remarkable courage, endurance, and dignity he displayed in his fight with death,’ said Olga.

  The next day, one of the nurses heard Boris’s involuntary cry: ‘Zhonia [Josephine], my beloved sister, I’ll never see you again!’ When he asked again to see his other sister, Lydia, Alexander telegrammed her: ‘27th May 1960, MOSCOW. SITUATION HOPELESS COME IF YOU CAN – SHURA.’ Lydia tried desperately to obtain a visa, even appealing directly to Khrushchev. She spent a week in London waiting for the Soviet authorities to make their decision.

  On 29 May, Boris’s pulse dropped perilously low, but the doctors managed to stabilise him. He slept soundly that night. The following morning, he asked to see his son. Evgeny sat with him as his father’s heroic strength ebbed away. ‘He complained how hard it was for him to realise the insignificance of everything he had done and the ambiguity of his world fame, which was at the same time associated with absolute obscurity in his motherland. He was also distressed that his relations with former friends were severed. He characterised his life as a fight with a reigning and triumphant triteness for a freely playing human talent. “All my life has been spent on it,” he concluded sorrowfully.’

  ‘On the day of his death, when the doctor said that he had several hours of life yet, Olga spent all day sitting on the veranda of the dacha,’ remembered Natasha Pasternak. ‘She asked the family if she could have permission to say goodbye to him but Zinaida, Alexander and Leonid did not answer her. She was crying outside all day, so Zinaida asked Boris if she could come in but Boris did not want her to come in.’

  Such anecdotes have been cited as evidence that Olga was not that important, emotionally speaking, in the writer’s life; that she wasn’t his great love. Yet in Boris’s last-ever letter to Olga, written on Thursday 5 May, before he realised he was dying, he told her: ‘Everything I possess of value I am passing on to you; the manuscript of the play and now the diploma. Surely it is possible to put up with this brief separation, and even if it requires a certain sacrifice, surely this sacrifice can be borne? If I really were near to death, I should insist that you be called over here to see me. But thank goodness this turns out to be unnecessary. The fact that everything, by the looks of it, will perhaps go on again as before seems to me so undeserved, fabulous, incredible!!’

  On the evening of 30 May, Boris had his last blood transfusion. The doctors knew that death was imminent, and Zinaida went in to be with him. His brother Alexander, who had spent a month by his side, told Boris that Lydia was expected at any moment. ‘Lydia, that’s good,’ Boris replied. He then asked for Josephine.

  Boris requested to see his two sons alone. At 11 p.m. they stood beside their father’s bed. He told them to stand back from the tangled part of his legacy abroad; the novel, the money and the associated complications. He also asked them to take it upon themselves to look after Olga. When they left him, his breathing became more laboured.

  As his nurse, Marfa Kuzminichna, attended to him, Boris whispered: ‘Don’t forget to open the window tomorrow.’ As the end drew closer, Marfa took Boris’s head in her arms.

  At 11.20 p.m. Boris Pasternak died.

  The following morning, at six, Olga went to meet Marfa, who was coming off duty. The nurse was approaching a crossroads, walking quickly. When Marfa saw Olga, she bent her head low. Immediately, Olga knew. Weeping, the two women embraced. ‘He is dead,’ Marfa said. ‘He is dead.’

  Marfa told Olga that on the day of his death, Boris had said to her: ‘Who will suffer the most because of my death? Who will suffer most? Only Oliusha will, and I haven’t had time to do anything for her. The worst thing is that she will suffer.’

  Seized by a blinding, despairing grief, Olga ran straight to the Big House, up the stairs to the veranda and pushed the door open, forcing her way in. Her actions were purely visceral. ‘I don’t remember how it happened, but suddenly I found myself in the Big House. Nobody stopped me at the door.’ The chambermaid led Olga to where Pasternak lay in the music room.

  ‘Boria was lying there … and his hands were soft. He lay in a small room, with the morning light on him. There were shadows across the floor, and his face was still alive – not at all inert.’

  As Olga knelt by her lover’s bed, she could hear his voice in her head. The words to his poem ‘August’, from the Zhivago cycle of poems, washed over her. Olga could not know that the last stanza, which seemed to sound out so clearly, would later be etched in Russian on the Oxford gravestone of Boris’s family; his mother, Rosalia, father, Leonid, and sisters, Josephine and Lydia, whose ashes are housed together there.

  Farewell, great span of wings unfurled,

  The stubborn wilfulness of flight,

  Words to illuminate the world,

  Creation, wonder-working might!

  For half an hour, Olga was left, undisturbed. As she wept beside him, Olga thought how prophetic Doctor Zhivago was: ‘Yes, it had all come true,’ she reflected. ‘The very worst had come true. Everything had been marked out beforehand, stage by stage, in the fateful novel – which had indeed played a tragic part in our life, and at the same time totally embodied it.’ Lara’s farewell to Yury Zhivago, after his death, seemed to echo Olga’s final adieu to Boris, as she sobbed helplessly:

  So here we are again, Yurochka. The way God brings us together. How terrible, think of it! Oh, I can’t bear it! Oh, Lord! I cry and I cry! Think of it! Again something just our kind, just up our street. Your going, that’s the end of me. Again something big, inescapable …

  Good-bye, my big one, my dear one, my own, my pride. Good-bye, my quick, deep river, how I loved your day-long plashing, how I loved bathing in your cold, deep waves.

  And in response, his farewell to Lara had been:

  ‘Good-bye, Lara, until we meet in the next world, good-bye, my love, my inexhaustible, everlasting joy. I’ll never see you again. I’ll never, never, see you again.’

  Grief narrows the field of vision, blurring the bounds of consciousness. Olga, vaguely aware of the rest of the family grouped outside the room, stumbled outside the dacha where Mitia and Marina were waiting for her by the gate. Together, they helped Olga home to the Little House.

  Beside herself to know what to do next, Olga and Mitia took a taxi to Moscow, to Irina’s apartment. ‘[Mama] was a lot calmer than I thought she would be. She was crying, but not in a hysterical way,’ said Irina. She kept on repeating, again and again, ‘“They keep on saying he has changed, but not at all. Not at all. He is as young as ever, still welcoming, still handsome”.’

  Despite the fact that Pasternak’s death was international front-page news for every major newspaper, the Soviet press did not report the writer’s death. Condolences came in from around the world. But in Moscow, there was silence. Feltrinelli said in a statement from Milan: ‘The death of Pasternak is a blow as hard as losing a best friend. He was the personification of my nonconformist ideals combined with wisdom and profound culture.’

  The funeral was organised for 4 p.m. on Thursday 2 June. Finally, the day before, a small notice appeared on the bottom of the back page of the Literary Gazette. ‘The board of the Literary Fund of the USSR announces
the death of the writer and member of Litfond [the Literary Fund] Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, which took place on May 30 in the seventy-first year of his life after a severe and lengthy illness, and expresses its condolences to the family of the deceased.’

  Not a word was written about the time and place of the funeral. Notices, written by hand on large sheets of paper, or on pages torn from exercise books, were posted in electric trains and near the ticket offices in Moscow’s Kiev station and on the platform at Peredelkino. It is a touching tribute to Boris that when the police kept tearing the notices down, new ones immediately appeared in their place that read: ‘Comrades! On the night of May 30–31st, 1960, one of the great poets of modern times, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, passed away. The civil funeral service will take place at 15.00 at Peredelkino.’

  The second of June was a hot summer’s day. Boris’s beloved garden was awash with pink and white blossom from the apple and lilac trees. Freshly cut pine boughs had been laid across the grass to protect it. From the early morning, people wearing black and carrying sprigs of lilac made the pilgrimage from the train station to the Peredelkino cemetery. The police were already stationed at the approaches to the village, and everybody who arrived by car was made to get out and walk.

  ‘From the early morning the electric trains arriving from the city brought mourners to Peredelkino; wave after wave of friends and strangers, of local peasants and workmen, of all those to whom Pasternak had meant or was beginning to mean so much, old and young – predominantly young people were gathering at his house for the final farewell,’ wrote Lydia, who finally got her visa and arrived three days after the funeral. ‘How did they know? The sultry air, the clouds, the whispering leaves must have told then. From house to house, over telephone wires, from mouth to mouth the tragic news spread over the whole of Russia. The very silence shouted it.’