The American critic Irving Howe had been proved right when he wrote in 1959: ‘What Pasternak’s views about the future of the Communist world may be, I do not know. But I believe that if and when freedom is re-established in Russia, the people will regard him as one who, quite apart from political opinions, was faithful to the truth of their agony. And for that they will honour him.’ They honoured him that day.
As Olga walked from Izmalkovo to the Big House, she saw the place swarming with people she did not recognise. The road outside his dacha was clogged with Western press; some even climbed into the trees or stood on boxes by the fence for a better view. Inside, the open coffin, almost buried by a vast array of flowers, had been put in the main sitting room. Boris was dressed in his father’s favourite grey suit. Artists were taking turns to make drawings of him. Olga watched, just as Boris had watched Leonid sketch Tolstoy at his deathbed. Maria Yudina and Stanislav Neigaus played Chopin – slow, haunting pieces filling the rooms. Olga jostled the throng to see Boris’s body, then went and resumed her place where she had spent the last days of his illness, weeping on the veranda outside.
‘Inside, people were still taking leave of my beloved who lay there quite impassive now, indifferent to them all, while I sat by the door so long forbidden me,’ she wrote. ‘I was still in a dazed state and I had been distracted by the trivialities of everyday existence – such as trying on a dress for the funeral – and I found salvation in sheer tiredness, plunging into a sleep which brought hope of waking up to discover that none of it had really happened. I had dreams that Boria was still alive, that he was tapping on my window with a twig. Perhaps I was also dreaming this terrible day with the wind and hot sun?’
Olga watched as, shortly after four, the coffin was borne out of the house, to Chopin’s Marche funèbre, the music wafting out of the dacha behind the coffin. Boris’s sons, Evgeny and Leonid, were among the pallbearers. ‘People began passing flowers by the armful through the window, now flung wide open, to others standing in the garden. The wreaths and the lid of the coffin were brought out through the door … then the open coffin appeared, swaying slightly as it was carried down the steps.’
When Irina looked into Boris’s coffin and saw the face of the man who was the closest to a father she had ever had, she thought that he looked like a stranger: adult, severe and distant. She later wrote: ‘Sometimes death strips the face of anything superfluous, exposing the essential reality. There was nothing like that with BL. Despite having meditated about death, written about death, prepared for death, death had not entered his life. It was not part of his world. They did not have any common ground. Death had not managed to enter him, it had simply substituted itself to him.’
‘There is no death. Death is not for us,’ Boris wrote. ‘There will be no death because the past has passed. It’s almost like this: there will be no death because everybody has already seen it. It is too old and everybody is bored with it, but now the new is in demand and the new life is eternal …’
Olga followed the procession behind Pasternak’s coffin. At one point, Olga became caught up in the crowds. Some friends including Heinze Schewe and Liusia Popova managed to steer her on a shortcut across a newly ploughed field of potatoes to the cemetery.
‘The place chosen for the burial could not have been more beautiful,’ wrote Alexander Gladkov. ‘It was open to all sides on a hillock with three pine trees, in sight of the house where the poet had lived the second half of his life.’ Gladkov was amazed by the number of mourners – by his estimation there were over 3,000. ‘For everybody present it was a day of enormous importance – and this fact itself turned into yet another triumph for Pasternak.’
The crowd gathered by the grave was interspersed with reporters, photographers and film crews, their cameras whirring, pushing to the front. And of course, KGB informers. ‘The procession with the coffin arrived,’ remembered Gladkov. ‘Before setting it down on the ground, next to the grave, the pallbearers for some reason, lifted it up above the crowd and for the last time I saw the face, gaunt and magnificent, of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak.’
The philosopher Valentin Asmus, a professor at Moscow University and one of Boris’s old friends, stepped forward. It is poignant that Pasternak was not accorded the graveside ceremonies normally accompanying the funeral of a member of the Writers’ Union. But this was the Russian people’s funeral, which would have delighted him far more than anything official and Soviet. ‘It was a display of genuine, popular sorrow,’ said Olga.
Asmus delivered the eulogy:
We have come to bid farewell to one of the greatest of Russian writers and poets, a man endowed with all the talents, including even music. One might accept or reject his opinions but as long as Russian poetry plays a role on this earth, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak will stand among the greatest.
His disagreement with our present day was not with a regime or state. He wanted a society of a higher order. He never believed in resisting evil with force, and that was his mistake.
I never talked with a man who demanded so much, so unsparingly of himself. There were few who could equal him in the honesty of his convictions. He was a democrat in the true sense of the word, one who knew how to criticise his friends of the pen. He will forever remain as an example, as one who defended his convictions before his contemporaries, being firmly convinced he was right. He had the ability to express humanity in the highest terms.
He lived a long life. But it passed so quickly, he was still so young and he had so much left to write. His name will go down forever as one of the very finest.
An actor from the Moscow Art Theatre followed with a recital of Pasternak’s poem ‘Hamlet’, from the Zhivago poems. Although the poem, like the novel, had not been published in the Soviet Union, according to the American correspondent from Harper’s Bazaar, ‘a thousand pairs of lips began to move in silent unison’.
The noise is stilled. I come out on the stage.
Leaning against the door-post
I try to guess from the distant echo
What is to happen in my lifetime.
The darkness of night is aimed at me
Along the sights of a thousand opera-glasses
Abba, Father, if it be possible,
Let this cup pass from me.
I love your stubborn purpose,
I consent to play my part.
But now a different drama is being acted;
For this once let me be.
Yet the order of the acts is planned
And the end of the way inescapable.
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy.
To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.*
Copies of Boris’s poem ‘August’ were distributed among the mourners. As one person finished reciting a poem, another would begin. At one point, a young worker stood up and shouted: ‘Thank you in the name of the working man! We waited for your book. Unfortunately, for reasons that are well known, it did not appear. But you exalted the name of the writer higher than anyone.’
The officials from Litfond, nervous of the rousing, untamed nature of the crowd, moved to bring the funeral to an end. Someone was carrying the lid towards the coffin. Olga, a few steps away from Zinaida, bent down to kiss Boris on the forehead. ‘And suddenly the dazed, prostrated feeling of the last few terrible days gave way to tears. I cried and I cried and I cried. I cried without caring about appearance, about what people might say.’
‘For a moment she stood still and silent, neither thinking nor crying, bowed over the coffin, the flowers and the body, shielding them with her whole being, with her head, her breast, her heart and her hands as strong as her heart,’ Pasternak wrote of Lara’s grief for Yury Zhivago. ‘The whole of her was shaken by the sobs which she restrained. She fought her tears as long as she could, but at times it was beyond her strength and they burst from her, pouring down her cheeks and falling on her dress, her hands and the coffin to which she clung.’
&n
bsp; An official came forward and said in an agitated voice: ‘That’s enough, we don’t need any more speeches. Close the coffin!’ People began to shout out from the crowds. ‘The poet was killed!’ And the crowd roared: ‘Shame! Shame on them!’ Boris’s housekeeper placed a copy of a prayer for the dead on Boris’s forehead. Then, as the lid was hammered onto the coffin, more shouts came from the crowd: ‘Glory to Pasternak!’
Almost everyone had brought flowers, so when the coffin was lowered into the ground mourners passed the flowers on to each other, over the heads of the crowd. It resembled a magical, undulating sea of flowers floating above the assembled mass. At this moment, quite unexpectedly, the bells of the nearby Church of Transfiguration began to peal. As the coffin was lowered into the grave and the first clods of earth thudded down on it, the crowd began to chant ‘Glory to Pasternak! Goodbye! Glory!’ The words echoed over the surrounding fields.
For a long time, many of the mourners – students, revolutionaries, young men and women – refused to leave the burial site. They remained near the grave, recited poetry and lit candles. That evening there was a crash of thunder and a heavy downpour. People put their hands over their candles to protect them from the heavy raindrops, and still went on, reciting one poem after another in the flickering candlelight.
A couple of days after the funeral, two senior KGB officials arrived at the Little House and demanded that Olga hand over the manuscript of The Blind Beauty. When she put up a valiant fight, saying it was not hers to give, one of the men replied: ‘I should not like to have to invite Olga Vsevolodovna to come with us to a place which will certainly be more traumatic for her than this conversation in a private apartment.’ His colleague added: ‘And you should bear in mind that there are six of us in the car – we can take the manuscript by force if needs be.’
Already it had begun. On 16 August, less than three months after they took The Blind Beauty, the KGB arrived at Olga’s door once more. A ruddy-cheeked fat man wearing a light-coloured mackintosh burst into her living room and, with a self-assured smile, announced: ‘You were expecting us to come, of course, weren’t you? You didn’t imagine that your criminal activities would go unpunished?’ They ransacked the Little House, and confiscated Olga’s few remaining precious papers. Olga was then taken to the Lubyanka. Her worst fears that, unless she had the Pasternak surname, she would be vulnerable to attack – possibly death – had come true.
‘It was clear that they had decided not to go after Pasternak,’ Irina wrote. ‘They were after something else. Was it not just pure vengeance? … He had not budged one bit from his views and he had died in his bed. Now he was considered a hero! It was unbearable, but now the machine was switched on to destroy, to humiliate and to flatten. There was no need to kill you. All it took was to make fun of you, to tarnish you in front of the rest of the world, to extract confessions from you and to make you crawl on your stomach.’
‘Pasternak was too outstanding a figure to be permanently labelled as an “enemy”,’ Olga commented later. ‘And after his death, therefore, when there was no longer any fear that he might spring some new surprise on them (as he had done with the Nobel Prize poem) the powers-that-be decided it would be better to elevate him to the pantheon of Soviet Literature.’ Even his sworn enemy, Surkov, did a complete volte-face, declaring Pasternak ‘an honest poet who he personally respected’. Surkov’s venom was now turned towards Olga. ‘Pasternak’s friend Ivinskaya’ he declared was ‘an adventuress who got him to write Doctor Zhivago, and then to send it abroad, so that she would enrich herself’.
On 30 January 1961 the American magazine Newsweek reported on Olga’s imprisonment:
Obviously justice was less important than revenge, a revenge that the Kremlin’s cultural organization men had not dared to take on the world-renowned Pasternak himself just as they had not dared to punish the celebrated pianist Sviatoslav Richter for playing at Pasternak’s funeral. Beyond that, most Western experts saw another motive. If Mrs Ivinskaya could be smeared as a ‘femme fatale’ who had ‘corrupted’ the ageing author, the government could escape the embarrassment of Dr Zhivago and reclaim the younger Pasternak as a great Soviet poet. An official committee in Moscow had already been established to do that, but the world would scarcely accept Pasternak’s truth being turned into such a fraud.
Olga was officially arrested on the 18 August 1960. A few weeks later, on 5 September, the KGB came for Irina.
In the Lubyanka, Olga was interrogated by the KGB’s deputy chairman, Vadim Tikunov. A rotund figure, he sat behind a huge desk, brandishing a copy of Doctor Zhivago: ‘You disguised it very cleverly,’ he told her, ‘but we know perfectly well that the novel was not written by Pasternak, but by you. Look, he says so himself …’ He gestured to the opening page of the book. Suddenly, Olga saw Boris’s ‘cranes’ sailing before her eyes. Boris had written: ‘It was you who did it, Oliusha! Nobody knows that it was you who did it all – you guided my hand and stood behind me, all of it I owe to you.’
Tikunov looked at Olga maliciously, ‘through tiny slits of eyes buried in puffy rolls of flesh’. Olga stared back at him, before responding boldly: ‘You have probably never loved a woman, so you don’t know what it means, and the sort of things people think and write at such a time.’
Ignoring her, Tikunov continued: ‘The point is that Pasternak himself admits he didn’t write it! It was you who put him up to it all. He was not so embittered until you came along. You have committed a criminal offence and established contact with foreigners.’
Three months later, Olga and Irina were tried by a people’s court in Moscow. For five days between 13 and 18 December 1960 the farcical trial ran on. ‘Not only was the case itself a sham, but even the actual proceedings were bogus – the whole thing was based on falsehood from beginning to end,’ said Olga. Mother and daughter were accused of crimes against the state involving smuggling. Tellingly, the court proceedings were never reported in the Soviet press. Twice in foreign broadcasts, however, certain details of the case were leaked. Olga was accused of having received money in Soviet currency illegally imported into the Soviet Union in large quantities at various dates, while Irina was charged with aiding and abetting in these crimes. Her meeting with Mirella Garritano, when she collected the suitcase for Boris, thinking it contained books, was used in evidence against her.
No one who had purchased the Soviet currency abroad and had brought it, presumably illicitly, across the border into the Soviet Union to pass on to Pasternak via Olga and Irina, was prosecuted.
Sergio D’Angelo, anxious to raise awareness of Olga and Irina’s plight, published an article in the Sunday Telegraph in England in January 1961, in which he confessed to having initiated the scheme to transfer royalties to Pasternak when he was alive and to having obtained Pasternak’s authority to do so. He also admitted to having continued the transfers to Olga after Pasternak’s death in accordance with Pasternak’s instructions.
In his article, D’Angelo himself pointed out that it was remarkable that as the initiator of the operation in which Olga could legitimately be described only as an accessory after the fact, he had visited the Soviet Union in 1960. He questioned how he could have been allowed to have spent a week in Moscow in the last days of August and the first days of September, after Olga’s arrest, and was let in and out unmolested by the Soviet authorities.
D’Angelo concluded:
The truth was that Pasternak and Ivinskaya were being far too closely watched for any scheme, for a transfer of funds from abroad, to work without detection. The Soviet police knew what was going on. But they chose to hold their hands until after Pasternak was dead.
It is clear from the above that the Soviet authorities were not interested in catching and punishing the real smugglers of illicitly acquired Soviet currency from abroad, but in using this opportunity to inflict the severest possible punishment on Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter, who became involved in an operation of which the Soviet secret police appears t
o have been fully informed throughout.
Shortly before his death – when Pasternak wrote to Jacqueline de Proyart in Paris saying that if he sent a telegram saying that someone had caught scarlet fever, it meant that Olga had been arrested – Boris had added: ‘in that event, all tocsins should be made to ring as would have done in my place, for an attack on her is in fact a blow at me.’ Literary figures in the West tried their hardest to sound the tocsins on behalf of Olga. Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, all wrote to Soviet authorities, while Bertrand Russell appealed to Khrushchev himself. David Carver, the general secretary of PEN, lobbied Alexei Surkov, who had risen to become the general secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Sergio D’Angelo wrote Surkov a stinging open letter in which he said: ‘You have always hated Pasternak and, dominated by this feeling, you carried out, as first secretary of the Writers’ Union, a series of ill-considered acts which did your country a very poor service.’ He went on to sum up: ‘Pasternak’s death was not sufficient to satisfy your spite, which you are now venting, with invective and slander, on two defenceless women who are, furthermore, seriously ill. I have no illusions and I do not think that you will find it possible to change your ways or to show moderation and humanity. But neither should you, on your part, have any illusions about having “closed the futile correspondence on the Ivinskaya affair” as you say in your letter: the conscience of all civilised and honest people will not permit it to be “closed” until justice has been done.’
Olga was sentenced to the maximum penalty of eight years’ imprisonment, while Irina was sentenced to three. They were both sent to the gulag, to labour camp 385/14 at Taishet, nearly 5,000 kilometres away from Moscow. There, in the Irkutsk province in Eastern Siberia, the wind was so strong that you had to walk backwards.
‘The journey to Siberia was long and terrible,’ wrote Olga. ‘It was January when the frosts are at their most severe, and the stops on the way, during which we had to spend the night in cold damp cells, were a great torment. Ira was wearing only a light coat intended for spring or autumn (it was made of dark-blue English bouclé) and with her silly mania for keeping in fashion, she had had it shortened. My heart bled for her when I saw her arms sticking way out of her sleeves.’
Lara Page 29
