The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  I find it strange that, now, I don’t remember exactly what reason was given for Masha’s suicide. I remember being obsessed with the question at the time. I was frustrated with my own inability to understand everything that was being said to me in Russian and equally frustrated with my lack of vocabulary to offer alternatives. I distinctly recall someone saying something I did understand: ‘Prosto ne khotela bol’she zhit’.’ (‘She just didn’t want to live any more.’) This was accompanied by a shrug that said: ‘You know what that’s like.’ I suppose, as teenagers, we all felt we understood. But, really, we understood nothing. Many years later, I found out that the Belorussian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich had written Enchanted with Death, a book about the outbreak of suicides in the country around the same time, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union: her explanation was that life became too uncertain and confusing for many people and they just couldn’t take it any longer. Also, many felt caught up in the Communist project, and the failure of that ideology symbolized something personal for them. Masha seemed an unlikely candidate for this way of thinking. She was plump and pretty and had a face that was so doll-like it was almost comical. She had cherubic cheeks that made her look like a matrioshka, with puffy, brown, curly hair. She was a cheerful girl: friendly, sweet, innocent. I still find it hard to believe that what she did was intentional and not just the proverbial cry for help.

  The morning I heard the dull knocking at the door, I had no desire to get up and half-wash myself in a tiny cubicle crawling with cockroaches. The bathroom of the student hostel had tiles which were crumbling off the walls. Insects and Soviet plaster intermingled, and a draught whistled through the cracks. Outside, it was freezing. It was a dry, biting cold, the sort you never quite got used to, even in St Petersburg. Neither did I have any idea what to wear: I had no black clothes and, crucially, no black coat. The only coat I had with me was completely unsuitable for most occasions, and definitely unsuitable for a funeral. It was an old man’s brown leather jacket with a sheepskin lining. I had bought it in a second-hand shop and thought it made me look like something out of Quadrophenia. In fact, it made me look more like something out of The Archers. It was not made to be worn to a Russian funeral service outside in temperatures of minus ten degrees. Three friends had come to pick me up to take me to the funeral (because my Russian would not have been good enough to take the right train to get there myself). They looked at my brown old man’s jacket with curiosity and pity. ‘Do you have any make-up?’ one of them asked, suddenly. ‘Bring it with you.’ He mumbled something about ‘the girls’, but I didn’t understand. It was very early in the morning, two of them were crying and I did not want to ask questions. I shoved a make-up bag into my handbag.

  The trip there was the longest journey I had made inside Russia at that point. It took hours. We went to the end of the metro line and then on the electrichka (cross-country rail service). I had no idea where we were: north, south, east, west. On the way there, I remember being shocked that the boys – my friends – were smoking on the metro. I gestured and frowned at them. This was the kind of thing that could get you arrested or, at the very least, hassled, delayed or detained, which didn’t seem a good idea on the way to a funeral. But they all just shrugged and looked at me reprovingly, as if to say, ‘We are going to the funeral of our friend who has committed suicide. No one is going to mind us smoking on the metro in this instance.’ I, however, did not smoke on the metro. I sat in accusing silence, staring at the sign on the doors that read Ne preslonyat’sya, which means ‘Do not lean against the glass’ but looks to all students of Russian as if it means ‘Do not do elephant impressions.’ (The word slon (think ‘Ceylon’) means ‘elephant’, and so it comes across as a verb that means ‘to elephant around’, which is maybe what leaning is, really, only using your arm instead of a trunk. This is the kind of thing that was going through my mind while I tried not to think about what had happened to Masha.)

  The landscape when we arrived was straight out of Doctor Zhivago: fields and nothing else for miles, with a graveyard in the foreground and a few crumbling, factory-style buildings. Looking back, if I had known what was going to happen that day, I probably wouldn’t have gone. The whole day involved me arranging my face into a series of expressions that indicated falsely that I wasn’t shocked when, in fact, I was shocked out of my mind. We queued outside the building for a while, me not knowing why we were there or even knowing what the building was, until I realized someone was saying the word morg (the same word as in English). I shivered. While we were in the queue, some girls came up to me. I didn’t know them. They were clearly friends of Masha’s, different from the group I knew. Their faces were heavily made-up. One said, ‘Are you the Foreigner? Vipulya? Tiny Little VIP?’

  ‘Yes. I am Vipulya. I am Tiny Little VIP.’

  ‘Did you bring the make-up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we borrow it?’

  ‘Er, okay.’

  I handed it over. A pause. The blonde girl looked at the ground. ‘It’s for Masha.’

  Finally, I understood. They were going to make up her face with it. It was the final honour that she would be made up with Western cosmetics. Now I understood why everyone had wanted me there. That was a Clinique compact I was not going to be using again.

  After about an hour standing outside in the sort of punishing cold that freezes your nostril hairs, we were ushered into the morgue, which was not much warmer in terms of temperature and positively icy in terms of immediate psychological impact. To my horror (which I was careful not to register on my face – everyone else was behaving as if this place was normal), there were corpses laid out everywhere, on slabs or slumped on chairs, maybe between fifteen and twenty, mostly older men who looked, from their unkempt appearance, as if they had died lonely and horrible homeless alcoholic deaths. One man’s features were twisted into a terrible grimace.

  It was something of a relief to find that Masha was laid out looking like Masha, her face peaceful and serene and glowing with recently applied Clinique blusher. I tried not to look appalled that she was wearing a white lace wedding dress. ‘Nevesta Khrista’ – ‘a bride of Christ’ – one of the girls whispered to me. We were expected to lean over and kiss her. I only pretended to do this. By this point, I had realized that I was well out of my depth and just the fact of my presence in this country where I didn’t belong, among this group of friends where I didn’t belong, had tipped into the horrifically inappropriate.

  The next few hours are a blur. But the worst bits stick out. Having to walk for ages to the site of the grave because suicides are not allowed to be buried in the main graveyard. Her mother almost throwing herself into the grave with grief, screaming, ‘My little kitten!’, all the other women crying and keening. Wishing that I didn’t know enough Russian to know that she was screaming, ‘My little kitten!’ The wake, at a horrible beige hotel where it became obvious that we were going to go round the table and say something moving about Masha and I had no idea how to say something respectful and honest in decent enough Russian. Realizing that I was going to have to eat koliva, which is a funeral dish of rice and sultanas and truly horrible. It’s a staple of the Orthodox Church. Everyone else seemed to cheer up at the sight of the koliva. ‘Maybe they don’t get many sultanas in their diet,’ I thought. It would later turn out that I was right about this.

  It was one of the most upsetting and tragic days for everyone there, and I blocked it out almost as soon as it happened. In the years to come, I was to have many joyous and life-affirming experiences in Russia and with Russians. So it’s unfair to let this day stand in for ‘the Russian experience’. What happened was a terrible tragedy, and it was an extraordinary privilege, in a way, to witness something like this as an outsider. But it was also incredibly weird and distressing. And it did feel like fate. Whenever I questioned how Russian I could ever really be, no matter how well I learned to speak Russian, no matter how many books I read, no matter how muc
h I tried to understand and empathize, everything would always come back to that day and how alien I felt. I could pretend all I liked. But I would never, ever be Russian. And I would never, ever take make-up I wanted to use again to a morgue.

  Of all the novels that explore Russianness in the twentieth century, Doctor Zhivago has marked itself out as the ultimate. The words ‘fate’ and ‘soul’ come up constantly in the novel. Death is never far off. But, this being an epic novel, it’s also full of life: Doctor Zhivago is infused with the dirty, smoky smell of fried chicken, the stench of everyday life is barely masked by eau de cologne, and there are splashes of colour everywhere, especially mauve. (Coincidentally, also a colour Nabokov uses frequently.) Doctor Zhivago himself is in some ways the ultimate Russian literary hero: a poet and a doctor who is not quite a product of the revolution but not quite an enemy of it either. The boy we see at his mother’s funeral grows up to write poems, which are reproduced at the back of the novel. Pasternak was better known as a poet before he became famous for this novel.

  Doctor Zhivago was published in 1957 and swiftly translated into English. Within two years, it was at the top of the bestseller lists in the United States. In 1958, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story of the novel takes place between the revolution of 1905 and the civil war, with the epilogue leading up to the 1940s. It’s an intimate portrait of the damage caused by political upheaval. Zhivago the boy comes from a wealthy background. His mother has consumption and travels regularly to France and Italy to try to get better. He knows that his family name is so important it has lent itself to banks and factories. There is even such a thing as ‘a Zhivago tie-pin’ and a cake shaped like a rum baba known as ‘a Zhivago bun’. But Zhivago’s father, whom he never knew, gambled it all away and his mother and he were left poor.

  The father kills himself by jumping out of a moving train. (I know. Again with the train and the suicide. Let’s not even get started on this.) His lawyer, Komarovsky, travelling with him, makes everyone on the train wait while a statement is drawn up. Yuri is taken in by family friends, the Gromekos in Moscow. Their daughter Tonya is like a sister to Yuri, and an understanding arises that they will marry each other. Meanwhile, also in Moscow, an exceptionally beautiful young woman, Lara, helps her widowed mother (‘a Russianized Frenchwoman’) to run a struggling dressmaking business. Komarovsky acts as their patron.

  When Lara turns sixteen, Komarovsky invites Lara to a ball and draws her into a sort of coercive affair. Lara’s friend Pasha Antipov is distraught that she won’t marry him and throws himself into revolutionary activities. Lara marries Komarovsky and has a child. Around the same time, Tonya and Zhivago marry. Then comes the revolution and war, many lose their homes and Moscow is evacuated. Zhivago and Lara meet properly for the first time when he is volunteering near the front line as a doctor and she as a nurse. Nothing happens between them, but he comes to associate her with the smell of an iron burning through fabric. (I know, I know. This is an extremely eventful novel. I’m summarizing it as best I can.)

  Later, as the revolution takes hold, the Zhivago family escapes to the family’s dacha at Yuryatin, where they think they will be safe. As ‘former people’ (of the middle class or aristocrats, rather than workers), they are not really safe anywhere, and Doctor Zhivago is likely to be called upon by the regime for his medical skills, something he is not happy about. By a monumental coincidence, Lara is nearby. She and Zhivago begin an affair. One day, when Tonya is heavily pregnant, Zhivago goes into town and is kidnapped by the revolutionary forces, who forcibly recruit him as their doctor. He has no way to get a message to Tonya or to Lara. Months later, he returns. Tonya has gone. Lara is still there. The two of them decamp to the Gromekos’ dacha, aware that Zhivago is wanted by the authorities for his anti-regime poetry. Komarovsky, Lara’s estranged husband, comes to warn them that they are going to be arrested. Zhivago decides to let Lara and her daughter be saved. He stays and is arrested. They never see each other again.

  So much fate and so much coincidence. Fate is one of the most obvious themes: ‘ “And why is it,” thought Lara, “that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?” ’ Personal fate is important. Especially who comes into your life at what particular moment. But historical fate is equally important: it can influence your personal fate in a positive way or totally mess everything up for you. Perhaps what Pasternak is searching for here is an answer to the question: ‘How can you be yourself when you are being blown in a million different directions you can’t control?’

  When it was first published, the book was seen as a defence of the individual broken by the state. It’s still not clear how controversial Pasternak initially intended the book to be. He said: ‘The revolution is not shown at all as the cake with cream on top which it has always been made out to be as a matter of course.’ That’s a long way off from saying that the revolution was a waste of time. Possibly, he wanted to write a book that would be critical but would still be published and read. Or possibly, like Doctor Zhivago, he had an ambivalence about the regime: he could see the point of view of the workers, but he could also see that it had all gone horribly wrong.

  Most readers of this novel have taken the view that Pasternak wanted to show a Soviet-era hero who is caught up in the sweep of events, powerless in the face of fate. That said, what little moral power Zhivago does have (to refuse to have an affair with Lara, for example), he does not exercise. He’s weak and, sometimes, incredibly silly. Is that his fault, though? Or is it fate that makes him that way? Is it because of his artistic temperament? This is the traditional Russian excuse. Just think of Omar Sharif’s mournful eyes and droopy, poetic moustache as Zhivago in the legendary film, and you can see the fate and the soul oozing out of him. It’s that shrugging ideal: ‘Woe is me. This is my fate and it’s hurting my soul. I cannot help but be a weak man who abandons his pregnant wife by accident.’

  I have a theory about the Russian prevalence of talk about fate and the soul. It’s a way of keeping death in the conversation without actually saying, ‘Oh, who cares, we’re all going to die soon anyway.’ But let’s face it, if you are always going on about fate and the soul, then, really, you are pretty fixated on death. Long before I learned Russian or had read any Russian literature, one of the first things I knew about Russian literature was that it was about death. I had seen the film of Doctor Zhivago. I knew that one of Yuri Zhivago’s first memories is his mother’s funeral. I knew even without having read Anna Karenina that she throws herself under a train. Even a passing acquaintance with Russian literature leads you to the conclusion that these are not exactly books to give you inspiration for life, they’re to remind you that death is never far away.

  This is not to say that the experience of reading Doctor Zhivago is a depressing one. The opposite, actually. Because Pasternak is so upfront about death from the beginning, you accept that it is just part of life. Plus, Pasternak’s style is relaxed, fluid and easygoing. He was seen as having sent the Russian novel in a completely different direction by using language that was very different to anything that had come before. The style is quite meandering and broad, and passages of the novel can appear to be a bit random. Although the plot is linear, his ideas don’t have a linear development, and there are times when you are reading it almost as a history book or a series of short stories and you forget that it’s a novel. Some people hate this. I rather love it.

  In biographical accounts, Pasternak comes across as a serious, thoughtful, romantic man, nowhere near as tormented by spiritual crisis as Tolstoy. (It’s also adorable that his name – Pasternak – means ‘parsnip’. I just don’t feel any British writer could have won a Nobel Prize while being called Mr Parsnip.) But he, too, had his weaknesses. For the last fourteen years of his life, his lover and secretary was Olga Ivinskaya, a woman he met in the offices of the literary magazine Novy Mir, where she was in charge of new authors. She was the model for Lara. Pasternak loved her but refused to leave h
is wife. Ivinskaya wrote an account of their time together, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak. It’s a wonderful read about that era, both nostalgic and disturbing. A lot of it, though, is a big moan about the fact that Pasternak didn’t allow her, the mistress, to have her own copies of the typescript of Doctor Zhivago. (‘Of course you expect me to get them ready and bring them to you, but there’s no copy for poor me!’ she writes.)

  Appropriately enough for someone in love with the man who wrote one of the most haunting novels about fate ever written, Ivinskaya regards it as her fate to be bound to Pasternak. She treats her role as caretaker of his legacy as something sacred. She is also a great eyewitness to his life as a writer. One thing Ivinskaya does very well is to give colourful accounts of other people encountering Doctor Zhivago for the first time. I love her retelling of a meeting with the legendarily intimidating poet Anna Akhmatova. Summoned to hear Boris Pasternak read aloud from Doctor Zhivago, you can imagine Akhmatova listening with her eyes closed, her imperious nose twitching, one eyebrow sceptically raised. It’s not clear how long this reading would have gone on for. Ivinskaya makes it sound as if he read the whole novel aloud in one sitting. (Surely that’s not possible? It would take hours.) In Ivinskaya’s account, Akhmatova sits regally, huddled in her ‘trademark white shawl’. When Pasternak finishes reading, having greatly admired what sounds like a rather melodramatic and tremulous performance (‘the inspired look on his face, the convulsive movements of his throat, and the suppressed tears in his voice’), Akhmatova pronounces. And she’s not entirely complimentary. She praises the prose style (‘superb’) and gives the best feedback any poet can ever give by saying that it is ‘as concise as poetry’.