by Viv Groskop
However, she finds one major flaw. Why does Zhivago have to be ordinary? she asks. Akhmatova has a big thing about ‘ordinariness’ in literature. She does not like it. It’s usually something she mentions in the context of Chekhov rather than Pasternak. There is something very odd about Chekhov’s work, in that everything that happens in his plays and stories takes place in pre-revolutionary Russia. And yet he is someone who never mentions politics or ideology and seems almost to pretend that it’s not happening. There’s a certain ‘whitewashed’ Downton Abbey quality to his portrayal of pre-revolutionary Russia, the idea of sweeping all the uncomfortable social and political truths underneath the beautiful tapestry rug. Yes, in Chekhov, the characters are often miserable. But they are miserable for ordinary reasons (they’re sick of looking out at birch trees, they find their sisters’ company intolerable, they love people who don’t love them). They are not miserable because of extraordinary historical circumstances or because they have lost their job or don’t have anything to eat.
With all this in mind, Akhmatova ‘could not agree with BL’s [Pasternak’s] own view of Zhivago as an “average” man’. It’s too much like Chekhov for her. She doesn’t want Pasternak’s protagonist to accept the political reality, she wants him to challenge it. Akhmatova wants Zhivago to be a hero and to put himself at the centre of things. She doesn’t want him to be swayed by events and unable to participate in them or change things for the better. ‘She advised BL [Pasternak] to think carefully before making Zhivago a plaything of historical events instead of into a personage who tried to influence them in some way.’ She almost alludes to the fact that Pasternak has chickened out. He is supposed to be a poet even before he is a novelist, and yet he hasn’t found what she calls ‘a poetic solution’. He hasn’t found a way to make Zhivago part of the action, calling the shots, not just swayed by fate.
This is a fascinating criticism of Doctor Zhivago. One of the things that has always irritated me – and many readers and critics – about the novel is that everything that happens is all very convenient for the good doctor. For a novel about fate, perhaps it’s not surprising that its chief flaw is the role of coincidence. The amount of coincidence is almost comical. Your mother’s died? Here’s a lovely new family for you. Lonely and in need of a wife? Why not marry the adopted sister and best friend (Tonya) you’ve been brought up with your whole life! Slightly bored in your marriage and lonely while serving as a doctor at the front? Why, here’s a lovely nurse (Lara) who has crossed your path several times before. Frustrated and inflamed by passion miles away from anywhere in the Urals? Don’t worry, Lara’s here, too! Annoyed your affair with Lara is due to be cut short as your wife is pregnant with a second child? Fear not! You can get kidnapped so that your family thinks you’ve disappeared and, when you come back, you can live in your deserted family house with Lara as your mistress! Hurrah! Whenever fate intervenes in Zhivago’s life, it really does make things very convenient for him indeed. But aren’t we all like this, really? If a convenient solution presents itself, we accept it. We grab hold of coincidences as a way out, and to avoid having to make decisions and change direction in life ourselves. Pasternak doesn’t judge us for this. He sees it as human. How do you face life? You roll with it, even if it makes you look bad. It’s as if he’s asking: ‘What’s the difference between fate and convenience?’ Not much. And most of us follow the path of least resistance. It’s only when we look back that we think to ourselves: ‘Ah, yes, that must have been meant to be. It was fate!’ Actually, it happened that way because we are morally weak and lazy. Not that Pasternak is judgemental about this. He just tells it like it is.
The big question in Doctor Zhivago is whether this level of coincidence is entirely normal and true to life. And it really is an extraordinary level of coincidence. (The fact that Komarovsky is both a) Zhivago’s father’s lawyer from the train incident at the beginning of the book and b) connected to the woman Zhivago falls in love with is fairly far-fetched. There must have been thousands of lawyers in Moscow at the time. What were the odds?) But it strikes me that there’s something about Russia itself that forces a Russian novel to contain ridiculous amounts of coincidence. (There are also many such extreme unlikelihoods in War and Peace.) If you are Tolstoy or Pasternak and you want to cover the scope and sweep of Russia in your novel, you are going to have to cover vast distances geographically in order to represent the whole of Russia, seeing as Russia is the world’s largest country by land mass. Whether they’re conscious or not of this fact (and there is a theory that we can’t help but be very different kinds of people, according to the size and geography of the country we call our own), it pervades their work. And so, in War and Peace, when Andrei is convalescing miles away from home, who should be the one person who is nearby, even though he is in the middle of nowhere? Why, of course, it is Natasha.
In Doctor Zhivago, the other ridiculous but necessary unlikelihood is that Lara goes to Yuryatin, which is a town very near where the family of Zhivago’s wife, Tonya, owns property. Yuryatin is over seven hundred miles from Moscow. Of all the places Lara could go … Of course, it would not make for a very good novel if Zhivago thought: ‘Well, it’s just happenstance that Lara is here. I must ignore her for the sake of my marriage. To go off with her on the strength of a geographical coincidence … Well, that would be weak and immoral.’
This novel asks us what we think of the moral condition of the person who gives in to the power of fate. Usually, in Russian literature, these types are seen as human and understandable. Yuri and Lara’s relationship is represented as the greatest love story ever told. It is not represented as a man taking advantage of a preposterous coincidence to cheat on his wife. No. Lara is there because they are destined to be together. Man is powerless in the face of destiny. And destiny is to be respected because it lets us off the hook. We spend our whole lives looking for things that are meant to be, hoping that fate will guide us, rather than taking responsibility for our own choices.
And yet. The novel shows that fate does not make us happy and give us what we want. Sometimes it brings a much-loved mistress seven hundred miles from Moscow and into the back of beyond, where we just happen to be. But at other times it is just as likely to be cruel. At the end of Doctor Zhivago, Yuri returns to Moscow to live with a third woman. (I know! Don’t get me started.) Tonya has gone to Paris. Lara has disappeared with Komarovsky. Zhivago’s life becomes difficult. He is unhappy and not physically well. He eventually dies of a heart attack.
In the film, there is one more insane coincidence: Zhivago is back in Moscow, travelling by tram. He sees Lara in the street. (This doesn’t happen in the book.) He tries to get the tram to stop to get to her, but he can’t. His distress mounts, and he stumbles off the train to die in the street, while she walks past him, oblivious. In the book, the ending is even more symbolic. As he is about to go into cardiac arrest, Zhivago glimpses a woman from the tram. It’s Madame Fleury, the old woman who used to work in the place where he first realized he loved Lara (when she burned the ironing). Madame Fleury is wearing a mauve dress. Mauve was the colour of a dress Lara once wore. It’s also the colour Pasternak uses to describe Russia before the revolution: it represents innocence, purity, idealism. It’s the colour he glimpses before he dies. ‘He thought of several people whose lives run parallel and close together but at different speeds, and wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others.’
The odds of something like this happening in real life are zero. But, then, real life is actually more ridiculous and full of coincidences than novels, which is why a novel like Doctor Zhivago can get away with what is really a ridiculous plot and go on to be one of the best-loved novels of all time. Our lives do run parallel and close together with the lives of others, and so often we do feel powerless in the face of fate. What did it mean that I knew a woman who killed herself as soon as I moved to Russia? Why did she die then, and I am still alive now? The answer to these questions in Do
ctor Zhivago is brutal. It’s coincidence. It’s fate. It’s dumb luck. How do you cope with that in life? You just keep going, even if it means sometimes being an inadequate person, betraying people you love or running away from responsibility. You just keep going.
3. How to be Optimistic in the Face of Despair: Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
(Or: Don’t wear tight shoes on prison visits)
For someone a fresh breeze blows
For someone the sunset luxuriates –
We wouldn’t know, we are those who everywhere
Hear only the rasp of the hateful key
I first discovered Anna Akhmatova’s poetry when I was living in St Petersburg during the year that had started with Masha’s funeral. It was a happy year, for the most part. But there were many times when I was confronted by the realities of the lives of Russian friends and had to dig deep to find any sense of optimism. Generally speaking, the people around me had very little money and not always that much food. If they had work, it was precarious. If you opened someone’s fridge, it would be virtually bare. It was very common for friends to ask me to lend them five dollars to last them to the end of the month. (They would almost always return it.) You had to be careful about helping people, though. First, you couldn’t help everyone. And, second, you can’t be friends or equals with people if you’re their benefactor. Overall, life could be wearing. I frequently felt guilty and helpless. At the end of that year, when I returned home to England to my parents’ house, without thinking, I went to get some milk to make tea. When I opened the fridge, I was so shocked at the sight of the packed shelves that I burst into tears.
The one thing that always made me feel better was reading Anna Akhmatova. She’s not an obvious candidate to choose as someone to cheer you up. Few writers have catalogued misery in such forensic, lyrical detail:
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
– 1 April 1957, Leningrad
This is the opener to Akhmatova’s cycle of poems Requiem, about the experience of women waiting for news of relatives who were arrested in the 1930s. Composed between 1935 and 1940, at a time when the population of the prison camps almost doubled, Requiem was not published until 1962, in Munich, and even then without the knowledge or consent of the author. It is an eleven-page poem about the worst imaginings of people pining for their loved ones and about not knowing whose fate is worse, the ones sent away or the ones left behind:
Mountains bow down to this grief,
Mighty rivers cease to flow.
…
For someone a fresh breeze blows
For someone the sunset luxuriates –
We wouldn’t know, we are those who everywhere
Hear only the rasp of the hateful key
…
And it’s not clear to me
Who is a beast now, who is a man
And how long before the execution.
We are not talking Doris Day here. And yet, somehow, Akhmatova always finds a chink of light:
But hope keeps singing from afar
…
Never mind, I was ready. I will manage somehow.
Today I have so much to do;
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again –
Akhmatova has a sense of the theatrical, and she makes everything into a game, distracting herself – and us – from the worst of life, by playing with words. In the introduction to Requiem, she quotes a woman in the prison queue who asks her: ‘Can you describe this?’ The word for ‘describe’ in Russian – opisat’ – contains the root of the word ‘to write’ – pisat’. It’s not just a rhetorical question about whether she can find the words to describe this situation. The woman is actively asking Akhmatova to write about it. In a very simple way, she is saying, ‘Someone needs to bear witness. You’re a writer. Do you think you’re up to it?’ Akhmatova tells the horror of an everyday moment very simply and without melodrama. She is the voice of a time when no one wanted to speak. If you want a dose of grit just when you think that everything is hopeless and you are about to give up, Akhmatova always has something elegant and inspiring to say. In Requiem, she says it best:
Forget how that detested door slammed shut
And an old woman howled like a wounded animal
And may the melting snow stream like tears
From my motionless lids of bronze,
And a prison dove coo in the distance,
And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on.
Sadly, though, beyond Russia, Akhmatova’s name is now barely known to anyone outside academic circles or those who take a special interest in Russian literature or poetry. This is a horrific development, as Akhmatova’s status within her lifetime was huge. Born in 1889, she was a sort of Russian Virginia Woolf. Later on, she became the unofficial dissident poet for the Stalinist age, writing her secret poetry about the horrors of waiting in line for news from the Gulag. I don’t think there is an English-language poet whose appeal comes close to that she has for Russians, and their love of her is compounded by the fact that she is easily the most famous female figure in Russian literature, full stop. Professionally persecuted, psychologically tortured and ostracized by the state, she made it to the age of seventy-six, outliving not only many of her peers but also Stalin himself. She never stopped writing. She never stopped trying to make a difference. And, perhaps most extraordinary of all, she never stopped hoping. She may possibly be one of the most optimistic people ever to have lived.
In St Petersburg in the 1990s, it was assumed that you were interested in Akhmatova if you were a) learning Russian and b) a woman. You couldn’t possibly be serious about learning Russian if you hadn’t read any of Akhmatova’s poetry, especially if you were a woman. And you would – of course! – have a special understanding of it if you were a woman. I was slightly sceptical of this way of thinking, especially as her poetry seemed to me to be about knuckling down and facing life’s biggest challenges. I always felt a bit uncomfortable about the whole Akhmatova/woman thing. The poetry of her contemporary and close friend Osip Mandelstam, for example, is similar in tone and subject matter to Akhmatova’s and just as enticing. There can be an uncomfortable sexism in the fawning appreciation of Akhmatova. But we will set that aside, because any road to her is a good road, even if she is such a steely and formidable character that her work can initially seem intimidating.
Akhmatova’s gender weighed heavily on her during her lifetime: she knew that everything she wrote would be assumed to represent ‘the woman’s experience’. And yet, at the same time, her work was criticized for being ‘too much about the woman’s experience’. No wonder she had to be ballsy and determined just to keep going. Her writing is harsh and clear-eyed:
No, not under the vault of alien skies
And not under the shelter of alien wings –
I was with my people, then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
Is there any better way of saying: ‘This really happened to us. I was there. And it was hell.’
As if all this wasn’t already a huge burden, much of her work was produced in impossible circumstances. She couldn’t have it published because she was not on the list of writers approved by the state. She couldn’t even physically write anything down because her home was routinely searched by the KGB, as were the homes of all her friends. It was illegal not only to publish anti-state material, but to write it in the first place. To prevent them being confiscated, Akhmatova’s poems were preserved
in what was known as ‘pre-Gutenberg conditions’. They were part of oral history, not written down, just remembered, in the way poetry was ‘written’ (i.e. committed to memory) for years before print was invented. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of the poet Osip, writes about how impressed she was with Akhmatova’s discretion as she worked on her poetry. Nadezhda had witnessed her own husband speaking the verses to himself and judged that Akhmatova was much less overt. ‘She did not even allow her lips to move, as M. did so openly, but rather, I think, pressed them tighter as she composed her poems, and her mouth became set in an even sadder way.’
In the early 1960s Akhmatova revealed that she had entrusted a handful of people with her work: ‘Eleven people knew Requiem by heart, and not one of them betrayed me,’ she said. Some poems were not written down anywhere until years later. Fortunately, Akhmatova’s friend Lydia Chukovskaya had an extraordinary gift for memorizing poetry. She and Akhmatova had a method: ‘Suddenly in mid-conversation, she would fall silent and, signalling to me with her eyes at the ceiling and walls, she would get a scrap of paper and a pencil.’ Akhmatova would then say something for the censors (who had bugged the apartment) to hear. Two popular choices were: ‘Would you like some tea?’ Or ‘You’re very tanned.’ Then she would note down a couple of lines on the scrap of paper and hand it to Chukovskaya to memorize. (I don’t even want to think about the pressure that this poor reader was under.) Once Chukovskaya had learned her lines, she would hand the piece of paper back and Akhmatova would say loudly, ‘How early autumn came this year.’ She would then burn the scraps of paper over an ashtray. I can’t begin to imagine the presence of mind Akhmatova must have had to keep it together mentally under these conditions. She clearly put ‘dignified survival’ at the top of her list and refused to compromise in any way.
