by Peter Finn
Both Pasternak and Yevgenia had their own artistic ambitions, and the marriage was marked by their competing struggle to assert themselves creatively and an inability to make concessions. There was also the unavoidable and looming fact that Pasternak was “a man with inarguably more talent,” their son later wrote.
Pasternak’s relations with women continued to be fraught. The marriage was buffeted by the heat of some of his correspondence with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, which greatly irritated his wife. In the summer of 1930, he found himself increasingly attracted to Zinaida Neigauz, the wife of his best friend, the pianist Genrikh Neigauz, with whom the Pasternaks vacationed in Ukraine. Zinaida was born in Saint Petersburg in 1897, the daughter of a Russian factory owner and a mother who was half Italian. When she was fifteen, she became involved with a cousin, a man in his forties and married with two children, an affair that informed some of the early experience of the young Lara in Doctor Zhivago. In 1917, Zinaida moved to Yelisavetgrad where she met and married her piano teacher, Neigauz.
Before he was even sure of Zinaida’s feeling, Pasternak told his wife he was in love. He then immediately proceeded to announce his passion to Genrikh. Pasternak and Genrikh wept, but Zinaida, for the moment, remained with her husband. By early the next year, the two were sleeping together, and Zinaida confessed the affair in a letter to her husband, who was on a concert tour in Siberia. He left a recital in tears and returned to Moscow.
Pasternak, with more than a measure of narcissism, argued that he could maintain his marriage, continue his affair, and sustain his friendship, all the while remaining above reproach. “I’ve shown myself unworthy of [Genrikh], whom I still love and always will,” said Pasternak in a letter to his parents. “I’ve caused prolonged, terrible, and as yet undiminished suffering to [Yevgenia]—and yet I’m purer and more innocent than before I entered this life.”
The complicated ménage continued for some time. Yevgenia went to Germany with her young son, leaving Boris and Zinaida free to consort together. In a poem, he encouraged Yevgenia to make a fresh start without him:
Do not fret, do not cry, do not tax
Your last strength, and your heart do not torture.
You’re alive, you’re inside me, intact,
As a buttress, a friend, an adventure.
I’ve no fear of standing exposed
As a fraud in my faith in the future.
It’s not life, not a union of souls
We are breaking off, but a hoax mutual.
Many years later, he remembered the marriage as unhappy and lacking passion. He said that “beauty is the mark of true feelings, the sign of its strength and sincerity.” And he thought it unfair that his son bore the trace of his failure to love in his “ugly face” with its reddish complexion and freckles.
Yevgenia’s eventual return to Moscow in early 1932 left Boris and Zinaida without a place to live in a city where flats were a very precious commodity. Zinaida, feeling “painfully awkward,” returned to Genrikh and asked him to take her back as “a nanny for the children” and “to help him do the housekeeping.” Pasternak returned to Yevgenia—for three days. “I begged her to understand—that I worship [Zinaida]—that it would be despicable to fight against this feeling.” When he met friends, he gave long, tearful accounts of his complicated family affairs.
Effectively homeless and in love, Pasternak began to despair. “It was around midnight—and freezing. A terrible, accelerating conviction of hopelessness tightened like a spring inside me. I suddenly saw the bankruptcy of my whole life.” He ran through the streets to the Neigauzes’ apartment. “Der spät kommende Gast? [The late-arriving guest?],” said Genrikh laconically as he opened the door and promptly left. Inside, Pasternak pulled a bottle of iodine from a shelf and drank it in one gulp. “What are you chewing? Why does it smell so strong of iodine?” asked Zinaida, who began to scream. A doctor living in the building was summoned, and Pasternak was induced to vomit repeatedly and then put to bed, still very weak. “In this state of bliss, my pulse almost gone, I felt a wave of pure, virginal, totally untrammeled freedom. I actively, almost languidly, desired death—as you might want a cake. If there had been a revolver by my side, I would have reached out my hand like reaching for a sweet.”
Genrikh, who at this point seemed quite happy to rid himself of Zinaida, said, “Well, are you satisfied? Has he proved his love for you?”
For Pasternak, Zinaida, to whom he was now married, was a homemaker who allowed him the physical and emotional space to work—something Yevgenia was less disposed to do.
Yevgenia “is much cleverer and more mature than [Zinaida] is, and perhaps better educated too,” Pasternak told his parents. Yevgenia “is purer and weaker, and more childlike, but better armed with the noisy weapons of her quick temper, demanding stubbornness and insubstantial theorizing.” Zinaida had “the hardworking, industrious core of her strong (but quiet and wordless) temperament.”
Yevgenia, said her son, “continued loving my father for the rest of her life.”
Pasternak’s complicated relations with more than one woman were far from over. Nor was his impulse to surrender to providence. And fate may have repaid his trust with the poet’s unlikely survival of Stalin’s purges in the years to follow.
Chapter 2
“Pasternak, without realizing it, entered the personal life of Stalin.”
The revolution was followed by a devastating and prolonged civil war between the Red Army and the anti-Bolshevik forces, the Whites. The winters were unusually severe. Food was scarce, and the Pasternak family was routinely undernourished. Boris sold books for bread, and traveled to the countryside to scrounge for apples, dry biscuits, honey, and fat from relatives and friends. He and his brother sawed wood from joints in the attic to keep fires burning at the Volkhonka apartment, where their living space was reduced by the authorities to two rooms; at night the brothers sometimes went out to steal fencing and other items that could be burned. Almost everyone’s health declined, and in 1920 Leonid sought and obtained permission to take Roza to Germany for treatment after she suffered a heart attack. Their two daughters also moved to Germany, and the family was permanently divided. Pasternak’s parents and sisters eventually settled in England before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Boris saw his parents only once more, during a visit to Berlin after he married his first wife, Yevgenia. That extended ten-month stay in Berlin, which had become the capital of émigré Russia, convinced Pasternak that his artistic future lay in his homeland, not amid the nostalgia and squabbling that marked the exile community. “Pasternak is uneasy in Berlin,” wrote the literary theorist and critic Viktor Shklovsky, who also later returned to Moscow. “It seems to me that he feels among us an absence of propulsion.… We are refugees. No, not refugees but fugitives—and now squatters.… Russian Berlin is going nowhere. It has no destiny.” Pasternak was deeply wedded to Moscow and Russia. “Amidst Moscow streets, by-ways and courtyards he felt like a fish in water; here he was in his element and his tongue was purely Muscovite.… I recall how his colloquial speech shocked me and how it was organically linked to his whole Muscovite manner,” observed Chukovsky.
Isaiah Berlin said Pasternak had “a passionate, almost obsessive desire to be thought a Russian writer with roots deep in Russian soil” and that this was “particularly evident in his negative feelings towards his Jewish origins … he wished the Jews to assimilate, to disappear as a people.” In Doctor Zhivago, the character Misha Gordon articulates this point of view, demanding of the Jews: “Come to your senses. Enough. There’s no need for more. Don’t call yourselves by the old name. Don’t cling together, disperse. Be with everyone. You are the first and best Christians in the world.” When he was a child, Pasternak’s nanny brought him to Orthodox churches in Moscow—services redolent with incense and watched over by walls of Byzantine iconography. But his sisters said he was untouched by Russian Orthodox theology before 1936, and Isaiah Berlin saw no sign of
it in 1945, concluding that Pasternak’s interest in Christianity was a “late accretion.” As an older man, Pasternak was attached to his own version of Christianity, a faith influenced by the Orthodox Church but not formally part of it. “I was born a Jew,” he told a journalist late in life. “My family was interested in music and art and paid little attention to religious practice. Because I felt an urgent need to find a channel of communication with the Creator, I was converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. But try as I might I could not achieve a complete spiritual experience. Thus I am still a seeker.”
By early 1921, the White forces who opposed the Bolsheviks were defeated, and literary life slowly rekindled in the ruined country. The first print run of My Sister Life, which also was published in Berlin, ran to about one thousand. It appeared in somewhat impecunious-looking khaki dustcovers—“the last gamble of some croaking publisher.” My Sister Life drew euphoric, head-turning reviews that announced the entry of a giant.
“To read Pasternak’s verse is to clear your throat, to fortify your breathing, to fill your lungs; surely such poetry could provide a cure for tuberculosis. No poetry is more healthful at the present moment! It is koumiss [fermented mare’s milk] after evaporated milk,” said the poet Osip Mandelstam.
“I was caught in it as in a downpour.… A downpour of light,” swooned Tsvetaeva in a 1922 review. “Pasternak is all wide-open—eyes, nostrils, ears, lips, arms.”
The collection barely seemed to touch on the actual events of 1917 beyond what Tsvetaeva called “the faintest hints.” The only time the word revolution was employed was to describe a haystack. In “About these Poems,” which appears at the beginning of the collection, the airy indifference to the political moment engendered some carping that Pasternak seemed a little too precious for the times:
The window-halves I’ll throw apart,
In muffler from the cold to hide,
And call to children in the yard,
“What century is it outside?”
A “hothouse aristocrat of our society’s private residences,” sneered the Marxist critic Valerian Pravdukhin. Such criticism would eventually grow louder, but in 1922 whatever ideological shortcomings might be surmised were muted by the widely acknowledged poetic genius of his lines.
Pasternak had arrived, and it did not take the Soviet leadership long to notice. In June 1922, Pasternak was summoned to the Revolutionary Military Council for a meeting with Leon Trotsky, the head of the Red Army, a leading theoretician of the new Marxist state, and the best-known, behind Lenin, of the new leadership. Trotsky was the member of the Politburo most interested in culture, and he believed artists, and agitprop, had a critical role in the elevation of the working class, with the ultimate goal of creating what he called a “classless culture, the first that will be truly universal.” In 1922, Trotsky began to familiarize himself with prominent and emerging writers, and the following year he would publish Literature and Revolution. “It is silly, absurd, stupid to the highest degree,” he wrote in the introduction, “to pretend that art will remain indifferent to the convulsions of our epoch.… If nature, love or friendship had no connection with the social spirit of an epoch, lyric poetry would long ago have ceased to exist. A profound break in history, that is, a rearrangement of classes in society, shakes up individuality, establishes the perception of the fundamental problems of lyric poetry from a new angle, and so saves art from eternal repetition.”
“Trotsky was no liberal in affairs of culture,” wrote one of his biographers. “He felt that no one in Russia who challenged the Soviet order, even if only in novels or paintings, deserved official toleration. But he wanted a policy of flexible management within this stern framework. He aimed to win the sympathy of those intellectuals who were not the party’s foes and might yet become its friends.”
Trotsky wanted to find out if Pasternak was willing to commit his lyrical talent and subsume his individuality to a greater cause: the revolution. Pasternak was recovering from a night of drinking when the summons by telephone came. He and Yevgenia were about to embark on their trip to Germany to introduce her to his parents, and a farewell party at the Volkhonka apartment had left a number of people the worse for wear. Pasternak was sleeping late when the phone rang at noon. He was summoned to the Revolutionary Military Council for an audience with Trotsky in one hour. Pasternak quickly shaved, poured water over his throbbing head, and washed his mouth out with cold coffee before throwing on a starched white shirt and a freshly pressed blue jacket. An official motorbike with a sidecar picked him up.
The two men greeted each other formally with first name and patronymic.
Pasternak apologized: “Sorry, I have come to you after a farewell party with some heavy drinking.”
“You’re right,” said Trotsky, “you really look haggard.”
The two men chatted for more than half an hour, and Trotsky asked Pasternak why he “refrained” from reacting to social themes. Pasternak said his “answers and explanations amounted to a defense of true individualism, as a new social cell in a new social organism.” Pasternak said Trotsky had “enraptured and quite captivated” him before confessing to a friend that he had monopolized the talk and prevented Trotsky from fully expressing his opinions. Indeed, the conversation seemed to achieve the remarkable feat of leaving Trotsky a little flabbergasted.
“Yesterday I began struggling through the dense shrubbery of your book,” said Trotsky, referring to My Sister Life. “What were you trying to express in it?”
“That is something to ask the reader,” replied Pasternak. “You decide for yourself.”
“Oh well, in that case I’ll carry on struggling. It’s been nice to meet you, Boris Leonidovich.”
Pasternak did not get a mention in Literature and Revolution—a fortunate snub given the emerging power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, and Trotsky’s ultimate fall. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin gradually outmaneuvered and crushed his rivals within the party.
There was a beguiling obliviousness to Pasternak’s encounters with the powerful, which would continue to mark his relations with the Soviet state. He had a preternatural willingness to express his opinions in a society where people filtrated their words for ideological or other offenses. Pasternak was never openly hostile to Soviet power, and his attitude to the men in the Kremlin swung between fascination and loathing. No one engendered more of that strange ambivalence—allure and disgust—than Stalin, who also seemed a little transfixed by Pasternak’s reputation as a poet-seer. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip’s wife, wrote there was “one remarkable feature of our leaders: their boundless, almost superstitious respect for poetry.” This was especially true of the relationship between Stalin and Pasternak. They never met, spoke only once on the phone, yet a mysterious, unknowable bond existed between the two. Pasternak, for a time, idealized the dictator. Stalin indulged the poet with his life.
On November 11, 1932, Pasternak stood at the window of his apartment on Volkhonka Street and watched the black funeral carriage, decorated with onion domes, which carried Stalin’s dead wife to Novodevichy Cemetery. Pasternak was agitated, according to his son. And his public response to the death—published six days later—would forever stir speculation that he had earned an unlikely benediction from Stalin, a former seminarian.
Early in the morning of November 9, 1932, Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s thirty-one-year-old wife, killed herself. No one heard the shot. By the time a maid found her body, lying in a pool of blood on the floor of her bedroom in a Kremlin apartment, she was already cold; down a corridor, in another bedroom, her husband was sleeping off a boozy night. The previous evening, the ruling party’s moguls had celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution at the home of the defense chief, Kliment Voroshilov; the leadership all lived in claustrophobic proximity inside the Kremlin’s thick, redbrick walls. Their parties tended to be boisterous, alcohol-soaked affairs, and Stalin, whose lupine malice was never far from the surface, was particularly obnoxiou
s that evening. His wife, stern and aloof, even with their two children, eleven-year-old Vasili and six-year-old Svetlana, was an austere Bolshevik who favored the dull look of the dutiful servant. She had married a forty-one-year-old Stalin when she was a girl, just eighteen. He was neglectful, and she was increasingly prone to severe migraines, bouts of hysteria, and exhaustion. One of Stalin’s biographers said Alliluyeva “suffered from a serious mental illness, perhaps hereditary manic depression or borderline personality disorder.”
For the evening at Voroshilov’s, Alliluyeva stepped out a little. She wore a stylish black dress with embroidered red roses, which had been purchased in Berlin. Her husband, who arrived at the party separately, didn’t notice, although he sat opposite her, at the middle of the dinner table. Instead, he flirted with a film actress, the wife of a Red Army commander, playfully tossing little pieces of bread at her. The meal was washed down with Georgian wine and punctuated with frequent vodka toasts. Stalin at one point raised his drink to call for the destruction of the enemies of the state; Alliluyeva pointedly ignored the raising of the glasses. “Hey, you!” shouted Stalin. “Have a drink.” She screamed back, “Don’t you dare ‘hey me’!” According to some accounts, Stalin flicked a lit cigarette at her, and it went down her dress. Alliluyeva stormed off, followed by Polina Molotova, the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. She complained to Molotova about her husband’s behavior and talked about her suspicion that Stalin was sleeping with other women, including a Kremlin hairdresser. When the two women separated, Alliluyeva appeared to have calmed down. Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs said that Alliluyeva tried to reach her husband later that night and learned from a doltish guard that Stalin was at a nearby dacha with a woman. Nadya is said to have written Stalin a last letter—lost to history—that burned with personal and political condemnations. She shot herself in the heart.
