by Peter Finn
Around Pasternak people disappeared, their fates suspected but unconfirmed—Pilnyak, Babel, and Titsian Tabidze, a Georgian friend whose poetry Pasternak had translated. At a meeting of the Georgian Union of Soviet Writers, another Georgian friend, Paolo Yashvili, shot himself before the inquisitors closed in.
The only happiness was the birth of Pasternak’s son, Leonid. The birth was noted in Vechernyaya Moskva (Evening Moscow) “The first baby born in 1938 is the son of Mrs. Z.N. Pasternak. He was born 00:00 hour January 1st.”
Osip Mandelstam was arrested later that year to be “consumed in their flames,” as Pasternak put it. He starved to death in a camp in the Far East in December 1938. “My health is very poor. I am emaciated in the extreme, I’ve become very thin, almost unrecognizable,” he told his brother in a last letter. He asked him to send food and clothes because “I get terribly cold without any [warm] things.” In 1939, his wife learned of his fate when a money order she had sent Mandelstam was returned because of the “death of the addressee.”
“The only person who … visited me was Pasternak—he came to see me immediately on hearing of M’s death,” said Nadezhda Mandelstam. “Apart from him no one had dared to come and see me.”
Chapter 3
“I have arranged to meet you in a novel.”
Pasternak began to write Doctor Zhivago on a block of watermarked paper from the desk of a dead man. The paper was a gift from the widow of Titsian Tabidze, the Georgian poet who was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1937. Pasternak felt the weight of those empty pages, writing to Tabidze’s widow, Nina, that he hoped his prose would be worthy of putting down on her husband’s paper. Pasternak visited Georgia in October 1945 to mark the centenary of the death of the Georgian poet Nikoloz Baratashvili, whose work he had recently translated. He stipulated that 25 percent of the advance for translating Baratashvili should be paid to Nina Tabidze.
Through much of his life Pasternak assisted people imprisoned or impoverished by the regime, and his surviving papers included large numbers of receipts for money orders sent all over the Soviet Union, including to prison camps. Nina Tabidze had not appeared in public in eight years, quarantined from the artistic circles in the capital, Tbilisi, where her husband was once feted. Nina had no word of the fate of Titsian, who was arrested on manufactured treason charges, and she would not learn definitively that he had been executed until after Stalin’s death in 1953. While Nina Tabidze held on to some small flicker of hope that her husband survived in some distant camp, Pasternak later said he had not believed in the possibility that the Georgian poet was alive: “He was too great, too exceptional a man, who shed light all around him, to be hidden—for the signs of existence not to have filtered through any bars.” When Pasternak arrived in Tbilisi, he said he would only participate in the festivities if Nina Tabidze also attended. At public events he sat her next to him. When he was asked to recite some of his translations of the poems of Baratashvili at the Rustaveli Theatre he turned to look at Nina Tabidze and asked if she wanted him to read. It was a defiant signal to the audience that he was embracing this outcast. Nina Tabidze returned the politically risky demonstration of respect with the gift of writing paper for the novel Pasternak planned.
Although Pasternak’s reputation rested almost exclusively on his poems, he had written prose, including some well-received short stories, a long autobiographical essay, and drafts of a novel. Ideas and characters from these writings, but more fully developed, would eventually find their way into Doctor Zhivago, as if Pasternak were on a lifelong journey toward his novel. He was burdened over many decades by the sense that he had yet to create something big and bold, and came to believe that such an achievement could only be earned through prose—“what it can be, real prose, what a magic art—bordering on alchemy!” Pasternak also believed that “major works of literature exist only in association with a large readership.” As early as 1917, Pasternak wrote in one poem, “I shall bid goodbye to verse; my mania. I have arranged to meet you in a novel.” He told Tsvetaeva that he wanted to write a novel “with a love intrigue and a heroine in it—like Balzac.” The reader of an early draft dismissed the effort as “dreamy, boring and tendentiously virtuous.” It was abandoned. Pasternak projected some of this failed ambition onto his ultimate hero, Yuri Zhivago: “Still in his high school years, he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place, in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astonishing things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.”
World War II heightened Pasternak’s preoccupation with the need for some singular piece of work. His friend the playwright Alexander Gladkov said that “his usual sense of acute dissatisfaction with himself now found an outlet in an exaggerated feeling that he was doing too little when set by the side of the enormous exertions of the country as a whole.” In October 1941, as Nazi forces approached Moscow, Pasternak along with other writers was evacuated to Chistopol, a small town of 25,000 people nearly six hundred miles east of Moscow. He subsisted there for nearly two years on thin cabbage soup, black bread, and readings in the dining room of the Literary Fund. It was a drab, cold existence.
Pasternak visited the front near Oryol in 1943 and read his poems to the wounded. General Alexander Gorbatov invited a group of writers to “a sober dinner” of potatoes, a little ham, one shot of vodka per person, and tea. The meal was marked by speeches. Unlike some of his colleagues who were dull and soporific, Pasternak gave a clear, patriotic address leavened with humor and poetic dashes. The officers listened in complete silence, pale and moved. The visit to the front inspired some war poems and two pieces of short prose, and some of the destruction he witnessed would appear in the epilogue to Doctor Zhivago.
Pasternak, however, was never among those writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, whose poems and dispatches, circulated by the millions, were woven into the country’s bloody resilience. “I am reading Simonov. I want to understand the nature of his success,” he said. He considered a novel in verse, and he contracted with theaters to write a play, but nothing ever came of these aspirations. Pasternak complained that he lived “with the constant, nagging sense of being an imposter” because he felt he was “esteemed for more than I have actually done.” His poems were published in the newspapers, and small volumes of poetry appeared in 1943 and 1945. He continued to earn a living through his translations. “Shakespeare, the old man of Chistopol, is feeding me as before.”
In 1944, Pasternak received some wrenching encouragement to continue to reach for a greater artistic achievement. Anna Akhmatova, who had been evacuated to Tashkent in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, arrived in Moscow in 1944 carrying an old letter for Pasternak from Osip Mandelstam, written two years before he perished. Mandelstam’s widow had found it. Mandelstam, who had once warned Pasternak that his translation work would overwhelm his original creations, said in the letter, “I want your poetry, by which we have all been spoiled and undeservedly gifted, to leap further out into the world, to the people, to children. Let me say to you at least once in life: thank you for everything, and for the fact that this ‘everything’ is still ‘not everything.’ ” For Pasternak, the letter, even if it referred to poetry, was a bitter prompt that there was more to strive for. The following year, in May 1945, Pasternak’s father, Leonid, died in Oxford. Pasternak felt he should “burn with shame” when his “own role is so monstrously inflated” and his father’s talent hadn’t gained “a hundredth of the recognition it deserves.”
Guilt, grief, dissatisfaction with himself, the need for that “great painting,” the desire finally to write a classic were all combining to produce what one friend called a “profound inner change” that would propel Pasternak toward Doctor Zhivago. The first recorded mention of the novel appears in a letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam in November 1945, when Pasternak told her that
he had been doing some new writing, a novel that would span the whole of their lives. On New Year’s Eve 1945, Pasternak bumped into Gladkov on Mokhovaya Street near the Kremlin. The two were jostled by revelers, but they managed to exchange a few words as they stood in light snow, which dusted Pasternak’s collar and cap. Pasternak said he was working on a novel “about people who could be representative of my school—if I had one.” He smiled sheepishly before moving off.
In an end-of-year letter to his sisters in England, he said that he was compelled to portray the great events of his country in clear, simple prose. “I have started on this, but it’s all so remote from what’s wanted from us here, and what people are used to seeing from us, that it’s difficult to write regularly and assiduously.”
Pasternak’s mood became more buoyant as the writing accelerated. “I am in the same high spirits I enjoyed more than 30 years ago; it’s almost embarrassing.” It seemed to him that the days and weeks were whistling past his ears. “I wrote it with great ease. The circumstances were so definite, so fabulously terrible. All that I had to do was listen to their prompting with my whole soul and follow obediently their suggestions.” Pasternak was also cheered that spring of 1946 by the enthusiastic reception he received from Muscovites at a series of literary evenings. At Moscow University, in April 1946, the audience called for him to continue to recite as he made to leave the stage. The following month, there was another series of encores at a solo recital at the Polytechnic Museum. Pasternak told his sisters that he was experiencing a kind of unexpected fairy tale in this romance with his audience. “You see it in the concert halls which sell out as soon as my name appears on a poster—and if I ever hesitate while reciting any of my poems, I’m prompted from three or four different directions.” (One acquaintance suggested Pasternak, who prepared for recitals, faked some memory lapses to test his audience, and bind it to him.)
On April 3, 1946, at a reading by Moscow and Leningrad poets, Pasternak arrived late and the audience burst into applause as he tried to sneak onto the stage. The poet who was speaking was forced to halt his recital until Pasternak sat down. The man who was interrupted and no doubt irritated was Alexei Surkov, his old and future foe, the poet who said Pasternak needed to imbibe the revolution to achieve greatness. The disruption seemed more than coincidental when much the same thing happened nearly two years later when Surkov was speaking at “An Evening of Poetry on the Theme: Down with the Warmongers! For a Lasting Peace and People’s Democracy” at the Polytechnic Museum. The venue was one of the largest in Moscow, and it was so packed that people were sitting in the aisles while the street outside was crowded with those who couldn’t get in. Surkov was nearing the end of a versified condemnation of NATO, Winston Churchill, and sundry Western belligerents when the audience erupted in applause, which seemed out of key with that moment in his recital. Over his shoulder, it was Pasternak again, stealing a little thunder from his rival, and supposedly slipping onto the stage. He stretched out his arms to hush the crowd, and allow Surkov to continue. When he was eventually called to the microphone Pasternak remarked coyly, “Unfortunately, I have no poem on the theme of the evening, but will read you some things I wrote before the war.” Each poem drew bursts of delighted enthusiasm from the crowds. Someone shouted, “Shestdeesiat shestoi davai!” (Give us the Sixty-Sixth!), a call for Shakespeare’s sonnet, which Pasternak had translated in 1940, in which the Bard declaims:
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir’d with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Pasternak was smart enough not to recite the politically charged lines. But the sustained applause had become a clapping, stomping public demonstration—a potentially dangerous display of affection for its recipient. (When Akhmatova was similarly received at a reading during the war, Stalin is reported to have said: “Who organized that standing ovation?”) The chairman of the meeting tried to restore order by ringing his bell, and Pasternak sported a smile of satisfied triumph. A large group from the audience followed him on his walk home.
Surkov could only fume. He had made his reputation during the war with unsubtle, patriotic verse that proclaimed:
Death to Fascism! The Soviet
Calls the brave to battle
The bullet fears the brave,
The bayonet the courageous.
One Western reporter in Moscow described Surkov as “emphatically masculine.” Rudely pink-faced and muscular, he spoke in a loud voice—sometimes at such a decibel that he appeared to be addressing a crowd, not conversing—and he walked in exaggerated strides, fast and long. Nine years younger than Pasternak, Surkov grew up the son of a peasant in a district northeast of Moscow and on reaching the capital was consumed with his status there; the Hungarian writer György Dalos, who attended college in Moscow and knew Surkov, described him as a special Soviet case of Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme. Dalos concluded that “in order to understand a figure like Surkov, good and evil must be regarded not as opposites but as parts of one inseparable whole.” A Soviet defector to the West later testified before the U.S. Congress that Surkov was “a KGB man,” meaning he was one of a number of trusted prominent figures who would do the bidding of the secret police when called upon.
Nadezhda Mandelstam noted that in conversation, Surkov always referred to a mysterious entity called “they.” He often wished to extend a kindness, but was unable to act until he had sounded out some superior entity.
“ ‘They,’ as I noticed, were always thinking this, that or the other, or giving it as their view. Once I asked him outright: ‘Who are they?’ As far as I am concerned you are ‘they.’ He was quite bowled over by such a question.… Later I realized that in a world horizontally divided, as it were, into floors, ‘they’ were always those on the next floor.” Mandelstam concluded that “like all his kind he stultifies language, stifles thought and life. In so doing, he also destroys himself.”
Surkov nursed a particular hostility toward Pasternak, yet he showed genuine kindness to Akhmatova, mitigating the worst of her persecutions and bringing her flowers. However, “he worked heart and soul for a system that had a pathological fear of every unfettered word, and so especially of poetry.” And no poet focused his animus more than Pasternak. One Pasternak intimate concluded simply that Surkov “hated him.” Pasternak, on the other hand, was never angered by Surkov’s hostility or criticism. After the war, he praised Surkov’s verse as exemplary of a new realism and said he was among his favorite poets because of his roughhewn, boisterous style. “Yes, really, don’t be surprised. He writes what he thinks: he thinks ‘Hurray!’ and he writes ‘Hurray!’ ”
The novel, which Pasternak initially entitled Boys and Girls, began to come into focus as he worked on it intensely in the winter months of 1945 and 1946, and his ambitions for it grew. “This is a very serious work. I am already old, I may soon die, and I must not perpetually put off giving free expression to my true thoughts.” He called it an epic, and said it was “a sad, dismal story, worked out in fine detail, ideally, as in a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel.” He became absorbed with the writing. “I could not go on living another year unless this novel, my alter ego, in which with almost physical concreteness certain of my spiritual qualities and part of my nervous structure have been implanted, went on living and growing, too.” He promised to give his views on art, the Gospels, on the life of man in history. He said it would “square accounts with Judaism” and with all forms of nationalism. And he felt that his subjects and their varying colors were “arranging themselves so perfectly on the canvas.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Pasternak believed, or at least strongly hoped, that the sacrifice of the people in war, the millions dead and the awful struggle to defeat Nazism, would preclude a return to repression.
But Pasternak was also alert enough to observe that the seemingly relaxed postwar atmosphere was eroding as tensions with the Western powers grew into the Cold War. In June 1946, Pasternak told his sisters that he moved around “on a knife-edge.… It’s interesting, exciting and probably dangerous.”
The crackdown on the intelligentsia came in August 1946. The targets, initially, were the satirical writer Mikhail Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. Stalin opened the campaign when the editors of two Leningrad journals were summoned to Moscow and harangued for publishing “silly” material. Zoshchenko, Stalin railed, “writes all kind of cock and bull stories, nonsense that offers nothing for the mind or the heart.… That’s not why we built the Soviet order, to teach people drivel.” The party’s Central Committee followed with a resolution that said Zoshchenko had specialized in writing “vapid, content-less and vulgar things, in the advocacy of rotten unprincipledness … calculated to disorient our young people and poison their minds.” The resolution singled out a story, “The Adventures of a Monkey,” which depicted an escaped monkey who returned to his cage in the zoo rather than deal with everyday life in Leningrad. The resolution described the story as a “hooliganish depiction of our reality.” Akhmatova was also charged with causing damage to young people with her “bourgeois-aristocratic aestheticism and decadence—‘art for art’s sake.’ ”
