by Peter Finn
As Ivinskaya rode with the two men toward Peredelkino, Khesin whispered to her that it was he who had sent Gringolts to her. Ivinskaya gasped at how easily she had been manipulated into getting Pasternak to write a letter to Khrushchev. And now Polikarpov, turning around to face her from the front seat, wanted more. “We’re now relying entirely on you,” he said. When they arrived in the village, there were already a number of official cars near Pasternak’s house, with other officials from the writers’ union. Irina, when she arrived, was asked to go to the dacha and get Pasternak; Ivinskaya would not risk meeting Pasternak’s wife, but Zinaida tolerated her daughter. Zinaida was frightened by the official hubbub, but Pasternak emerged with a strange cheerfulness. As he got into Polikarpov and Khesin’s car, he started to complain that he wasn’t wearing a suitable pair of trousers because he, too, concluded that he was to meet Khrushchev. “I’m going to show them,” he blustered. “I’ll make such a fuss and tell them everything I think—everything.” He joked all the way into town, and the mood “was one of almost hysterical gaiety.”
At Polikarpov’s request, Ivinskaya brought Pasternak to her apartment for a short interlude before they went over to the Central Committee building. When they arrived at the latter, Pasternak went up to the guard and told him he was expected but had no identification except his writers’ union card—“the membership card of this union of yours which you’ve just thrown me out of.” And then he continued to be preoccupied with his trousers. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” said the guard, “it doesn’t matter, it’s quite all right.”
There was no meeting with Khrushchev. Pasternak was ushered into a room with Polikarpov, who had freshened up and was acting as if he had been sitting at his desk all day. He rose to his feet and “in a voice befitting a town crier” announced that Pasternak would be allowed “to remain in the Motherland.”
But Polikarpov said Pasternak would have to make peace with the Soviet people. “There is nothing we can do at the moment to calm the anger,” said Polikarpov. He noted that the following day’s issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta would include a sampling of this anger.
This was not the meeting Pasternak expected and he erupted in fury. “Aren’t you ashamed, Dmitri Alexeyevich? What do you mean ‘anger’? You have your human side, I can see, but why do you come out with these stock phrases? ‘The people! The people!’—as though it were something you could just produce from your own trouser pockets. You know perfectly well that you really shouldn’t use the word ‘people’ at all.”
Polikarpov sucked in his breath to contain himself; the crisis had to be ended and he needed Pasternak’s acquiescence. “Now look here, Boris Leonidovich, the whole business is over so let’s make things up, and everything will soon be all right again.
“Goodness me, old fellow, what a mess you’ve landed us in,” he continued, coming round to pat Pasternak on the shoulder.
Pasternak recoiled from the intimacy and the reference to an “old fellow.”
“Will you kindly drop that tone? You cannot talk to me like that,” he said.
“Really now,” Polikarpov continued, “here you go sticking a knife in the country’s back, and we have to patch it all up.”
Pasternak had had it with the accusations of treachery. “I will ask you to take those words back. I do not wish to speak to you anymore.”
He headed for the door.
Polikarpov was aghast. “Stop him, stop him, Olga Vsevolodovna.”
Ivinskaya, sensing Polikarpov’s weakness, told him, “You must take your words back!”
“I do, I do,” mumbled Polikarpov.
Pasternak stayed, and the conversation continued in a more civil tone. Polikarpov suggested he would be in touch soon with a plan and quietly told Ivinskaya as she left that another public letter from Pasternak might be necessary.
Pasternak was pleased with his performance. “They are not people but machines,” he said. “See how terrible they are, these walls here, and everyone inside them is like an automaton.… But all the same I gave them something to worry about—they got what they deserved.”
In the car, on the way back to Peredelkino, Pasternak loudly replayed the whole conversation with Polikarpov, ignoring Ivinskaya’s warning that the chauffeur was certain to report back on everything that was said.
In a lull, Irina recited some lines from Pasternak’s epic poem “Lieutenant Schmidt”:
In vain, in years of turmoil,
One seeks a happy ending—
Some are fated to kill—and repent—
While others go to Golgotha …
I suppose you never flinch
From wiping out a man.
Ah well, martyrs to your dogma,
You too are victims of the times …
I know the stake at which
I’ll die will be the boundary mark
Between two different epochs,
And I rejoice at being so elect.
Pasternak fell silent. A very long Friday had come to an end.
Chapter 13
“I am lost like a beast in an enclosure.”
The wrath of the people appeared under the headline “Rage and Indignation: Soviet People Condemn B. Pasternak’s Behavior” in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Twenty-two letters were spread out over much of a broadsheet page under subheads such as “Beautiful Is Our Reality,” “The Word of a Worker,” and “Paid Calumny.” The excavator operator F. Vasiltsev wondered who this Pasternak was. “I have never heard of him before and I have never read any of his books,” he wrote. “This is not a writer but a White Guardist.” R. Kasimov, an oil worker, also asked: “Who is Pasternak?” and then dismissed his work as “aesthetic verse in obscure language incomprehensible to the people.”
Lydia Chukovskaya assumed that the letters were the creations of the editors, and she said she could just imagine “a wench from the editorial board” dictating their content. This assessment was unfair; the letters were written by real people, even though some variation on the words “I have not read Doctor Zhivago but …” appeared in a number of missives and led to much amused mocking among those who sympathized with Pasternak. The newspaper was indeed inundated with letters, about 423 in all between October 25 and December 1, and a clear majority reflected the genuine response of Soviet readers. They had, unsurprisingly, absorbed the unrelenting message of the previous days that Pasternak was a money-grubbing traitor who had stigmatized the revolution and the Soviet Union. This, many readers felt, was not only grievously insulting, but an attack on their achievement in building Soviet society. “The revolution remained central to these people’s consciousness and socioethical order, the sacred foundation of a mental universe,” said one historian, “and their reaction to the Pasternak affair was above all a defense against any attempt, real or imaginary, to undermine this intellectual cornerstone of their existence.”
American psychologists who were visiting the Soviet Union during the attacks on Pasternak found some sympathy for him and demand for the novel, but such sentiments were far from universal. “There was also substantial evidence that many, perhaps the majority, of students in the literary, historical and philosophical faculties of Moscow and Leningrad higher-educational institutions accepted the official line condemning Pasternak as a traitor to Russia,” they reported in a summary of their visit. “Acceptance of the official point of view seems to have been based, in part, upon resentment of what was felt to have been exploitation in the West of the Pasternak matter in the interests of anti-Russian propaganda.”
At the height of the Nobel crisis, Pasternak was also getting fifty to seventy letters a day, both from Soviet citizens and from abroad. Most offered support—albeit anonymously from his fellow countrymen. Even among the letters to Novy Mir there were about 10 percent, mostly from young people, who backed Pasternak’s right to publish Doctor Zhivago or their right to read the novel. There is some evidence that the editors of Novy Mir forwarded letters defending Pasternak to the KGB.
There were also letters that wounded Pasternak. He singled out one that was addressed “To Pasternak from Judas: ‘I only betrayed Jesus, but you—you betrayed the whole of Russia.’ ”
For a time, all of Pasternak’s mail was blocked. At his meeting with Polikarpov, Pasternak had demanded that letters and parcels be allowed through, and the following morning the postwoman brought two bags full. The German journalist Gerd Ruge estimated that in all Pasternak received between twenty thousand and thirty thousand letters after the award of the Nobel Prize. His delight in this correspondence, even though it soaked up his time, was expressed in the light poem “God’s World”:
I return with a bundle of letters
To the house where my joy will prevail.
The letters broke his isolation, reconnected him with old friends in the West, and forged new literary bonds with writers such as T. S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, and Albert Camus. “The great and undeserved happiness bestowed on me at the end of my life is to be in touch with many honorable people in the widest and far world and to engage with them in spontaneous, spiritual and important conversations,” he told one correspondent in 1959. He stayed up until two or three in the morning answering these letters, using his dictionaries to help him respond in multiple languages. “I’m troubled by the volume of it and the compulsion to answer it all,” he said. There were moments, as he put it in one poem, when he felt he would like to “merge into privacy, like landscape into fog.”
He was troubled, too, by the desire of Western admirers to resurrect and publish many of his old poems, work that he felt was often best forgotten. “It is an unspeakable grief and pain for me to be reminded again and again of those scarce grains of life and truth, interspersed with an immensity of dead, schematic nonsense and nonexistent stuff,” he told one translator. “I wonder [at] your … attempt to rescue the things deservedly doomed to ruin and oblivion.” Nor was he happy with some overelaborate interpretations of the novel in the West. He rejected a proposal by Kurt Wolff to publish a collection of critical essays to be called Monument to Zhivago. “Didn’t the doctor have enough trouble?” Pasternak asked Wolff in a letter. “There can only be one monument: a new book. And I am the only one who can do that.”
Along with the appearance of the letters in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet news agency Tass reported on November 1 that should Pasternak wish “to leave the Soviet Union permanently, the Socialist regime and people he has slandered in his anti-Soviet work, Doctor Zhivago, will not raise any obstacles. He can leave the Soviet Union and experience personally ‘all the fascinations of the capitalist paradise.’ ”
Pasternak’s wife told a reporter from United Press International the following day that Pasternak was not feeling well and must rest. She said expulsion from the Soviet Union would be the worst thing that could happen to him. “I am going to cook for him as well as I can, and we shall live very quietly here for one year or longer—with no visits or interviews.” Like Emma Ernestovna, the housekeeper of Viktor Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago, Zinaida saw herself the “matron of his quiet seclusion,” who “managed his household inaudibly, and invisibly, and he repaid her with chivalrous gratitude, natural in such a gentleman.”
On November 4, Polikarpov phoned Ivinskaya’s apartment while Pasternak was visiting. “We must ask Boris Leonidovich to write an open letter to the people,” he informed her. The letter to Khrushchev was insufficient as a public apology. Pasternak immediately began to craft another attempt. It echoed his earlier statements that he always felt the award of the Nobel would be a matter of pride for the Soviet people. When Ivinskaya brought a draft to Polikarpov, he rejected it and said he and Ivinskaya would have to fashion a more acceptable version. “We ‘worked’ on it like a pair of professional counterfeiters,” said Ivinskaya. When she showed the rewritten version of the letter to Pasternak, he “simply waved his hand. He was tired. He just wanted an end to the whole abnormal situation.”
The letter, addressed to the editors of Pravda, was published on November 6. Pasternak said he voluntarily rejected the Nobel Prize when he saw “the scope of the political campaign around my novel, and realized that this award was a political step, which had now led to monstrous consequences.” He said he regretted that he had not heeded the warning from the editors of Novy Mir about Doctor Zhivago. And Pasternak said he could not accept erroneous interpretations of the novel, including the assertion that the October Revolution was an illegitimate event. Such claims, he wrote (or rather Polikarpov wrote), have been “carried to absurdity.…
“In the course of this tempestuous week,” the letter continued, “I have not been persecuted, I have not risked either my life or my freedom, I have risked absolutely nothing.”
The letter concluded with “I believe that I shall find the strength to restore my good name and the confidence of my comrades.”
Exhaustion and concern for Ivinskaya combined to give the authorities the concession they wanted even though most careful readers of the letter knew it was not from Pasternak’s hand. The repeated assertion that he was acting voluntarily stretched the credulity of even Pravda readers. But the fact that he signed any letter of contrition disappointed some Russians. In Ryazan, a schoolteacher named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “writhed with shame for him”—that he would “demean himself by pleading with the government.”
Anna Akhmatova dismissed Pasternak’s ordeal as inconsequential compared to what she and Zoshchenko had suffered when they were thrown out of the Union of Soviet Writers in Stalin’s time. Pasternak and his family were left untouched in his fine house, she remarked. “The story of Boris is—a battle of butterflies,” she told Chukovskaya. Some long-standing tension between Akhmatova and Pasternak had begun to surface. The Leningrad poet smarted from what she felt was Pasternak’s lack of homage to her art; she was irritated by his manner, but still loved him and craved his admiration. Akhmatova continued to believe that Doctor Zhivago was a bad novel “except for the landscapes,” and that Pasternak was too self-satisfied with his martyrdom and his fame. Later in the year, when the two met at a birthday party in Peredelkino, Akhmatova commented, “Boris spoke the whole time only about himself, about the letters he was receiving.… Then for a long time, in a totally boring way, he played the coquette when they asked him to read. After I read, he asked me, shouting across the table: ‘What do you do with your poetry? Pass it around to your friends?’ ”
Akhmatova recalled visiting the composer Dmitri Shostakovich at his summer home in Komarovo outside Leningrad. “I looked at him and thought: he carries his fame like a hunchback, used to it from birth. But Boris—like a crown which just fell down over his eyes, and he shoves it back in place with his elbow.”
The Pravda letter was a tactical retreat; Pasternak still had to support two households. The authorities in return for Pasternak’s signature agreed to restore his and Ivinskaya’s ability to earn a living through translation work; Polikarpov also said that a second edition of Pasternak’s translation of Faust would be published. He lied. That winter, Pasternak was unable to earn any money. His translation of Maria Stuart by Juliusz Słowacki, which was about to be published, was suspended; the production of Shakespeare and Schiller plays that he had translated was stopped; and no new translation work was commissioned. In January he wrote to the Soviet copyright agency to ask what had happened to payments he was scheduled to receive and he also wrote to Khrushchev to complain that he couldn’t even participate in the “harmless profession” of translation. He even suggested to the copyright agency that it could get his royalties in exchange for fees owed to Western writers who were published in the Soviet Union but not paid, such as Hemingway. The Soviet Union did not pay for the Western books it translated and published until 1967, when it entered into an international copyright agreement.
On paper, Pasternak was a wealthy man. Feltrinelli had been depositing payments from publishers around the world into a Swiss bank account, and both the CIA and the Kremlin speculated that Pasternak was a
lready a millionaire. Accessing some of that money would bring relief, but also more heartache and tragedy. Pasternak realized his wealth was a poisoned chalice and that if he sought permission to transfer it to Moscow, he would face “the perpetual accusation of treacherously living off foreign capital.” He did tell his publisher in February to disburse $112,000 in gifts of various sizes to his friends, translators, and family in the West. But initially he expressed some indifference about his fortune, telling Feltrinelli, “The fact that I am completely lacking in curiosity regarding the various details and how much it all amounts to must not amaze or hurt you.”
The pinch of no income eventually began to hurt. “Their desire to drown me is so great I can see nothing but this desire,” Pasternak said. And he expressed bewilderment at his predicament. “Have I really done insufficient in this life not to have at seventy the possibility of feeding my family?” He began to borrow money, first from his housekeeper and then friends. In late December he asked Valeria Prishvina, the widow of the writer Mikhail Prishvin, if he could borrow 3,000 rubles, about $300, until the end of 1959. Early in January, he borrowed 5,000 rubles from Kornei Chukovsky, who presumed it was for Ivinskaya. His neighbor found Pasternak older. “His cheeks are sunken but no matter: he’s full of life.” Chukovsky told him he hadn’t slept in three months because of what Pasternak had endured. “Well, I’m sleeping fine,” Pasternak responded.
He told Ivinskaya the following month, “We must put our financial affairs, both yours and mine, in order.” Pasternak asked Gerd Ruge, the German correspondent, if he could get him some cash that would be paid back from the money held in the West by Feltrinelli. Ruge gathered about $8,000 worth of rubles at the West German embassy from Russians of ethnic German origin who had been granted permission to emigrate but could take no money with them. Ruge took their cash in exchange for the payment of deutsche marks when they reached Germany. The German journalist handed Ivinskaya’s daughter a package of cash when the two brushed by each other at the metro station Oktyabrskaya in a prearranged piece of amateur spycraft.
