The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book

by Peter Finn

  On the twenty-seventh, Pasternak’s pulse dropped, but the doctors worked to revive him. Opening his eyes again, he told them he had felt so good while asleep and now his worries were back. He was still feeling low, and unusually blunt, when he spoke to his son Yevgeni later that day.

  “How unnatural everything is. Last night I suddenly felt so good, but it proved to be bad and dangerous. With quick injections they tried to bring me back and they did.

  “And now, just five minutes ago, I started calling the doctor myself, but it proved to be nonsense, gas. On the whole, I feel everything is steeped in shit. They said I had to eat to make my stomach work. But that’s painful. And it’s the same in literature, recognition, which is no recognition at all, but obscurity. It would seem I was already buried once, and for good; enough. No memories. Relationships with people all ruined in different ways. All fragmentary, no unbroken memories. Everything is steeped in shit. And not only we, but everywhere, the whole world. My whole life has been a single-handed fight against the ruling banality, for the human talent, free and playing.”

  By the evening of the thirtieth, it was clear to the doctors that death was imminent. Zinaida went in to see Pasternak. “I have loved life and you very much,” he said, his voice momentarily strong, “but I am leaving without any regrets. Around us there is too much banality, not only around us, but in the whole world, I simply cannot reconcile myself to it.”

  His sons followed at about 11:00 p.m. “Borenka, Lydia will soon be here, she’s on her way,” Yevgeni told his father. “Hold on for a while.”

  “Lydia, that’s good,” said Pasternak.

  He asked everyone but his sons to leave the room. He told them to stay aloof from that part of his legacy that lay abroad—the novel, and the money, and all the attendant complications. Lydia, he said, would manage it.

  Pasternak’s breathing became more and more labored. The nurses brought in the oxygen tent. He whispered to Marfa Kuzminichna: “Don’t forget to open the window tomorrow.”

  At 11:20 p.m. on May 30, Pasternak died.

  Zinaida and the housekeeper washed and dressed the body. The family stayed up through much of the night.

  At 6:00 a.m., on the road near Pasternak’s dacha, Ivinskaya saw Kuzminichna coming off duty, her head bowed. She knew without asking that Pasternak was dead and stumbled, crying and unannounced, into the big house: “And now you can let me in, now you don’t have to fear me anymore.”

  Nobody bothered her. She found her way to the body. “Borya was lying there still warm, and his hands were soft. He lay in a small room, with the morning light on him. There were shadows across the floor, and his face was still alive—not at all inert.”

  She summoned his voice and could hear him recite “August,” one of the Zhivago poems.

  Farewell, azure of Transfiguration,

  Farewell the Second Savior’s gold.

  Ease with a woman’s last caress

  The bitterness of my fatal hour.

  Farewell, years fallen out of time!

  Farewell, woman: to an abyss

  Of humiliations you threw down

  The challenge! I am your battlefield.

  Farewell, the sweep of outspread wings,

  The willful stubbornness of flight,

  And the image of the world revealed in words,

  And the work of creation, and working miracles.

  Word spread through the village. Lydia Chukovskaya told her father, whose hands began to tremble. He sobbed without tears.

  “The weather has been unbelievably beautiful: hot and stable,” Chukovsky wrote in his diary later that day. “The apple and cherry trees are in bloom. I’ve never seen so many butterflies, birds, bees and flowers. I spend entire days out on the balcony. Every hour there’s a miracle, every hour something new, while he, the singer of all these clouds, trees and pathways … is now lying in state on a pitiful folding bed, deaf and blind, destitute, and we shall never again hear his impetuous, explosive bass.”

  The Soviet press did not report Pasternak’s death, although it was front-page news around the world. Prime ministers, queens, and ordinary people sent their condolences. In Milan, Feltrinelli said in a statement, “The death of Pasternak is a blow as hard as losing a best friend. He was the personification of my nonconformist ideals combined with wisdom and profound culture.”

  In Moscow, there was silence. Finally, on June 1, a small notice appeared on the bottom of the back page of a minor publication Literatura i Zhizn (Literature and Life): “The board of the Literary Fund of the USSR announces the death of the writer and member of Litfond, Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, which took place May 30 in the seventy-first year of his life after a severe and lengthy illness, and expresses its condolences to the family of the deceased.”

  There was not even the standard expression of regret in this final attempt at insult. A writer as prominent as Pasternak would normally be memorialized with numerous obituaries in all the leading dailies as well as an appreciation signed by many of his fellow writers in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Pasternak was still a pariah worthy of only one run-on sentence, and the Central Committee in an internal memo said that the snub “was welcomed by representatives of the artistic intelligentsia.” On June 2, the literary newspaper reprinted the perfunctory notice from Literatura i Zhizn and gave it the same small play at the bottom of the back page. But on the same page was a large article about the Czech poet Víte˘zslav Nezval under the headline “A Magician of Poetry.” For some readers, the juxtaposition was no coincidence but the sly tribute of some unknown editor.

  There were other notices about Pasternak’s death, handwritten and taped to the wall near the ticket office in Moscow’s Kiev Station, where the suburban trains departed for Peredelkino. “At three o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday June 2, the last leave-taking of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the greatest poet of present-day Russia, will take place.” Other versions of this message appeared in different locations around the city. When they were torn down by the police, new ones took their place.

  The afternoon of the funeral was another in what had been a series of hot days, and one with an “unbearably blue sky.” The apple and lilac trees in Pasternak’s garden were ablaze with pink and white and purple blossoms, and underfoot there was a carpet of wildflowers peeking out from the freshly cut pine boughs that had been laid to protect the young grass.

  When the American journalist Priscilla Johnson caught the train around 1:00 p.m., it was clear that many of the passengers, wearing black and carrying sprigs of lilac, were on their way to the funeral. And when the train pulled into Peredelkino, it emptied out, disgorging passengers who seemed to her to be either very young or very old. The authorities described them as “mostly intelligentsia” and young people, students from the Institute of Literature and Moscow State University. They formed a loose procession to the dacha. The police were stationed at all the intersections, and they told those who arrived by car, including the foreign press, that they would have to park and walk the last part of the way.

  The authorities hoped to manage the funeral, and how it was seen by the world. On the eve of the burial, the local Communist Party chief had provided a tour of the village for foreign correspondents, including the cemetery, where a freshly dug grave stood in the shade of three tall pine trees and within sight of Pasternak’s dacha. It was a cemetery of competing ideas: crosses or red stars marked the different graves. “Pasternak will be buried in the best site in the graveyard,” the functionary boasted.

  Representatives of the USSR Literary Fund had visited the family after Pasternak’s death and said they would pay for the burial and help manage the logistics. The KGB set up temporary headquarters in a local office, and agents were sent out to mingle with the crowd and record who attended. Word had already spread among members of the Moscow branch of the Union of Soviet Writers that they should not attend, and in the days before the funeral some writers had snuck in and out through the backyard to pay their
respects without being seen by the ubiquitous informers.

  Only a few writers were willing to risk the wrath of the authorities by attending the funeral. When the playwright Alexander Shtein was asked why he didn’t go to the funeral, he replied, “I don’t take part in anti-government demonstrations.”

  The curtains were drawn in the house of Pasternak’s neighbor Konstantin Fedin, Surkov’s successor as secretary of the writers’ union. Fedin was ill, but his absence was taken as an affront. Two mourners clashed by Pasternak’s coffin over Fedin’s failure to attend. One had claimed that Fedin was so sick he didn’t know about Pasternak’s death. Another had angrily retorted: “He can see perfectly well from his windows what is going on here.”

  The novelist Veniamin Kaverin was so incensed he later wrote to Fedin. “Who can forget the senseless and tragic affair of Pasternak’s novel—an affair which did so much damage to our country? Your part in this business went so far that you even felt compelled to pretend you had not heard of the death of the poet who was your friend and lived next door to you for 23 years. Perhaps you could see nothing from your window as people came in their thousands to take their leave of him, and as he was carried in his coffin past your house.”

  The garden quickly filled to overflowing. Western newsmen stood on boxes by the dacha gates; some climbed into the trees to get a better view. The mourners waited silently to enter the house by the side door and file by the body before exiting out the front door. Pasternak was dressed in his father’s dark gray suit and a white shirt. “He could have been lying in a field, rather than in his own living room, for the coffin was banked with wild flowers, with cherry and apple blossoms, as well as red tulips and branches of lilac.” The flowers became more and more heaped as mourners left their own sprays. A group of women dressed in black—sometimes including Zinaida and Yevgenia, Pasternak’s first wife—stood at the head of the coffin.

  The journalist Priscilla Johnson was shocked when she saw the body, “for the face had lost all of its squareness and strength.” Veniamin Kaverin thought that Pasternak’s familiar face was now “sculpted in white immobility,” and he detected what he thought was “a tiny smile lingering on the left corner of his mouth.” The body had been embalmed on May 31 after the artist Yuri Vasilyev had made a death mask. On June 1, a local priest held a private requiem service in the dacha for the family and some close friends.

  When Johnson asked Pasternak’s sister-in-law if the burial would be preceded by a service in the nearby fifteenth-century Russian Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration, she looked the American up and down. “You,” she said, “are very naïve.”

  Ivinskaya passed by the body, unable to linger because of the stream of people behind her. “Inside people were still taking leave of my beloved, who lay there quite impassive now, indifferent to them all, while I sat by the door so long forbidden to me.” She was approached by Konstantin Paustovsky, the eighty-year-old dean of Soviet letters, and Ivinskaya began to cry as he bent down to speak to her. Paustovsky must have imagined that she was unable to enter the house because of her complicated situation. “I want to go past the coffin with you,” he said, taking Ivinskaya by the elbow.

  Paustovsky remarked on what “an authentic event the funeral was—an expression of what people really felt.” He said one was bound to recall “the funeral of Pushkin and the Tsar’s courtiers—their miserable hypocrisy and false pride.”

  The secret police moved among the crowd, eavesdropping or taking photographs. They were unmistakable to many of the mourners and the “sole alien element in the crowd which, with all its diversity, was united in its shared feeling.”

  “How many were there altogether?” Pasternak’s old friend Alexander Gladkov wondered. “Two or three thousand, or four? It was hard to say but it was certainly a matter of several thousand.” Western correspondents placed the number at a more conservative one thousand and the authorities counted five hundred. Even a crowd of a few hundred was remarkable. Gladkov had worried that the funeral would turn out to be “rather poorly attended and pathetic.”

  “Who could have expected so many when nobody had to come just for form’s sake, by way of duty, as is so often the case,” Gladkov marveled. “For everybody present, it was a day of enormous importance—and this fact itself turned it into another triumph for Pasternak.”

  People ran into old friends in the front garden—comrades, in some cases, from the camps. Gladkov met two former inmates he had known and not seen in years. It seemed entirely natural to meet again at this moment, and Gladkov recalled Pasternak’s lines from “Soul”:

  My soul, you are in mourning

  For all those close to me

  Turned into a burial vault

  For all my martyred friends.

  Around the back of the dacha, people sat on the grass as some of Russia’s finest pianists played on an old upright, the notes wafting through the open windows of the music room. Stanislav Neigauz, Andrei Volkonsky, Maria Yudina, and Svyatoslav Richter took turns, performing slow dirges and some of the melodies Pasternak loved, particularly those by Chopin.

  Shortly after 4:00 p.m. Richter ended the music with a rendition of Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” The family asked those still inside the house to move into the front garden so they could have a last moment alone with the deceased. Ivinskaya, outside by the front porch, strained to see inside, at one point climbing up on a bench and looking through a window. One observer thought that “in her humiliated position, she looked overwhelmingly beautiful.”

  After a short period, Zinaida, dressed in black, her hair highlighted with henna, stepped onto the front porch. It was time for the funeral procession.

  The mounds of flowers from around the coffin were passed through the windows to the crowd. The organizers from Litfond had driven up a blue minibus to carry the coffin quickly and ahead of the mourners to the grave, where the casket was to be hastily buried. The pallbearers, including Pasternak’s two sons, refused to put the body in the vehicle. The open coffin was hoisted on their shoulders, and the crowd parted as they set off, through the garden, right on Pavlenko, and along “the melancholy dirt road” which “bitterly threw up dust” as the crowd made its way to the cemetery.

  The young writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both disciples of Pasternak, followed with the coffin lid. In the Russian tradition, it would not be screwed on until the moment just before interment. The pallbearers, at the head of the throng, walked with such haste that the body appeared to be bobbing on an ocean of humanity. Young men stepped out of the crowd to assist in carrying the coffin when the pallbearers appeared to tire.

  Some of those in attendance took a shortcut across the newly plowed field in front of Pasternak’s dacha. It led directly down to the cemetery, which stood on a small hillside near the brightly colored cupolas of the local church. The graveyard was already crowded when the procession with the coffin arrived. When the pallbearers reached the edge of the grave, they raised the casket high above the crowd just for a moment before placing it on the ground.

  “For the last time, I saw the face, gaunt and magnificent, of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” recalled Gladkov.

  The philosopher Valentin Asmus, a professor at Moscow State University and an old friend of Pasternak’s, stepped forward. A young boy leaned in to Priscilla Johnson and told her who he was. “Non-party,” he added.

  “We have come to bid farewell to one of the greatest of Russian writers and poets, a man endowed with all the talents, including even music. One might accept or reject his opinions but as long as Russian poetry plays a role on this earth, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak will stand among the greatest.

  “His disagreement with our present day was not with a regime or a state. He wanted a society of a higher order. He never believed in resisting evil with force, and that was his mistake.

  “I never talked with a man who demanded so much, so unsparingly, of himself. There were but few who could equal him in the honesty of his
convictions. He was a democrat in the true sense of the word, one who knew how to criticize his friends of the pen. He will forever remain as an example, as one who defended his convictions before his contemporaries, being firmly convinced that he was right. He had the ability to express humanity in the highest terms.

  “He lived a long life. But it passed so quickly, he was still so young and he had so much left to write. His name will go down forever as one of the very finest.”

  The actor Nikolai Golubentsov then recited Pasternak’s poem “O Had I Known” from the 1932 collection Second Birth.

  A slave is sent to the arena

  When feeling has produced a line

  Then breathing soil and fate take over

  And art has done and must resign.

  A young man, nervous and stammering, read “Hamlet” from the Zhivago cycle of poems. The poem, like the novel, had never been published in the Soviet Union but still “a thousand pairs of lips began to move in silent unison” and a charge seemed to course through the crowd. Someone shouted, “Thank you in the name of the working man. We waited for your book. Unfortunately, for reasons that are well known, it did not appear. But you lifted the name of writer higher than anyone.”

  The officials from Litfond, sensing the hostile murmur of the crowd, moved to bring the funeral to an end. Someone began to carry the lid toward the coffin. The closest mourners bent over the body to kiss Pasternak farewell. Among the last was Ivinskaya, crying uncontrollably. At certain points during the graveside ceremony, she and Zinaida were just steps away from one another at the head of the coffin. Zinaida was irritated that Ivinskaya and her daughter had pushed their way to the front. As Ivinskaya said her farewell, Zinaida “stood smoking by a fence, not 20 feet from the coffin … and throwing baleful glances now and then at the man whose body was about to be lowered into the grave.”

  Spontaneous shouts continued from the crowd.