The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book
Page 31
“wrote poetry not as a rare exception”: Boris Pasternak, I Remember, 76.
“a tuning-up”: Andrei Sinyavsky, “Boris Pasternak” (1965) in Davie and Livingstone, Pasternak: Modern Judgments, 157.
“The relationship remained platonic”: Christopher Barnes, “Notes on Pasternak” in Fleishman, Boris Pasternak and His Times, 402.
“no poet since Pushkin”: Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics, 109.
“why listen to such nonsense?”: “O, kak ona byla smela” (Oh, How Bold She Was) in Yevgeni Pasternak, Ponyatoe i obretyonnoe, stat’i i vospominaniya, 517.
“It is like a conversation with you”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 299; Boris Pasternak letter to Yevgenia Lurye, December 22, 1921, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 7, 376–77.
“Zhenya and Borya”: “O, kak ona byla smela” (Oh, How Bold She Was) in Yevgeni Pasternak, Ponyatoe i obretyonnoe, stat’i i vospominaniya, 520.
“Hemmed in on all sides by noise”: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 12.
“a man with inarguably more talent”: “O, kak ona byla smela” (Oh, How Bold She Was) in Yevgeni Pasternak, Ponyatoe i obretyonnoe, stat’i i vospominaniya, 511.
Zinaida was born in Saint Petersburg: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 237–44.
“I’ve shown myself unworthy”: Boris Pasternak letter to parents and sisters, March 8, 1931, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 195.
Do not fret, do not cry, do not tax: Translated by Raissa Bobrova. In Boris Pasternak, Poems, 167.
“beauty is the mark of true feelings”: Boris Pasternak letter to Jacqueline de Proyart, August 20, 1959, in Boris Pasternak, Lettres à mes amies françaises (1956–1960), 194–95.
“painfully awkward”: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 273–74.
“I begged her to understand”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Josephine Pasternak, February 11, 1932, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 207.
he gave long, tearful accounts: Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, 32.
“It was around midnight”: Boris Pasternak letter to Josephine Pasternak, February 11, 1932, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 209.
“In this state of bliss”: Ibid.
“Well, are you satisfied?”: Ibid.
“is much cleverer”: Boris Pasternak, letter to parents and sisters, November 24, 1932, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 230.
“continued loving my father”: “O, kak ona byla smela” (Oh, How Bold She Was) in Yevgeni Pasternak, Ponyatoe i obretyonnoe, stat’i i vospominaniya, 511.
Chapter 2
devastating and prolonged civil war: Alexander Pasternak, Vanished Present, 194; Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 244, 274, and 276.
“Pasternak is uneasy in Berlin”: Shklovsky, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, 63.
“Amidst Moscow streets”: Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, page xviii.
Berlin said Pasternak: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 222.
“Come to your senses”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 110.
“late accretion”: Isaiah Berlin, letter to Edmund Wilson, December 23, 1958, in Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, 668.
“My family was interested in music and art”: Jhan Robbins, “Boris Pasternak’s Last Message to the World,” This Week, August 7, 1960.
“last gamble of some croaking publisher”: Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience, 21.
“To read Pasternak’s verse”: Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters, 168.
“in a downpour”: Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience, 22.
“What century is it outside?”: Lydia Pasternak Slater, “About These Poems,” in Boris Pasternak, Poems of Boris Pasternak, 35.
“hothouse aristocrat”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 286.
“It is silly, absurd, stupid”: Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 31.
“Trotsky was no liberal”: Service, Trotsky, 315.
Pasternak was recovering: Accounts of the meeting in Vil’mont, O Borise Pasternake, vospominaniya i mysli, 93–95; and Boris Pasternak, letter to V. F. Bryusov, August 15, 1922, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 7, 398.
“one remarkable feature”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 161.
black funeral carriage: Montefiore, Stalin, 108.
Pasternak was agitated: Yevgeni Pasternak, Sushchestvovan’ya tkan’ skvoznaya, Boris Pasternak. perepiska s Yev. Pasternak, 379.
“suffered from a serious mental illness”: Montefiore, Stalin, 12.
For the evening at Voroshilov’s: Ibid., 3–22; Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 172–75.
“On the evening before”: Boris Pasternak’s message to Stalin in Literaturnaya Gazeta, November 17, 1932.
“From that moment onwards”: Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, 348.
passionate, opinionated: Akhmatova, My Half-Century, 85.
We live, deaf to the land beneath us: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 13.
In the version: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 172.
“I didn’t hear this”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 61.
playing the ukulele: Akhmatova, My Half-Century, 101.
Mandelstam thought he was doomed: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 175.
“ideological food”: Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 238.
“Pasternak is completely bewildered by Mandelstam’s arrest”: Bukharin, letter to Stalin, June 1934, in Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. Col. : 558, I.: 11, F.: 709, S.: 167.
“Isolate but preserve”: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 182.
“If I were a poet and a poet friend of mine were in trouble”: There are at least eleven versions of this conversation, according to Benedikt Sarnov in Stalin and the Writers. We have relied on the account of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip’s widow, who spoke directly with Pasternak about it, albeit sometime after the phone call. See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 146–48. We however translate the word master, which was used by Nadezhda Mandelstam in the Russian version of her memoir, as “master” rather than “genius.”
“He was quite right to say”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 149.
“Like many other people in our country”: Ibid., 148.
“something to say”: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 223.
“The immense talent of B. L. Pasternak”: De Mallac, Boris Pasternak, 145.
“Your lines about him”: Clark et al., Soviet Power and Culture: A History in Documents, 322–23.
“I am never sure where modesty ends”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 119.
“a sincere and one of the most intense”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 81.
“Koba, why is my death necessary for you?”: Service, Stalin, 592.
Stalin personally signed: Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, 203.
Anatoli Tarasenkov, an editor of the journal Znamya: Anatoli Tarasenkov, “Pasternak, Chernovye zapisi [Pasternak, Draft Notes], 1934–1939,” in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 178–79.
“My soul has never recovered from the trauma”: Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 175.
“Everything snapped inside me”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 81.
“No forces will convince me”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 138.
In the 1937 file: Eduard Shneiderman, “Benedikt Livshits: Arest, sledstvie, rasstrel” (Benedikt Livshits: Arrest, Investigation, Execution), Zvezda (Star) 1, (1996): 115.
“I don’t give them life”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 148.
“In those awful bloody years”: Ibid., 144.
“He seemed afraid”: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 226.
“Why, for example, did Stalin”: Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 277.
“consumed in their flames
”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 127.
“My health is very poor”: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 192.
“The only person”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 132.
Chapter 3
he hoped his prose would be worthy: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nina Tabidze, January 24, 1946, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, 438.
large numbers of receipts: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 178.
“He was too great”: Boris Pasternak, Letters to Georgian Friends, 151.
he turned to look at Nina Tabidze: Nina Tabidze, “Raduga na rassvete” (Rainbow at Dawn), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 333.
“what it can be, real prose”: Boris Pasternak, letter to E. D. Romanova, December 23, 1959, quoted in Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 186.
“major works of literature exist”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 87.
“I shall bid goodbye”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 268.
He told Tsvetaeva: Ibid., 269.
“dreamy, boring and tendentiously virtuous”: Ibid.
“Still in his high school years”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 58.
“his usual sense of acute dissatisfaction”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 113.
General Alexander Gorbatov invited: Tamara Ivanova, “Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 281.
“I am reading Simonov”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 115.
“the constant, nagging sense of being an imposter”: Ibid., 87.
“Shakespeare, the old man of Chistopol”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 213.
Mandelstam, who had once warned: Akhmatova, My Half-Century, 99.
“I want your poetry”: Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters, 562.
“burn with shame”: Boris Pasternak, letter to sisters, end of December 1945, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 365.
“profound inner change”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 124.
The first recorded mention: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 9, 421.
Pasternak said he was working on a novel: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 125.
“I have started on this”: Boris Pasternak, letter to sisters, end of December 1945, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 370.
“I am in the same high spirits”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, February 24, 1946, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 251.
days and weeks were whistling: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 162.
“I wrote it with great ease”: De Mallac, Boris Pasternak, 181.
“You see it in the concert halls”: Boris Pasternak, letter to sisters, end of December 1945, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 368.
One acquaintance suggested: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 252.
Pasternak arrived late: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 163.
“An Evening of Poetry”: Max Hayward, introduction to Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 20–24; De Mallac, Boris Pasternak, 194.
“Who organized that standing ovation?”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, 375.
Death to Fascism!: Dalos, The Guest from the Future, 54.
One Western reporter in Moscow: Gerd Ruge, “Conversations in Moscow,” Encounter 11, no. 4 (October 1958): 20–31.
“in order to understand a figure”: Dalos, The Guest from the Future, 95.
“a KGB man”: Testimony of Yuri Krotkov, aka George Karlin, before the U.S. Senate subcommittee to investigate the administration of the Internal Security Act. November 13, Committee on the Judiciary, Karlin Testimony, at 171, U.S. Government Printing Office, pt. 3 (1969).
“ ‘They,’ as I noticed”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, 594–95.
“he worked heart and soul”: Dalos, The Guest from the Future, 95.
“hated him”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 205.
“Yes, really, don’t be surprised”: Valentin Berestov, “Srazu posle voiny” (Right After the War), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 485.
He called it an epic: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, October 5, 1946, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 253.
“on a knife-edge”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Lydia Pasternak Slater, June 26, 1946, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 373.
“writes all kind of cock and bull stories”: Transcript of Orgburo meeting in Moscow, August 9, 1946, in Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, 412.
“vapid, content-less and vulgar things”: Resolution published in Pravda on August 21, 1946, in Ibid., 421.
a colossal boozer: Service, Stalin, 437–38.
“sycophantic contributions from the floor”: Dalos, The Guest from the Future, 56.
“Anna Akhmatova’s subject-matter”: Ibid., 56–57.
She rued: Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 252–53.
“Praising American Democracy”: Conquest, Stalin, 277.
“not one of us”: Hingley, Pasternak, 166.
“Yes, yes, [out of touch with] the people”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 233.
“For all the charm of certain passages”: Chukovsky, Diary, September 10, 1946, 359.
“it is a failure of genius”: Mikhail Polivanov, “Tainaya Svoboda” (Silent Freedom), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 471.
slackened: Pasternak used this word in a letter to one reader. See Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 296.
“an effort in the novel”: Boris Pasternak, “Three Letters,” Encounter 15, no. 2 (August 1960): 3–6.
“gobbled down”: Tamara Ivanova, “Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 285.
“heard Russia”: Emma Gerstein, commentary on Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 4, 653.
“a spring of pristine”: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 181.
Pasternak arrived with the pages: Muravina, Vstrechi s Pasternakom, 46–52.
Pasternak told the Gulag survivor: Varlam Shalamov, “Pasternak,” in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 645–46.
the home of the pianist Maria Yudina: For descriptions of this evening see Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 182; Chukovskaya, “Otryvki iz dnevnika” (Diary fragments), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 407–8; and Yelena Berkovskaya, “Mal’chiki i devochki 40-kh godov” (Boys and Girls of the 1940s), in ibid., 540–41.
looking forward to the reading: Maria Yudina, in A. M. Kuznetsova, “ ‘Vysokii stoikii dukh’: Perepiska Borisa Pasternaka i Marii Yudinoi” (“High Resilient Spirit”: Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Maria Yudina), Novy Mir, no. 2 (1990): 171.
“And he began to recite from memory”: Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 165.
Fadeyev was well-disposed: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 75.
“Alexander Alexandrovich has rehabilitated himself”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 141.
“Mass Grave”: Nikolai Lyubimov, Boris Pasternak iz knigi “Neuvyadaemyi tsvet” (Boris Pasternak from the book “The Unfading Blossom”), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 620.
below a call for Pasternak’s isolation and ruin: See Max Hayward’s notes in Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 188.
“With all its dishonesty”: Ibid., 132.
“At least they are not going to let me starve”: Ibid.
“Who would bear the phony greatness”: Vladimir Markov, “An Unnoticed Aspect of Pasternak’s Translations,” Slavic Review 20, no. 3 (October 1961): 503–8.
“I started to work again”: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 136–37.
“I write no protests”: Boris Pasternak, lettter to Olga Freidenberg, March 26, 1947, B
oris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 269.
Chapter 4
“My wife’s passionate love of work”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Renate Schweitzer, quoted in Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 185.
“big hands”: Interview with Lyusya Popova, Komsomol’skaya Pravda, August 19, 1999.
“a divided family”: Quotes up to “Her present condition” from Boris Pasternak, letter to parents, October 1, 1937, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 321–22.
made it hard to carry the pregnancy: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 295.
Zinaida had little interest: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 27.
“a dragon on eight feet”: Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias, 242.
the previously active seventeen-year-old: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 189.
“as a matchbox”: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 330.
“fulfill my duty as a wife”: Ibid., 340.
“Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce”: The descriptions of Ivinskaya’s meeting and subsequent romance with Pasternak in this chapter, and the dialogue between the two, are all from Ivinskaya’s memoir, A Captive of Time, unless another source is cited.
“few women who have had an affair with me”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nina Tabidze, September 30, 1953, in Boris Pasternak, Letters to Georgian Friends, 154.
Pasternak was known for his flings: Vyacheslav Ivanov, “Perevyornutoe nebo. Zapisi o Pasternake” (The Upturned Sky. Notes on Pasternak), Zvezda 8 (August 2009): 107.
Zinaida said that after the war: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 344.
“Poor Mama mourned”: Yemelyanova, Legendy Potapovskogo pereulka, 16.
treated his birthdays as days of mourning: Voznesensky, An Arrow in the Wall, 270.
“faces could be seen side by side”: Lydia Chukovskaya, “Otryvki iz dnevnika” (Diary fragments), January 6, 1948, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 426.
“pretty but slightly fading blonde”: Emma Gerstein, “O Pasternake i ob Anne Akhmatovoi” (About Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 392.