Lara Read online

  Five years later, on another visit to Moscow, I went to the Pushkin statue, erected in 1898, where Boris and Olga frequently rendezvoused during the early stages of their relationship. It was here that Boris first confessed the depth of his feelings to Olga. The vast statue of Pushkin was moved in 1950 from one side of Pushkin Square to the other, so they would have started their courtship on the west side of the square and moved to the east side in 1950 where I stood, looking up at the giant bronze folds of Pushkin’s majestic cape tumbling down his back. My Moscow guide, Marina, a fan of Putin and the current regime, looked at me standing under Pushkin’s statue, envisaging Boris at that very spot, and said: ‘Boris Pasternak is an inhabitant of heaven. He is an idol for so many of us, even those who are not interested in poetry.’

  This reverential view echoed my meeting with Olga’s daughter, Irina Emelianova, in Paris a few months earlier. ‘I thank God for the chance to have met this great poet,’ she told me. ‘We fell in love with the poet before the man. I always loved poetry and my mother loved his poetry, just as generations of Russians have. You cannot imagine how remarkable it was to have Boris Leonidovich [his Russian patronymic name†] not just in the pages of our poetry but in our lives.’

  Irina was immortalised by Pasternak as Lara’s daughter, Katenka, in Doctor Zhivago. Growing up, Irina became incredibly close to Boris. He loved her as the daughter he never had and was more of a father figure to her than any other man in her life. Irina got up from the table we were sitting at and retrieved a book from her well-stocked shelves. It was a translation of Goethe’s Faust which Boris had given her, and on the title page was a dedication in Boris’s bold, looping handwriting in black ink, ‘like cranes soaring over the page’ as Olga once described it. Inside, Boris had written in Russian to the then seventeen-year-old Irina: ‘Irochka, this is your copy. I trust you and I believe in your future. Be bold in your soul and mind, in your dreams and purposes. Put your faith in nature, in the spirit of your destiny, in events of significance – and only in such few people as have been tested a thousand times, and are worthy of your confidence.’

  Irina proudly read the final inscription to me. Boris had written: ‘Almost like a father, Your BP. November 3, 1955, Peredelkino.’ As she ran her hand affectionately across the page, she said sadly: ‘It’s a shame that the ink will fade.’

  It was a timeless moment, as we both stared at the page, considering perhaps that everything precious in life eventually ebbs away. Irina closed the book, straightened her shoulders, and said: ‘You cannot imagine how knowing Boris Pasternak altered our lives. I would go and listen to his poetry recitals and I was the envy of my friends at school and my English professor and the teachers. “You know Boris Leonidovich?” they would ask me in awe. “Can you get the latest poem from him?” I would ask his typist if we could just have one line of his verse and sometimes he would distribute a poem for me to hand out. That gave me incredible prestige at school and in a way his glory rubbed off on me.’

  The Russian people’s reverence for Pasternak, which remains to this day, is not just because of the enduring power of his writing, but because he never wavered in his loyalty to Russia. His great love was for his Motherland; in the end, that was stronger than everything. He renounced the Nobel Prize for Literature when the Soviet authorities threatened that if he left his country, he would not be allowed to return. And he never became an émigré, refusing to follow his parents to Germany, then England, after the 1917 Revolution.

  When I went to Peredelkino, to the writer’s colony, a fifty-minute drive from central Moscow, where Boris spent nearly two decades writing Doctor Zhivago, I felt a profound sadness. As I sat at Boris’s desk in his study on the upper floor of his dacha, I traced the faint ring marks his coffee cups had left on the wood over fifty years earlier. Icicles hung outside the window, reminiscent of David Lean’s film: I was reminded of Varykino, the abandoned estate in the novel, where Yury spends his last days with Lara, dazzling in the sun and snow; the lacework of hoar frost on the frozen window panes; the crystalline magic conjured on screen; Julie Christie, embodying his Lara, effortlessly beautiful beneath her fur hat. I thought of my great-uncle Boris looking out of the window, across the garden he adored, past the pine trees to the Church of Transfiguration. In the distance lies Peredelkino cemetery, where he is buried. Earlier that day, my father, Boris’s nephew, and I had trudged through deep snowdrifts in the cemetery to visit his grave, where I was touched to find a bouquet of frozen long-stemmed pink roses carefully placed against his headstone. They must have been left there by a fan. I was struck that no words of Boris’s adorn his grave. Just his face etched into the stone. Powerful in its simplicity, nothing more needs to be said.

  I leaned back in Boris’s chair in his study and considered how often he must have turned back from the undulating view to his page (he wrote in longhand), inspired, to create scenes of longing between Yury and Lara. When I was there the snow was gently falling outside, enhancing the stillness. The room is almost painful in its plainness. In one corner stands a small wrought-iron bed with a sketch of Tolstoy hanging above it and family drawings by Boris’s father, Leonid, to each side. With its drab grey patterned cover and the reddish brown cut-out square of carpet close by, the bed would not have been out of place in a monastic cell. Opposite, a bookcase: the Russian Bible, works by Einstein, the collected poems of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, novels by Henry James, the autobiography of Yeats and the complete works of Virginia Woolf (Josephine Pasternak’s favourite author), along with Shakespeare and the teachings of Jawaharlal Nehru. Facing the desk, on an artist’s easel, a large black and white photograph of Boris himself. Wearing a black suit, white shirt and dark tie, I considered that he looked about my age, mid-forties. Pain, passion, determination, resignation, fear and fury emanate from his eyes. His lips are almost pursed, set with conviction. There was nothing soft or yielding about his sanctuary; he saved his sensuousness for his prose.

  I thought about Boris’s courage, a courage that meant he could sit there and write his truth about Russia. How he defiantly stared the Soviet authorities in the face, and how persecution and the threat of death eventually took its toll. How, despite outliving Stalin, in spite of his colossal literary achievements, he lived his last years here in imposed isolation, the Soviet authorities watching and monitoring his every move. His study became his personal quarantine: writing upstairs; his wife Zinaida downstairs, chain-smoking as she played cards or watched the clunky antique Soviet television, one of the first ever made.

  And I imagined his lover Olga Ivinskaya, in the last years of Boris’s life, anxiously waiting for him every afternoon to join her in the ‘Little House’ across the lake at Izmalkovo, a kilometre away. Here she would soothe and support, encourage and type up his manuscripts. Not visible in his home by way of cherished photograph or painting, her absence is jarring. For what is the love story in Doctor Zhivago if it is not his passionate cri de coeur to Olga? I thought of her endlessly reassuring him of his talent when the authorities taunted that he had none; how she brought fun and tenderness into his life when everything else was so strategic, harsh, political and fraught. How she loved him but, just as crucially, how she understood him. Many artists are selfish and self-indulgent, as he was. It would be easy to conclude that Boris used Olga. It is my intention to show that, rather, his great omission was that he did not match her cast-iron loyalty and moral fortitude. He did not do the one thing in his power to do: he did not save her.

  Looking around his study for the last time, I knew that I wanted to write a book which would try to explain why he performed this uncharacteristic act of moral cowardice, putting his ambition before his heart. If I could understand why he behaved as he did and appreciate the extent of his suffering and self-attack, could I forgive him for letting himself and his true love down? For not publicly claiming or honouring Olga – for not marrying her – when she was to risk her life loving him? As he writes in D
octor Zhivago: ‘How well he loved her, and how loveable she was in exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and needed … She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line which the Creator at a single stroke had drawn round her, and in this divine outline she had been handed over, like a child tightly wound up in a sheet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul.’

  * Josephine married her cousin, Frederick Pasternak, hence the continuation of the surname.

  † Every Russian has three names. A first name, a patronymic and a surname. The patronymic name is derived from the father’s first name. The usual form of address among adults is the first name and the patronymic.

  1

  A Girl from a Different World

  Novy Mir, meaning ‘New World’, the leading Soviet literary monthly where Olga Ivinskaya worked, was set up in 1925. Literary journals such as Novy Mir, the official organ of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, enjoyed huge influence in the Stalinist period and had a readership of tens of millions. They were vehicles for political ideas in a country where debate was harshly censored, and the contributors held enormous sway in Russian society. The offices in Pushkin Square were situated in a grand former ballroom, painted a rich dark red with gilded cornices, where Pushkin once danced. The magazine’s editor, the poet and author Konstantin Simonov, a flamboyant figure with a silvery mane of hair who sported chunky signet rings and the latest style of American loose-fitting suits, was keen to attract ‘living classics’ to the journal, and counted Pavel Antokolsky, Nicolai Chukovski and Boris Pasternak among its contributors. Olga was in charge of the section for new authors.

  On an icy October day in 1946, just as a fine snow was beginning to swirl outside the windows, Olga was about to go for lunch with her friend Natasha Bianchi, the magazine’s production manager. As she pulled on her squirrel fur coat, her colleague Zinaida Piddubnaya interrupted: ‘Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce one of your most ardent admirers,’ gesturing to Olga.

  Olga was stunned when ‘this God’ appeared before her and ‘stood there on the carpet and smiled at me’. Boldly, she held out her hand for him to kiss. Boris bent over her hand and asked what books of his she had. Astounded and ecstatic to be face-to-face with her idol, Olga replied that she only had one. He looked surprised. ‘Oh, I’ll get you some others,’ he said, ‘though I’ve given almost all my copies away …’ Boris explained that he was mainly doing translation work and hardly writing any poems at all due to the repressive strictures of the day. He told her that he was still translating Shakespeare plays.

  Throughout his writing career, Pasternak earned the bulk of his income through commissioned translation work. Proficient in several languages, including French, German and English, he was deeply interested in the intricacies and dilemmas of translating. Gifted in interpreting, and conveying a colloquial essence, he was to become Russia’s premiere translator of Shakespeare, and would be nominated for the Nobel Prize six times for his accomplishments in this area. In 1943 the British embassy had written to him with compliments and gratitude for his efforts translating the Bard. The work provided several years of steady income. He told a friend in 1945: ‘Shakespeare, the old man of Chistopol, is feeding me as before.’

  ‘I’ve started on a novel,’ he told Olga at Novy Mir, ‘though I’m not yet sure what kind of thing it will turn out to be. I want to go back to the old Moscow – which you don’t remember – and talk about art, and put down some thoughts.’ At this stage, the novel’s draft title was ‘Boys and Girls’. He paused, before adding a little awkwardly: ‘how interesting that I still have admirers …’. Even at the age of fifty-six, more than twenty years Olga’s senior, Pasternak was considered handsome in a strong, striking way, despite the fact that his elongated face was often likened to an Arab horse’s – hardly flattering – partly because he had long yellowish teeth. It seems slightly disingenuous that Boris should have questioned that he had admirers – a faux modesty – when he knew perfectly well that he had a hypnotic effect on people, and that men and women everywhere were in awe of him. The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, to whom Pasternak would become a mentor figure, was captivated by the poet’s dazzling presence the first time he met him, that same year, 1946:

  Boris Leonidovich started talking, going straight to the point. His cheekbones would twitch, like the triangular shaped cases of wings pressed tight shut, prior to opening. I worshipped him. There was a magnetic quality about him, great strength and celestial otherworldliness. When he spoke, he would jerk his chin, thrusting it up, as if trying to break free of his collar and body. His short nose hooked right from the bridge, then went straight, making one think of the butt of a gun in miniature. The lips of a sphinx. Grey hair, cropped short. But, overshadowing everything else, was the pulsating wave of magnetism that flowed from him.

  All through his life women pursued Boris Pasternak. Yet he was no quasi-Don Juanesque character; quite the opposite. He revered women, feeling an innate empathy for them because he saw that for women, as for poets, things could often become complex and entangled in their emotional and sentimental lives. His fateful meeting with Olga at Novy Mir was to become the greatest entanglement, enmeshing his emotional and creative lives.

  After exchanging a few words with Zinaida Piddubnaya, he kissed both women’s hands and left. Olga stood there, speechless. It was one of those life-changing moments when she felt the axis of her world tilt. ‘I was simply shaken by the sense of fate when my “god” looked at me with his penetrating eyes. The way he looked at me was so imperious, it was so much a man’s appraising gaze that there could be no mistake about it; here he was, the one person I needed more than any other, the very one who was in actual fact already part of me. A thing like this is stunning, a miracle.’

  In Doctor Zhivago the reader is introduced to Lara in chapter two, ‘A Girl from a Different World’. Yury Zhivago’s first impressions of Lara are based on Boris’s early meetings with Olga: ‘“She has no coquetry,” he thought. “She does not wish to please or to look beautiful. She despises all that side of a woman’s life, it’s as though she were punishing herself for being lovely. But this proud hostility to herself makes her more attractive than ever.”’

  There was an instant attraction between Boris and Olga, recalled Irina: ‘Boris was sensitive to my mother’s kind of beauty. It was a tired beauty. It wasn’t the beauty of a brilliant victor, it was almost the beauty of a defeated victim. It was the beauty of suffering. When Boris looked into my mother’s beautiful eyes, he could probably see many, many things in them.’

  The following day, Pasternak sent Olga a parcel. Five slim volumes of his poems and translations appeared on her desk at the offices at Novy Mir. His tenacious pursuit of her had begun.

  Olga had first set eyes on him fourteen years earlier, when, as a student at the Moscow Faculty of Literature, she went to one of Pasternak’s poetry recitals. She was hurrying through the corridor to get to her seat at Herzen House, Moscow, anxious to hear the ‘poet hero’ recite his famous poem ‘Marburg’, which chronicled his first experience of love and rejection. Suddenly, as the bell rang to announce the performance, the nervous black-haired poet rushed past her. He had an electric energy, she thought, which made him seem ‘dishevelled and on fire’. When he finished his recital, the excitable crowd surged forwards to surround him. Olga watched as a handkerchief belonging to him was torn to shreds and even the remaining crumbs of tobacco from his cigarette butts were snatched up by fans as meaningful keepsakes.

  Over a decade later, in 1946, when Olga was thirty-four, she was given a ticket to an evening in the library of the Historical Museum where Pasternak was to read from his Shakespeare translations. The Russian writer had been first introduced to the works of the English playwright by his first love, Ida Davidovna Vysotskaya, when he was at Marburg University; Ida was the inspiration for his poem ‘Marburg’. The daughter of a wealthy Moscow merchant, she had been tutored by Boris as a young girl. Ida and her sister visit
ed Cambridge in 1912, where she discovered Shakespeare and English poetry. She spent three days with Boris in Marburg later that summer, presenting her serious-minded friend with an edition of Shakespeare’s plays and indirectly giving birth to a fresh calling.

  On 5 November 1939, Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, which had been commissioned by the great theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, had been accepted for staging at the Moscow Art Theatre. This made Pasternak immeasurably proud, not least because the 1930s had been a decade filled with terror and frustration for him. Just as Pasternak had warmed to the task of writing his novel, external circumstances kept him from fulfilling his creative dream. At first, he was hampered by financial need, later by isolation, depression and fear. In 1933 he had written to Maksim Gorky, the godfather of Soviet letters and the founder of the ‘socialist realism’ literary style, that he needed to write short works and publish quickly in order to support his family, which after divorce and remarriage had doubled in size. Already, Pasternak’s attitude to his work was one of risk-taking. Completely against being any sort of mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda, he believed it a moral imperative that he write the truth about the age. He considered it dishonest to be in a privileged position against a backdrop of universal deprivation. Yet publication of his work was regularly delayed by censorship problems.

  In August 1929, the whole literary community were affected by an issue that broke out in the press. During the 1920s it was frequent practice among Soviet authors to publish works abroad to secure international copyright (the USSR was not a signatory to any international copyright convention) and to circumvent official censorship. On 26 August the Soviet press accused two authors, Evgenyi Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak, who published abroad, of major acts of treachery involving anti-Soviet slander. The party- and state-organised campaign of vilification played out in the press lasted several weeks, leaving the writing community in a state of fear and insecurity. In the end Zamyatin emigrated to France and Pilnyak was forced to resign from the Writers’ Union. Pasternak took these cases closely to heart as he shared stylistic features and close personal relations with the two writers. These literary witch hunts coincided with the collectivisation of agriculture. Over the next few years, its violent enactment would devastate the rural economy and destroy the lives of millions.