In view of the urgency of the matter, special precautions were taken to prevent any delay in the sending of the illustrations. The services of the conductors of the express trains at the Nikolayevsky railway were enlisted; the guards on the express trains to St Petersburg acted as messengers.
‘My imagination was impressed by the sight of a uniformed guard waiting outside our kitchen door, as on a station platform outside a railway carriage,’ wrote Boris. ‘Joiner’s glue sizzled on the range. The drawings were hastily sprinkled with fixative and glued on sheets of cardboard, and the parcels, wrapped up, tied and sealed up with sealing wax and handed over to the guard.’ The whole family was involved in this endeavour – Rosalia used to help with the pressured business of packing and mailing the illustrations, while the children watched, rapt.
Thirty years later, on 21 May 1939, Pasternak wrote to his father: ‘Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter [Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya-Esenina] came to see me with a friend of hers and they talked a great deal about you. She had already spoken to me several times before about how she loved your illustrations. “Of all Tolstoy’s illustrators, not one has come close to him or embodies his ideas so faithfully as your father” – “Yes, yes, the drawings for Resurrection, they’re just brilliant,” put in the other. And we all agreed that you have no equal.’
Tolstoy died on 7 November 1910 while ‘fleeing the world’ at Astapovo train station. The world’s press was camped out on the platform. Leonid was summoned to make a drawing of the deceased writer on his death bed and took the twenty-year-old Boris with him. Boris watched as his father drew in pastel the corner of the room where Countess Tolstoy sat ‘shrunken, mournful, humiliated’ at the head of the iron bed where her husband was lying. Sofia Tolstoy explained to Leonid that after Tolstoy left her, due to antagonisms between her and his disciples, she had tried to drown herself and had to be dragged out of the lake at Yasnaya Polyana. It took Leonid fifteen minutes to complete the death-bed drawing. In his notebook, Leonid wrote: ‘Astapovo. Morning. Sofia Andreyevna at his bedside. The people’s farewell. Finale of a family tragedy.’
The summer before the 1917 Revolution, Boris Pasternak was visiting his parents at the apartment they rented in a manor house in a Molodi estate, 60 kilometres south of Moscow. It was thought that the house had served as a lodge for Catherine II’s journeys to the south of Crimea. The generous proportions of the manor and grand layout of the park, with its converging avenues, suggested royal origins. While his first collection of poetry, Above the Barriers, was being prepared, Pasternak went to work as an industrial office clerk to support the war effort. The twenty-seven-year-old poet was given a job in a chemical works in an industrial town called Tikhiye Gory, on the banks of the River Kama in the Republic of Tatarstan. This town, known as ‘Little Manchester’, was at an important intersection of geographical and trade routes uniting East and Western Russia. While fulfilling his daily filing duties, Pasternak did not cease his literary work. In order to earn money he began translating Swinburne’s trilogy of dramas about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
‘In March 1917, when news of the Revolution that had broken out in Petersburg came through, I set out for Moscow,’ Pasternak later wrote. ‘At the Izhevsk factory I was to find and pick up Zbarsky, a fine fellow of an engineer who had been sent there on a work assignment, place myself at his disposal and then continue my journey with him. From the Tikhiye Gory we sped on in a covered wagon on runners, for an evening, right through the night and part of the following day. Wrapped up in three long coats and half buried in hay, I rolled on the floor of the sleigh like some bulky sack, robbed of any freedom of movement.’
The February Revolution was focused around Petrograd (now St Petersburg). In the chaos, members of the Imperial Parliament assumed control of the country, forming a provisional government. The army leadership felt that they did not have the means to suppress the Revolution, resulting in Tsar Nicholas’s abdication. A period of dual power ensued, during which the provisional government held state power while the national network of ‘soviets’, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the working classes and the political left. During this period there were frequent mutinies, protests and strikes as attempts at political reform failed and the proletariat gained power. In the October Revolution (November in the Gregorian calendar) the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, overthrew the provisional government and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, moving the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918 out of fear of imminent foreign invasion. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside. Civil war subsequently erupted among the ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks) and ‘Whites’ (anti-socialist factions). It continued for several years, creating poverty, famine and fear, especially amongst the intelligentsia. The Bolsheviks eventually defeated the Whites and all rival socialists, paving the way for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.
In Doctor Zhivago, Yury Zhivago bears witness to the momentous political upheaval:
The paper was a late extra, printed on one side only; it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People’s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were established in Russia. There followed the first decrees of the new government and various brief news items received by telegraph and telephone.
The blizzard slashed at Yury’s eyes and covered the printed page with a grey, rustling snowy gruel, but it was not the snowstorm that prevented Yury from reading. He was shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment and the thought of its significance for centuries to come.
After 1917 life in Moscow was harrowing. Food and fuel were scarce and living conditions poor. Fortunately, Boris’s brother Alexander, a budding architect, knew exactly which bits of roof beams could be cut away and sawn up for firewood without causing the whole house to collapse, as a number did in the Moscow winter of 1918–19. Fuel was in such demand that at night Boris broke planks from rotten fences or stole firewood from government places, and guests invited for tea brought a log as a gift instead of sweets or chocolates. In the grey hours before sunrise, the Pasternak children would set out for the Boloto, a market where villagers sold what vegetables they could. In Zhivago, Pasternak recalls the privations and pressures of war, the resulting famine and spread of typhoid:
Winter was at hand and in the world of men the air was heavy with something as inexorable as the coming death of nature. It was on everybody’s lips.
Food and logs had to be got in. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become an abstract notion, and food and firewood were replaced by the problems of alimentation and fuel supply.
The people in the towns were as helpless as children in the face of the unknown – of that unknown which swept every known usage aside and left nothing but desolation in its wake – although it was the offspring and creation of the towns.
People were still talking and deceiving themselves as their daily life struggled on, limping and shuffling to its unknown destination. But Yury saw it as it was, he could see that it was doomed, and that he and such as he were sentenced to destruction. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. The days were counted, and these days were running out before his eyes.
… He understood that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future. He both feared and loved that future and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if saying good-bye, was avidly aware of the trees and clouds and of the people walking in the streets, of the great Russian city struggling through misfortune – and he was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better but was powerless to do anything.
In 1921, to Boris’s great distress, his sisters and parents left Russia and travelled to Germany. Unbeknownst to any of them, they would never live in Russia together again. Deprived of her rights for higher education in Russia – just as any offspring of a non-proletarian family in
