accommodation for her parents, who intended to come after her. She was soon joined by Lydia, Leonid and Rosalia. Boris and Alexander stayed on at the family’s studio apartment at 14 Volkhonka Street in Moscow, as they had embarked on their respective careers as writer and architect. Rosalia and Leonid had managed to obtain visas for Germany for a long course of health treatment – Leonid had to have a cataract removed and Rosalia had heart problems. The hungry years of the Revolution had undermined their health, strength and spirit, while Leonid Pasternak was deeply concerned by the threat that he would lose his Moscow apartment to state requisition. However, it never occurred to any of the family that they would not be reunited in Russia after the country’s upheavals.
Josephine’s last memories of her childhood in Moscow were the gruelling winters when the town was covered in snow and the citizens had to report at labour centres. ‘They were given spades and perhaps a day’s ration and had to clear the roads,’ she remembered. ‘Lydia was underage and did not need to report, but she went instead of me as I was not strong enough to shovel the heavy snow. She and Boris were in the same group. It must have been an unforgettable day … A day of such brilliance of sun and snow, of purity of landscape, of concerted effort and of friendliness among the people at work.’ In Doctor Zhivago, to escape starvation and the political uncertainties in Moscow after the 1917 Revolution, the Zhivago family travels to Varykino, Tonya’s ancestral estate in the Urals. When their train is halted by snowdrifts, the civilian passengers are commandeered to clear the rails. Yury Zhivago remembers these three days as the most pleasant part of their journey:
But the sun sparkled on the blinding whiteness and Yury cut clean slices out of the snow, starting landfalls of dry diamond fires. It reminded him of his childhood. He saw himself in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn into the curly fleece, cutting the same dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream buns and fortresses and cave cities. Life had had a splendid taste in those far-off days, everything had been a feast for the eyes and for the stomach!
But at this time, too, during their three days of work in the open air, the workers had a feeling of pleasantly full stomachs. And no wonder. At night they were issued with great chunks of hot fresh bread (no one knew where it came from or by whose orders); it had a tasty crisp crust, shiny on top, cracked at the side and with bits of charcoal baked into it underneath.
Berlin in the 1920s was a period of high productivity for Leonid Pasternak, as the city had become a meeting place of the Russian intelligentsia. Over 100,000 Russians were living in exile. Leonid painted and befriended Albert Einstein, and the opera singer Chaliapin, who was rehearsing for his Berlin recital. He also sketched and painted the Russian composer, pianist and conductor Prokofiev at the piano, painter Max Liebermann and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was to enjoy an intense correspondence with Boris.
It was an immeasurable source of pain for Boris that after his parents left Moscow, he only saw them once again. He visited them in Berlin in 1922 and lived with them for nearly a year with his first wife, Evgenia. Afterwards, in the ensuing correspondence, lasting over twenty years, the constant ache of his missing them and echo of regret is tangible.
Conditions meanwhile were worsening throughout Russia, with food shortages and ration cards introduced in 1929. Collectivisation was regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution, mainly in grain deliveries in Russia. In 1930, there was a decree of the Federation of Soviet Writers’ Associations providing for the formation of writers’ shock brigades, to be sent out to the collective and state farms.
The conditions that Pasternak witnessed at the state farms stressed and depressed him; he regarded what he saw as inhuman. ‘Among them was the war with its bloodshed and its horrors, its homelessness, savagery and isolation, its trials and worldly wisdom which is taught,’ he later wrote in Doctor Zhivago. ‘Here too were the lonely little towns where you were stranded by the war, and the people with whom it threw you together. Such a new thing, too, was the Revolution, not the one idealised in student fashion in 1905, but this new upheaval, today’s born of the war, bloody, pitiless, elemental, the soldiers’ revolution, led by the professional, the Bolsheviks.’ It made you question your loyalty to what mattered in life. Everything and everyone felt deposed. Nothing seemed sacred anymore; not even loyalty to your spouse:
Everything had changed suddenly – the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, who to listen to. As if all of your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgement you respected. At such a time you felt the need to entrust yourself to something absolute – life or truth or beauty – of being ruled by it now that man-made rules had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life which was now abolished and gone for good.
Josephine Pasternak last set eyes on Boris at Berlin train station in the summer of 1935. On 23 June the Kremlin had insisted that Boris attend an anti-fascist writers’ congress in Paris. This summons was a rushed exercise in Soviet propaganda, as the ‘Congress for the Defence of Culture’ had already commenced in Paris two days earlier. The Kremlin recognised suddenly that Boris Pasternak’s absence from a line-up that included the world’s leading writers – including Gide, Bloch and Cocteau from France, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley from Britain, as well as Brecht and Heinrich Mann from Germany – would be a cause of international dismay. Despite suffering from chronic insomnia and depression so debilitating that it had led him to spend months in the writers’ country sanatorium outside Moscow earlier that spring, the Kremlin ordered Pasternak to go immediately to Paris. He was, however, granted six hours free to stop off in Berlin.
Boris had telegrammed his family from Russia prior to his departure to say that he dearly hoped to see Josephine and Frederick along with his parents during this fleeting visit. Rosalia and Leonid were in Munich at the time and regrettably were not strong enough to make an impromptu journey to Berlin. But Josephine and Frederick immediately travelled overnight from Munich, arriving at the family’s Berlin apartment the following morning to await Boris’s arrival.
Josephine was troubled by a new fragility in her older brother’s emotional state. He had been unwell for months, exhausted and distressed by Stalin’s reign of terror on writers and his own inner torment. Despite being hailed as ‘one of the greatest poets of our time’ when he was introduced at the writers’ congress the following day, he felt ashamed of his esteemed reputation. Afterwards he wrote to his father that the whole event had left him with ‘the bitter dregs of a terrible, inflated self-importance, ludicrous over-estimation and embarrassment, and – worst of all – a sort of gilded captivity’. So severe was his nervous exhaustion and depression that when initially requested to go to Paris for the conference, he had rung Stalin’s secretary in person to protest that he was too unwell to attend. ‘If there was a war and you were called to serve, would you go?’ he was asked. Yes, Boris replied. Well, ‘regard yourself as having been called to serve’, was the reply.
Within twenty-four hours an ill-fitting suit was bought for him and two days later he arrived at midday by taxi at his parents’ apartment in Berlin, which Josephine and Frederick had opened up in readiness for his visit. ‘I do not remember my brother’s first words or his greeting, or how we all embraced each other: everything was overshadowed by the strangeness of his bearing,’ recalled Josephine. ‘He behaved as if only a few weeks, not twelve years, had separated us. Every now and again he burst into tears. And he had one wish only: to sleep!’
Josephine and Frederick drew the curtains and insisted that Boris lie down on the sofa. They sat with him while he slept for two or three hours. Josephine was increasingly anxious, as she knew that Boris had to be at the Friedrichstrasse train station for around six that evening and as yet they had not had time to talk. When Boris woke up he seemed mildly refreshed; however Frederick tried to
