had to have happiness in order to be liked’. An insecure and vulnerable beauty, she was flattered by the famous writer’s interest in her. By the spring of 1922, they were married. ‘Zhenya’ was twenty-one years old.
If relationships act as mirrors to our flaws and our needs, Boris learned much about himself during his first marriage. Evgenia also had a volatile, artistic streak and their clash of egos was not conducive to marital harmony. Boris’s fame was impacting his ego; he did not consider Evgenia enough of an artist to merit her difficult, emotional behaviour. Of the two of them, he considered himself the greater artist and assumed Evgenia would lay aside her ambition to help foster his, just as he had witnessed his mother do for his father. While he was by nature active, preferring to run everywhere rather than walk – probably to help burn off his excess nervous energy – Evgenia was languid, preferring to sit around the house. Energetically, they did not seem compatible.
Boris travelled with his new wife to Berlin for a holiday in the summer of 1922. It was Evgenia’s first time abroad and the newlyweds relished their time in the German capital, visiting bustling cafes and art galleries. While Evgenia liked to sightsee and enjoy the pulsating life of fashionable quarters, Boris, like Tolstoy, was more drawn to the ‘real Germany’: the misery of slums in the northern districts of the city.
Boris was paid in dollars for some of his translation work. He spent his money freely. Ashamed of having so much relative to the poverty of so many, his tips, like his brother-in-law Frederick’s, were always blushingly generous. According to Josephine, who sometimes accompanied her brother on his walks around Berlin, he also ‘showered hard cash upon pale urchins with outstretched hands’. Boris explained his and Tolstoy’s attraction to the less privileged: ‘people of an artistic nature will be attracted by the poor, by those with a difficult, modest lot in life. There everything is warmer and riper, and there is more soul and colour there than anywhere else.’
Once the first cloudless weeks of gallery visiting and seeing old friends were over, the writer began to get restless, and irritable. Evgenia suffered from gingivitis, an inflammation of the gums, which caused her to cry a lot. But Boris was indifferent to her suffering. ‘We, the family, sided with her,’ explained Josephine, ‘but what could we do? Boris did not display any kind of callousness: he simply seemed fed up with the incongruity of the whole set-up – the boarding house, the lack of privacy, his wife’s uncontrollable tearful moods.’ The family raised eyebrows further when he decided to take a room of his own where he could work in peace. This they considered sheer extravagance. The last straw came when Evgenia discovered that she was pregnant. The quarrels became fiercer: ‘A child! Slavery! It is your concern, after all,’ Boris would say to his wife, ‘you are the mother.’
‘What?’ Zhenya would cry out, ‘mine? Mine? Oh! You, you – you forget that I am devoted to my art, you selfish creature!’
The main source of their tension was whether and when they should return to Moscow. Boris was keen to get back to Russia, while Evgenia preferred Berlin, ‘Russia’s second capital’. The vitality of Russian intellectual life reached its zenith in the early 1920s, then declined under the impact of widespread political unrest and soaring inflation. The bleakness of Germany’s fate saddened Pasternak, who later wrote: ‘Germany was cold and starving, deceived about nothing and deceiving no one, her hand stretched out to the age like a beggar (a gesture not her own at all) and the entire country on crutches.’ Typically theatrical, he added that it took him ‘a daily bottle of brandy and Charles Dickens to forget it’.
Back in Moscow the couple moved into the Pasternaks’ old apartment on Volkhonka Street. Soon after returning, on 23 September 1923, their son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, was born. ‘He is so tiny – how could we give him a new, an unfamiliar name?’ Boris wrote. ‘So we chose what was closest to him: the name of his mother – Zhenya.’
Uncertain of his income, and unable to make ends meet with the advances from publishers for his own work and translations, Pasternak worked for a short time as a researcher for the Library of the People’s Commissariat for Education in Moscow. Here he was responsible for reading through foreign papers and censoring – cutting out – all references to Lenin. He turned this mundane exercise to his advantage: scouring the foreign press enabled him to keep abreast of Western European literature. During intervals he read, amongst others, Proust, Conrad and Hemingway. He also joined the Left Front of Arts, whose journal, LEF, was edited by the poet and actor Vladimir Mayakovski, who had been two years below Boris at school. When Boris became part of the front it was more as a gesture of solidarity to his old associate than a genuine desire to become actively involved in the group and its revolutionary agenda, and he broke with them in 1928. That same year he sent the first part of his autobiographical prose offering Safe Conduct to a literary journal for publication.
In April 1930 Mayakovski suffered a mental breakdown, penned a suicide note and killed himself. His funeral, attended by around 150,000 people, was the third-largest event of public mourning in Soviet history, surpassed only by those of Lenin and Stalin. In 1936, Stalin proclaimed that he ‘was and remains the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch’. Olga later wrote of Mayakovski: ‘In many ways the antidote of Pasternak, he combined powerful poetic gifts with a romantic anguish which could find relief only in total service to the Revolution – at the cost of suppressing in himself the urgent personal emotions evident in his pre-revolutionary work’.
Increasingly frustrated that he did not have the freedom to write what his heart desired, Pasternak found his daily life almost intolerable. Working conditions – always of utmost importance to Boris – had become unbearable. The entire Volkhonka Street block had been requisitioned by the state and turned into one communal apartment housing six families: a total of twenty people, sharing one bathroom and kitchen. Boris and his family were granted permission to use his father’s old art studio as their living space. It was incredibly noisy, so Pasternak moved his work to the area which served as a dining room. Hardly conducive to concentration: it was open house to the other families, their visitors and relatives. Pasternak was at this time working on an intricate translation into Russian of Rainer Maria Rilke’s haunting ‘Requiem for a Lady Friend’, which the writer had penned as a tribute to his friend the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who suddenly died eighteen days after giving birth to her first child.
By 1930 Pasternak had become infatuated again – this time with Zinaida Neigaus. What is extraordinary is that for a man with such a fierce sense of morality, Pasternak failed to honour one of the most basic codes of life – he ran off with the wife of one of his best friends.
He admired the esteemed pianist Genrikh Neigaus almost to the point of obsession. In a letter to his mother on 6 March 1930 he had written: ‘The only bright spot in our existence is the very varied performances by my latest friend (for the past year), Heinrich Neuhaus [Genrikh Neigaus]. We – a few of his friends – have got into the habit of spending the rest of the night after a concert at one another’s homes. There’s abundant drink, with very modest snacks which for technical reasons are almost impossible to get hold of.’
Boris was quickly enthralled by Zinaida. The daughter of a St Petersburg factory owner, from a Russian Orthodox family, with her black hair cut short and well-defined lips, she was a classic ‘art nouveau’ figure. She was also everything Evgenia was not. While Evgenia was highly emotional and yearned for the fulfilment of her own creative life, Zinaida Neigaus was happy to facilitate her husband’s career. When Genrikh gave winter concerts in cold halls, Zinaida would organise the arrival of the grand piano and lug the firewood in herself to stoke the fire. While her husband remained with his head in the artistic clouds – he was proud of telling friends that his practical skills were limited to fastening a safety pin – Zinaida raised their two sons, Adrian and Stanislav. She was endlessly energetic, robust, domestic and practical, unlike the elegant but languid Evgenia. Boris’s nephew Charles, who met both women, remembered: ‘Despite Boris’s ardent description of Zinaida, I found her (admittedly more than twenty-five years
