the harsh, raven-haired, chain-smoking Zinaida.’
Pasternak’s interest in Zinaida grew during the summer of 1930 when he and Evgenia holidayed in Irpen near their friends, the historian Valentin Asmus, and his wife, Irina. Zinaida, Genrikh and their sons, then aged two and three, made up the party, along with Boris’s brother Alexander (called Shura by the family), his wife Irina and their son Fedia. Irpen was beautiful: languorous heat, oxen grazing in the fields, meadows filled with wild flowers and in the far distance, the shaded banks of the River Irpen: summer at its fullest and finest. Boris and Evgenia’s dacha stood in its own grounds surrounded by woods. Evgenia spent part of the summer painting an oil of a gigantic spreading oak tree which filled their plot of land. Long evenings were spent eating outside, watching fireflies and candles flicker in the dusk, discussing philosophy or literature, reciting poetry and listening to Genrikh play.
Zinaida had arranged for a grand piano to be delivered from Kiev so that her husband could practise for a recital that he was giving on the open-air stage of Kiev’s Kupechesky Gardens on 15 August. The whole group from Irpen attended the concert. As the humid night progressed, thunderclouds gathered. Genrikh played the Chopin Concerto in E minor to great acclaim. By the end of the performance, a violent storm had broken out, with flashing lightening and thunderous noise. While the pianist and orchestra were sheltered under a platform canopy, the audience became drenched. Yet they all remained, happily entranced by the music. This evening and Genrikh’s playing of Chopin’s E-minor Concerto formed the subject of Pasternak’s poem ‘Ballade’, which he dedicated to Genrikh.
While the summer proved to be the perfect tonic for Boris, Zinaida and Evgenia had taken against each other – perhaps intuitive to the fact that they were soon to become rivals. Initially, Zinaida tried to avoid the Pasternaks. She was not only alarmed by Boris’s excessive praise of her domestic prowess – he would take any chance to help or gather firewood, bring in water from the well or hang around her to sniff her freshly scented ironing – but because she disliked Evgenia. Zinaida, rigorous to the point of military standards in her domesticity, found the elegant, ethereal Evgenia spoilt, lethargic and indulgent. Meanwhile Evgenia dismissed the stocky Italianate-looking woman as unsophisticated and coarse. Boris blithely ignored the mounting tensions between them.
The group broke up in September and by the end of the month, only Boris and Zinaida’s families were left. They were all due to leave early next morning. The night before, Zinaida, having already packed, went to Boris’s dacha to see if they were ready. She found Evgenia assembling the canvases that she had painted all summer, while Boris was busy putting things in suitcases with the painstaking care he had learned as a child. As there was little time left, Zinaida swept in and efficiently finished all their packing. Boris was lost in admiration. Zinaida, with her proprietorial and bossy nature, must, however, have been wholly unwelcome to poor Evgenia. Later, Boris expressed his veneration for Zinaida in the opening lines of the first poem in the collection Second Birth.
Would I have found the strength to act,
without the dream I dreamed in Irpen?
Which showed me what largesse a life could hold,
the night we packed our things to go.
The following evening the two families boarded the Moscow-bound train from Kiev. Genrikh and his two sons were asleep when Zinaida stepped out into the corridor to smoke. Boris left Evgenia and their son sleeping too, to follow Zinaida. For three hours they stood in the corridor talking as the train rattled on. Boris, who could contain himself no longer, confessed his love for Zinaida.
In an almost comical attempt to dampen his ardour, Zinaida recounted an episode from her childhood. She told Boris that from the age of fifteen she had been the mistress of her cousin, Nicolai Melitinsky, who was then forty-five. Her father, a military engineer, who had married her eighteen-year-old half-Italian mother when he was fifty, had died when Zinaida was ten. Finances had been tight for her mother, who scraped to send her to the Smolny Institute for girls. Meanwhile she and her middle-aged cousin met for trysts in a flat rented for that purpose. The guilt of these years was later to torment and appal her.
Naively, she had not bargained for the fact that the burgeoning novelist in Pasternak would be more engaged by her tale of humiliation than dispirited or disgusted. Shortly afterwards, Boris described her as a ‘beauty of the Mary Queen of Scots type, judging by her fate’. Zinaida’s teenage affair was to become Lara’s ‘backstory’ in Doctor Zhivago: she is seduced by the much older lawyer Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky: ‘Her hands astonished him like a sublime idea. Her shadow on the wall of the hotel room had seemed to him the outline of innocence. Her vest was stretched over her breast, as firmly and simply as linen on an embroidery frame … Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.’ When Lara talks of how damaged she is by her affair with Komarovksy, you can almost hear Zinaida on the train trying to discourage Boris. ‘There is something broken in me, there is something broken in my whole life,’ Lara says to Yury Zhivago. ‘I discovered life much too early, I was made to discover it, and I was made to see it from the very worst side – a cheap, distorted version of it – through the eyes of an elderly roué. One of those useless, self-satisfied egoists of the old days who took advantage of everything and allowed themselves whatever they fancied.’
The seeds for Lara’s character were sown by his meeting Zinaida, but when Boris later fell for Olga Ivinskaya, it was she who fully embodied as a living archetype his Lara.
Soon after his return from Irpen, Boris caused mayhem. Selfishly putting his own desires first, he confessed his love for Zinaida to Evgenia, then went to Genrikh and declared his devotion to the pianist’s wife. In typical Boris style, the meeting was emotional and highly charged, with both men weeping. Boris spoke of his deep admiration and affection for Genrikh, and in an act of gauche insensitivity presented him with a copy of ‘Ballade’. He then insisted that he was incapable of spending his life without Zinaida.
Boris’s confidante, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, thought her friend was falling headlong into disaster. ‘I fear for Boris,’ she wrote. ‘In Russia poets die as an epidemic – a whole list of deaths in ten years. A catastrophe is unavoidable; first, the husband. Second, Boris has a wife and son; third, she is beautiful (Boris will be jealous) and fourth and chiefly, Boris is incapable of a happy love. For him to love means to be tortured.’
If Pasternak was tortured, so too were the women he loved. For months Zinaida would be torn by overwhelming guilt at breaking up her marriage. Boris was similarly racked over his treatment of Evgenia, writing to his parents in March 1931 that he had caused Evgenia ‘undiminished suffering’. He concluded that his wife loved him because she did not understand him and deluded himself that she needed rest and freedom – ‘complete freedom’ to realise herself professionally. He appeared to be projecting – he needed freedom from his unhappy marriage to Evgenia, while the melodrama he thrived on was exactly the creative fuel he required.
On New Year’s Day 1931, when Genrikh left for a concert tour of Siberia, Boris began obsessively calling on Zinaida, as often as three times a day, and temporarily moved out of the family’s apartment. Unable to withstand Zinaida’s vacillation any longer, after five months of ardent pursuit, he turned up at the Neigauses’ Moscow home. Genrikh opened the door to Boris and addressed him in German as ‘Der spätkommende Gast’ (the belated guest) and left to go to play at a concert.
Boris begged Zinaida once more to leave Genrikh. When Zinaida refused, he grabbed a bottle of iodine from the bathroom cupboard and in some sort of weak suicide bid, swallowed it all. His gullet burned and he started making involuntary chewing movements. When Zinaida realised what he had done she poured milk down Boris’s throat to induce vomiting – he was sick twelve times – probably saving his life. A doctor came and ‘rinsed out his insides’ as a precaution against internal burns.
