in a ‘state of utter bliss’ as Zinaida tended to him, moving noiselessly and efficiently around him.
Extraordinarily, such was his reverence for the melodramatic poet, that when Genrikh returned home at two o’clock that morning and learned of what had happened, it was to his wife that he turned and said: ‘Well, are you satisfied? Has he now proved his love for you?’ Genrikh then agreed to hand Zinaida over to Boris.
‘I’ve fallen in love with Z[inaida] N[ikolaevna], the wife of my best friend, N[euhaus],’ Pasternak wrote to his parents 8 March 1931. ‘On January 1st he left for a concert tour of Siberia. I had feared this trip and tried to talk him out of it. In his absence, the thing that was inevitable and would have come about in any event, has acquired the stain of dishonesty. I’ve shown myself unworthy of N[euhaus] whom I still love and always will; I’ve caused prolonged, terrible and as yet undiminished suffering to Zhenia – and yet I am purer and more innocent than before I entered this life.’
Although Genrikh was shaken and hurt by Boris and Zinaida’s affair – he had to stop playing in the middle of one concert during his Siberian tour and left the stage in tears – he was by no means an innocent party. Zinaida’s eventual break with him was eased by Genrikh’s own infidelities. In 1929 he had sired a daughter by his former fiancée, Militsa Borodkina, and he married her in the mid-1930s.
In November 1932 Boris wrote to his parents and sisters from Moscow that Genrikh ‘is a very contradictory person, and although everything settled down last autumn he still has moods in which he tells Zina that one day in an attack of misery he’ll kill her and me. And yet he continues to meet us almost every other day, not only because he can’t forget her, but because he can’t part from me either. This creates some touching and curious situations.’ However, Sir Isaiah Berlin, a great friend of Boris and Josephine, remembered that for years after Zinaida left him, Genrikh was a frequent visitor at the couple’s dacha in Peredelkino, where Boris and Zinaida lived from 1936. After one typical Sunday lunch, Isaiah Berlin and Genrikh travelled back to Moscow together on the train. Sir Isaiah was somewhat taken aback when Genrikh turned to him and said, by way of explanation for why he had let his wife go: ‘You know, Boris is really a saint.’
Sadly though, Boris was all too human. One of the things that plagued him most during his marriage to Zinaida was his fixation with Zinaida’s teenage affair with Melitinsky. As mental torture is largely irrational, Zinaida was powerless to quell her husband’s jealous anxieties. He often became paranoid staying in hotels because the ‘semi-debauched set-up’ reminded him of Zinaida’s teenage trysts with Melitinksy. The story of Zinaida’s youthful liaison became an obsession which triggered sleeplessness and mental depression. Boris once destroyed a photograph of Melitinksy which his daughter had bought to Zinaida as a gift following her cousin’s death.
On 5 May 1931, when it was clear that Boris was not going to return to Evgenia, she and her son left Russia. They travelled to Germany, where Boris’s family – Josephine, Frederick, Lydia, Rosalia and Leonid – greeted them with open arms, intent on cocooning them with familial love. ‘Look after her,’ Boris instructed his family. ‘And we did,’ said Josephine. Frederick organised and paid for Evgenia, who had been ill with tuberculosis, to spend the summer at a sanatorium in the Black Forest while her son stayed with the family at a pension on the Starnberger See in Munich.
Understandably, Boris’s family in Germany, who loved Evgenia and adored little Evgeny, were shocked by Boris’s behaviour. They saw him as having discarded his first wife and son, and handing responsibility over to them. Leonid’s censure weighed heavily on Boris, who was left in no doubt that his family were appalled by the way he had treated Evgenia and Evgeny. On 18 December 1931, when Boris was openly living with Zinaida, his father wrote to him from Berlin:
Dear Boria!
What a lot I ought to write to you on all sorts of subjects – the terrible thing is that I know in advance that it’s a pointless waste of time, because you, and all of you, act without thinking out the consequences in advance; you’re irresponsible. And of course one’s sorry for you as well, we are especially so – what a mess you’ve got yourself into, you poor boy! And instead of doing all you can to disentangle everything and as far as possible reduce the suffering on both sides, you’re dragging it out even more and making it worse!
In early February 1932, Boris wrote Josephine a letter running over twenty pages. It is part an emotional confession of the guilt he feels at his treatment of Evgenia, part justification of his love for Zinaida – who he at one stage describes unflatteringly: ‘always comes back from the hairdresser looking terrible, like a freshly polished boot’ – part a catalogue of his neurotic mental state, which seems to veer near to madness; and part grateful homage to his sister, who Evgenia said ‘did more for her than anyone else in the world’ during the previous summer in Germany.
All is far from rosy. He admits to Josephine that he struggles with Zinaida’s oldest son, Adrian, ‘a hot-headed, selfish boy and a brutal tyrant towards his mother’. Living with another young boy makes the absence of his own son, Evgeny, even more painful. Boris also explains why, on his father’s insistence, he did not vacate the rooms in Volkhonka Street for Evgenia and her son. They had returned to Moscow on 22 December 1931 but had been forced to go and live with Evgenia’s brother for some time because it was apparently difficult for Boris to move apartments or find new ones due to restrictions imposed by the authorities and the requirements of necessary permits. This was not helped by the fact that Pasternak was already encountering restrictions due to the content of his work. ‘All this comes at a time when my work has been declared to be the spontaneous outpourings of a class enemy,’ Boris confided, ‘and I’m accused of regarding art as inconceivable in a socialist society, that is, in the absence of individualism. Verdicts like these are quite dangerous, when my books are banned from libraries.’
Probably Boris and Zinaida’s happiest time was the period they spent together in Georgia. In the summer of 1933 Pasternak had been commissioned to translate some Georgian poetry, and in order to master the language properly, and familiarise himself with the native tongue and colloquialisms, he visited the country.
To many Russians, Georgia, with its ‘abundance of sunshine, its strong emotions, its love of beauty and inborn grace of its princes and peasants alike’, was a place of enchantment and inspiration. Georgians were considered earthier and more passionate than their strait-laced Russian cousins. Pasternak made great friends with the acclaimed Georgian poets Paolo Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze. Of Yashvili he wrote: ‘Talent radiated from him. His eyes shone with an inner fire; the fire of passion had scorched his lips and the heat of experience had burnt and blackened his face, so that he looked older than his years; and as though he had been worn and tattered by life.’ Pasternak’s love affair with the Caucasus would continue throughout his life, and he referred to Georgia as his second home.
According to Max Hayward, the Oxford academic who would later be recruited to translate Doctor Zhivago into English, the poems Pasternak composed to describe his journey over the Georgian Military Highway to Tbilisi (‘probably the most breath-taking mountain road in the world’) have not been equalled in calibre since Pushkin and Lermontov wrote on the same theme. For Pasternak the Caucasian peaks, receding in an infinite panorama of unexampled grandeur, offered a simile for a vision of what a socialist future might look like. But even in this prodigious setting, Pasternak favoured images that were domestic and intimate: the rugged lower slopes, for instance, reminded him of a ‘crumpled bed’.
Pasternak’s translations of Georgian poetry would be greatly admired by Stalin – a fact that may have saved the writer’s life. Over a decade later, in 1949, as the secret police became increasingly aware of the controversial, anti-Soviet nature of the novel Pasternak was writing, a senior investigator in the prosecutor’s office claimed there were plans to arrest him. However, when Stalin was informed, the leader began to recite: ‘Heavenly colour, colour blue,’
