was the fate of many of Pasternak’s contemporaries, Stalin is supposed to have said: ‘Leave him in peace, he’s a cloud dweller.’ And on Pasternak’s KGB file the immortal words were stamped: ‘Leave the cloud dweller alone.’
In the early flush of happiness at his newfound stability, and possibly because he had anticipated from the start that she would play that role, Boris saw Zinaida as the facilitator of his craft. He wanted and needed her to be indispensable to his functioning as an artist. ‘You are the sister of my talent,’ he told her. ‘You give me the feeling of the uniqueness of my existence … you are the wing that protects me … you are that which I loved and saw, and what will happen to me.’
When Evgenia finally cleared her belongings from the Pasternak apartment on Volkhonka Street in September 1932, and Boris moved back in with Zinaida, they found the house in a dilapidated condition. The roof leaked, rats had gnawed and ripped the skirting boards, and many window panes were cracked and missing. A month later, when Boris returned from a three-day trip to Leningrad, Zinaida had wrought an amazing transformation. The windows were repaired. She had hung curtains, fixed herniated mattresses and fashioned a new sofa cover from one of the spare curtains. The floors were polished, the windows were washed and sealed for the winter. Zinaida had even added various rugs, two cupboards and an upright piano which, extraordinarily, came from her ex-in-laws, Neigaus’s parents, who had moved to Moscow and were now living with the abandoned Genrikh.
In 1934, Boris married Zinaida in a civil ceremony. So caught up was he in his fantasy image of Zinaida that he failed to see her shortcomings. Zinaida may have been a dab hand in the house, but for a man as impassioned as Boris, she was not the champion and soul mate he yearned for. Not only did Zinaida not understand his poetry, she could not fathom her husband’s creative courage. Worse, she increasingly feared his poetry’s power to upset the equilibrium of her well-managed household by provoking official disfavour.
A considerable strain in their relationship was caused by the arrest of Boris’s friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam. One evening in April 1934, Boris bumped into him on a Moscow boulevard. To his consternation – even ‘the walls have ears’ he warned – Mandelstam, a fearsome critic of the regime, proceded to recite an incredibly scathing poem he had written about Stalin. (Lines included: ‘His fingers are fat as grubs,/And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips …/His cockroach whiskers leer,/And his boot tops gleam.’)
‘I didn’t hear this; you didn’t recite this to me,’ Boris said to him, agitated. ‘Because, you know, very dangerous things are happening now. They’ve begun to pick people up.’ These were the early ominous beginnings of what would become the Great Terror, when hundreds of thousands of people accused of various political crimes – espionage, anti-Soviet agitation and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups – were quickly executed or sent to labour camps. Boris told Mandelstam that his poem was tantamount to suicide and implored him not to recite it to anyone else. Mandelstam did not listen and inevitably, was betrayed. On 17 May he was arrested by the NKVD.
When he found out, Pasternak valiantly tried to help his friend. He appealed to the politician and writer Nikolai Bukharin, recently appointed editor of Izvestiya newspaper, who had commissioned some of Pasternak’s Georgian translations. In June, Bukharin sent Stalin a message with the postscript: ‘I’m also writing about Mandelstam because B. Pasternak is half crazy about Mandelstam’s arrest, and nobody knows anything …’
Pasternak’s entreaties paid off. Instead of being sent to almost certain death in a forced labour camp, Mandelstam was sentenced to three years’ internal exile in the town of Cherdyn, in the north-east Urals – Stalin having issued a chilling command that was passed down the chain: ‘Isolate but preserve’. Boris was astonished to be called to the communal telephone in the hallway at Volkhonka Street and told that it was Stalin on the line. According to Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda:
Stalin said that Mandelstam’s case was being reconsidered and that everything would be all right with him. An unexpected reproach followed – why didn’t Pasternak turn to writer’s organisations or ‘to me’ to plead for Mandelstam? Pasternak’s answer was ‘writer’s organisations haven’t been dealing with this since 1927, and if I hadn’t pleaded, you might not have got to know about it’.
Stalin stopped him with a question: ‘But he is an expert, a master, isn’t he?’
Pasternak answered, ‘That’s not the point.’
‘Then what is the point?’ Stalin asked.
Pasternak said that he would like to meet and speak with him.
‘What about?’
‘About life and death.’
Stalin hung up the phone.
When word of the telephone conversation with Stalin got out, Pasternak’s critics claimed he should have defended his friend’s talent more vigorously. But others, including Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, felt happy with Boris’s response. They understood his caution and thought he had done well not to be lured into the trap of admitting that he had, indeed, heard Osip’s ‘Stalin Epigram’. ‘He was quite right to say that whether I am a master or not is beside the point,’ Osip declared. ‘Why is Stalin so afraid of a master? It’s like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him like shamans.’
In 1934, Pasternak was invited to the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union. He was disquieted by the official praise and by efforts to turn him into a literary public hero who had not been politically compromised. His work was increasingly being recognised by the West and he felt uncomfortable with this attention. Ironically, his writing was becoming more difficult to publish, so he concentrated on translation work. In 1935 he wrote to his Czech translator: ‘All this time, beginning with the Writers’ Congress in Moscow, I have had a feeling that, for purposes unknown to me, my importance is being deliberately inflated … all this by somebody else’s hands without asking my consent. And I shun nothing in this whole world more than fanfare, sensationalism, and so-called cheap “celebrity” in the press.’
Pasternak and his family now accepted accommodation in the Writers’ Union apartment block on Lavrushinsky Lane in Moscow and a dacha in Peredelkino. Pasternak acquired the rights to one of the properties, shaded by tall fir trees and pine trees, with the money he had received from his Georgian translations. In 1936 he still held high hopes that his parents would return to Russia and live with him there. This writers’ colony, built on the former estate of a Russian nobleman outside Moscow, had been created to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent authors with a retreat that provided bucolic escape from their city apartments. Apparently, when Stalin heard that the colony was to be called Peredelkino, from the Russian verb peredelat, which means to re-do, he suggested it would be better to call is Perepiskino, from the verb to rewrite. Kornei Chukovsky, the Soviet Union’s best-loved children’s author, described the system of the writers’ colony as ‘entrapping writers with a cocoon of comforts, surrounding them with a network of spies’.
Such state controls did not sit comfortably with Pasternak. Nikolai Bukharin once said that Pasternak was ‘one of the most remarkable masters of verse of our time, who has not only strung a whole row of lyrical pearls on to the necklace of his talent, but has produced a whole number of revolutionary works marked by deep sincerity’. But Pasternak pleaded: ‘Do not make heroes of my generation. We were not: there were times when we were afraid and acted from fear, times when we were betrayed.’
At a writers’ meeting in Minsk, Pasternak told his colleagues that he fundamentally agreed with their view of literature as something that could be produced like water from a pump. He then put forward the view for artistic independence, before announcing that he would not be part of the group. Almost an act
