Boris Pasternak (Борис Пастернак)
by Dmitry Bykov
Click here to read the author's biography
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Sample translation by Emily Lygo
CHAPTER 1. THE LUCKY FELLOW
THE NAME PASTERNAK IS AN INSTANT INJECTION OF HAPPINESS. PEOPLE WITH QUITE DIFFERENT BIOGRAPHIES AND BELIEFS HAVE SAID THE SAME: FROM ROSY-CHEEKED KOMSOMOL MEMBERS TO TIME-HONOURED DISSIDENTS, FROM INCORRIGIBLE OPTIMISTS TO THOSE WITH AN UNSHAKEABLY TRAGIC VIEW OF THE WORLD. PASTERNAK’S FATE APPEARS TRIUMPHANT, ESPECIALLY AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY, BUT NOT BECAUSE HE DIED IN HIS OWN BED, AND MUCH LATER, IN 1989, WAS REINSTATED INTO THE SOVIET WRITERS’ UNION WITH THE SAME UNANIMOUS SUPPORT THAT THE DECISION TO EXCLUDE HIM FROM THAT ORGANISATION HAD ENJOYED 31 YEARS EARLIER. HIS IS NOT A TRIUMPH OF JUSTICE AND, IN ANY CASE, RUSSIAN LITERATURE NEEDS NO LESSONS IN POSTHUMOUS REHABILITATION. PASTERNAK’S BIOGRAPHY IS AS WONDERFULLY HARMONIOUS AS HIS WRITINGS, ALTHOUGH HE TOOK PARTICULAR PRIDE IN PLAYING NO PART IN IT. SUBMISSION TO FATE, THE AWARENESS OF AN AUTHORSHIP HIGHER THAN HIS OWN, WAS THE CORNERSTONE OF PASTERNAK’S WORLD VIEW: ‘YOU HOLD ME, AS YOUR HANDIWORK, YOU HIDE ME AS A RING IN ITS CASE.’ THE HANDIWORK TURNED OUT WELL; PASTERNAK DID NOT INTERFERE WITH HIS MASTER’S WORK.
‘Life has been good’ were his words during one of the many illnesses that preceded his death, when he was bedridden in Peredelkino and could no longer expect help from any quarter: the ambulance service would not travel outside Moscow and the government and writers’ hospitals would no longer admit him. ‘I’ve done everything I wanted to do.’ ‘If this is dying, then it is nothing to be scared of,’ he said three days before he died, after the latest blood transfusion had briefly renewed his strength. Even after the tragic confessions of his final days, in which he declared himself defeated by the world’s vulgarity, he said to his wife just a few seconds before he died: ‘I’m happy.’ With these words, and fully conscious, he passed away.
‘What a wonderful funeral!’ Akhmatova exclaimed on hearing of Pasternak’s send-off on his final journey; she was unable to take her leave of him in person as she was lying in hospital after a heart attack. The memoirist Lidia Ginzburg recorded her words, and in them she rightly detected ‘envy of this lucky fellow’s last piece of luck.’ As a deeply religious person, Akhmatova could not fail to appreciate the harmony of the grand plan – Pasternak was buried on a radiant day in early summer when the apple trees and lilac and his favourite wild flowers were in bloom; eight Pasternak ‘boys’ – friends and companions of his last years – carried the coffin and he floated above a crowd of people who had gathered together for one reason. In the coming years many people boasted about taking part in the procession, which not only recalled a traditional funeral feast but also had something of a protest march about it; but at the time, people came from the most innocent impulse to take their leave of Pasternak, not for the sake of political opposition, but for him. They felt they were taking part in the final act of the mystery that the life of this poet had become; in Peredelkino on 2 June 1960 one could be a part of something infinitely greater than the life of even the most talented writer. There’s no doubt about it – it was a lucky fellow’s last piece of luck.
Such luck followed him throughout his life – but then, almost any person’s life, with the exception of the incurably ill or those born into chains, can be retold from this angle; it depends what you choose to emphasise. More than once in her life Akhmatova experienced great inspiration and blindingly good fortune, but a fundamentally tragic view of life suited her temperament better; at every new misfortune she would utter the sacred words: ‘It was ever thus with me’. Pasternak’s life can appear no less tragic: separation from his parents, the illness and early death of his stepson, the arrest of his beloved, condemned to working a day job besides writing, a smear campaign, – but he had a different view of life: he aimed for happiness and celebration, he blossomed in an atmosphere of mutual love and could bear suffering with stoicism. For this reason, the tragic upsets of his personal life – such as occurred in 1917, 1930, and 1947 – he accepted as unavoidable. […]
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Happiness can appear offensively tactless, inappropriate, and egotistical. Who knows how many untroubled lucky fellows lived through the twentieth century? Who knows how many of them remember the 1930s as a time of resounding industrial successes and caviar freely available in the shops!
Pasternak’s ‘happy’ view of life annoyed many people. The memoirs of a friend describe how in the spring of 1947 Pasternak – handsome, healthy and happily in love – breezed into the room of an incurably ill patient, and in a booming voice began to enthuse about the weather, the spring, the sunset, as if he had noticed nothing at all; he seemed to exist in an aura of happiness that danced around him. Such an account is, of course, superficial and uncharitable; perhaps Pasternak was trying to console the patient in his own way, in a Pasternak way… after all, for him death was not an end but only the transition to something that we can know nothing about. (‘Death is not in our realm,’ he said by way of an end to such conversations in the opening pages of Doctor Zhivago.) But even those who did not know Pasternak and who never saw him in his everyday life could be annoyed by the extraordinary ecstasy of his poetry – especially in the context of Russian Literature, so used to languishing from unrequited love and civil discontent. Lucky fellows are a rarity here, you can count them on your fingers, and thus analogies between them are inescapable. His stubborn antagonist Nabokov wrote, ‘Everything about him betrays a fateful kinship with Benediktov’. Yet the joy of early Benediktov1 (later he ceased rejoicing and the reader lost interest) is the joy of a lucky lover, landowner, a playful chap, the delight of a hedonist endowed with an excellent digestion and deaf to the primordial tragedy of existence. Pasternak is a different case entirely. His happiness is always accompanied by tragedy, but a ‘tragic experience of life’ is characterised not by moaning or complaining, but by a respect for the scale of what is happening. All weeping women in Pasternak’s prose and poetry are, above all, beautiful. In yet another marvellous coincidence of literature and life, many remember the weeping Olga Ivinskaya2 at Pasternak’s funeral: ‘I have never seen such beauty,’ recalls Maria Rozanova, ‘even though she was red-faced from tears and could not wipe them away because her arms were full of flowers.’ This sobbing beauty with arms full of flowers is the most perfect embodiment of Pasternak’s relationship to the world. Here, as in all the most important moments in his biography, the Chief Artist was at work.
This is the reason that prisoners loved his poetry so much. Varlam Shalamov, the writer with probably the most tortured and distorted biography in the entire twentieth century – and there are enough to choose from – wrote ‘The poetry of Pushkin and Mayakovsky could not be the straws that a person grasped for as he clung on to life, real life rather than just existence.’ When Evgenia Ginzburg, the author of Into the Whirlwind, heard that her sentence was not execution but 10 years in the camps, she could hardly hold back her tears of joy; she steeled herself with words from [Pasternak’s poem] Lieutenant Schmidt: ‘Take your hat in your teeth, do anything but weep! Miles of mineshafts along the Nerchinsk highroad. Hard labour – what a blessing!’
The Christian sense that life is a priceless gift was bestowed on many during the twentieth century because the metaphor was realised literally: life was taken away, but sometimes, with touching compassion, it was suddenly returned. It was quite an achievement (and in this sense Soviet power improved upon the Tsars) to convince the Russian population to see hard labour as a blessing. In the twentieth century prisoners loved Pasternak because he lived life with the sense that it was a miracle achieved through suffering. This is the happiness not of a narcissistic victor, but of a condemned man suddenly granted mercy.
His poems remained that ‘last straw’ to grasp at because a fantastic, forgotten fullness of life radiates from their every line: these texts do not describe nature, they become an extension of it. That is why it is senseless to demand logical connections from them: they come in gusts, like the rain, and rustle branches. The word ceases to be a means for describing the world and becomes an instrument of its recreation.
This is yet another reason to rejoice at the very sound of the name Pasternak: before us is a fully realised gift. His self-appraisal, ‘I was lucky enough to say all that I had to say,’ is no exaggeration. Pasternak fearlessly faced every temptation of his time and embraced many of them; his triumph is not in being beyond reproach, but in the full and accurate expression of everything that he experienced (and his fearlessness in living through it all). We rejoice in this triumph with him, because at the end of such a life even death appears not unnatural, but another necessary link in the chain. Indeed, it was this mood in Pasternak’s poems on the subject of death that his contemporaries could not understand: more than anything else, they were troubled by ‘August’. ‘It’s all about death, but at the same time there’s so much life!’ Fedin exclaimed not long before he betrayed its author, his friend of many years.
Farewell, blue of the Transfiguration
And gold of the Second Coming,
Let a final feminine caress
Soften the grief of my leaving.
Farewell to years of timelessness!
Let us take our leave, O woman
Who challenged the eternal abyss!
I am your battlefield.
Farewell to the span of an outstretched wing,
To the wilful stubbornness of flight,
To the image of the world, realised in words,
To creativity and miracles.
The combination of freedom and stubbornness, this pride in the image of the world so fully expressed in words that we feel we are somehow part of it (for this generous author gives us the chance to take part in his work) – this is exactly what fills us with happiness at the sound of the name Pasternak.
There are two distinct approaches to writing a biography. The first is the apology (and constitutes the vast majority of biographies). The second knocks the subject off its pedestal in order to avoid schoolboy banalities and to illuminate the greatness of the hero, as it were, against the background of his faults. Seen in this way, Pasternak is the most compromised figure in Russian literature. In the language of apologetics, this is called his universalism.
The inheritor of the ‘classical’ tradition and a modernist; a member of the intelligentsia and a man outside of any social class; equally at ease with an aesthete of the former gentry class and a peasant schoolteacher; elitist and democratic at the same time; not recognised by the officials but not forbidden either (this created, until 1958, the ‘ambiguous position’ which Pasternak himself leaned towards and which also determined the uniqueness of his status). A Jew and an inheritor of Russian culture, a Christian writer who did not like or engage in discussions of his Jewishness. A philosopher, musician, bookworm, and a man firmly grounded in everyday life, digging his allotment and lighting his stove with genuine peasant skill. For a Russian reader, Pasternak was a harmonious unity of opposites, just like his dacha, which might sound like some kind of ‘estate’ (in a personal letter to Khrushchev the Swedish king requested that Pasternak not be deprived of his ‘estate’) but which was in fact a two-storey wooden house on a state-owned plot of land. For millions of Soviet readers, Pasternak was a poet of the dacha: at the dacha they lit their stoves like Pasternak, burned dry branches and remembered the ‘pagan altars at the feast of fertility’, went mushroom gathering, began romances, and at night, to the sound of rain outside, they whispered in the ears of their loved ones, ‘At the dacha everyone’s asleep. In the garden, sheltered head to toe, the tatters billow’… Some colleagues scornfully labelled Pasternak a ‘dachnik’ – he refused to take part in trips around Soviet construction projects, corrective labour camps and collective farms; he observed, not without the hint of a challenge to the authorities, that a writer does not need knowledge of so-called ‘life’: everything that he needs he can see from his window. Peredelkino itself, where he lived for 25 years, was another kind of harmonious compromise – between town and country: it is less than 20 kilometres from Moscow, yet a place of fairytale beauty and peace.
Russian philology is going through difficult times. The reign of structuralists and post-structuralists, Freudians and New Historicists, apologists for deconstruction and knights of semiotics has turned out to be no less oppressive than the dictatorship of the Soviet Marxists – the only difference being that there was a time when you could be shot for producing non-Marxist literature, while if you refuse to write in this gobbledygook the worst they can do is exclude you from the literary world. But literature, thank goodness, can allow even the executed to return; so is it worth taking offence at the abuse of unidentified literary objects?
CHAPTER XXV VACANCY FOR A POET
The most frank and defining statement about the 1930s, as Pasternak understood them, is found in the poem often referred to as ‘Stanzas’. In the original it has no title, but it is a direct paraphrase of Pushkin’s ‘Stanzas’, written in 1826, which heralded his transition from moderate and apologetic rebellion to enthusiastic loyalty; the extent to which this transition was voluntary is disputed to this day. Pushkin’s fate was divided into two one September evening when Nicholas I led him by the hand into his ‘close circle’ and confidently announced, ‘This is my Pushkin.’ Were the ‘stanzas’ an attempt at self-justification or a natural stage in the creative evolution of Russia’s finest poet? This is one of those eternal questions; Pasternak’s opinion is expressed unambiguously – he justifies Pushkin, puts himself in his position, makes a clear analogy with the beginning of Nicholas’s reign, and elucidates the inevitability of illusions about power:
A century, more, not yesterday,
Yet there’s the same temptation, hope
Of gaining favour, glory, being
Free to face things without fear.
Not just a fashionable fop, whose day
Of glory lasts just briefly, wanting
To share one’s work with all the people
And at the same time with the law.
At the same moment the same dead end,
Encountering lazy minds as then,
Taking those notes again from books,
The same comparisons between epochs.
Only now is it time to speak,
Shatter the day’s triumph with juxtaposition:
The dawn of Peter’s glorious days
Was dimmed by riots and punishments.
So forwards, now, and without trembling,
Comforted by the parallel,
For now alive – no relic yet,
No one remembering you with regret. (1931)
In its first publication (the May 1932 issue of the literary magazine Novyi mir) the fourth line is missing. Pasternak deleted it himself, restoring it a year later when it was reprinted in the collection Second Birth.
The parallels between Pushkin’s fate and his own are presented unusually explicitly for Pasternak, and cast the author in a favourable light – it is not for nothing that he entreats himself to be ‘comforted by the parallel’. ‘Taking those notes again from books’ is clearly a reference to his own compilation of ‘foreign Leniniana’ in 1924, juxtaposed with Pushkin’s archival research of 1833–6; the line ‘The same comparisons between epochs’ is a reference to his search for analogies between the present authorities and the time of the Petrine reforms and it has two ends: to compliment the authorities ‘in a form they will be capable of understanding’ and at the same time to provide them with some kind of moral compass, to call for contemplation and magnanimity. Pushkin states this call more clearly, even imperatively – ‘Be like your ancestor in all… and may your memory, like his, be short’. Pasternak’s plea, on the other hand, is veiled. More generally, while Pushkin’s poem is concerned chiefly with trying to exert some influence on the authorities and advise friends of his new status, for Pasternak the problem is one of self-justification; after all, he was new to the role of good citizen loyal to the authorities of his country, and on top of that he was new to the role of its first poet.
It is interesting that the Soviet authorities, who sensed that Pasternak was Pushkin’s successor and also a typologically similar figure, understood the foundation of Pasternak’s world view better than any critics. Far better than, say, Khodasevich, who wrote, ‘Of course, I shall not seriously compare Pasternak with Pushkin… though one may compare their epochs… Alongside those who still put up some resistance there are (and their voices are heard more loudly) those who are unravelling, cracking up: Pasternaks. Great philistines by nature, they have identified in philistine Bolshevism a note of delinquent daring bravado and have managed to get ‘in tune with the times.’ He goes on to talk about the collapse of the language that Pasternak is alleged to have destroyed…
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It would be a mistake to conceive of Russian history as a series of thaws and freezes; it is a bit more complicated than that – the cycle has not two phases, but four. The cycle of historical development in Russia consists of four stages that are repeated again and again: reform, which radically destroys the former order and leads to the triumph of unpunished crimes; a harsh, disciplined clamp-down; a thaw, which preserves the regime but lets off steam; and a stagnation that leads to degeneration. This cycle can be traced as far back as the existence of a unified Russian state and continues to the present day. Neither individual heroes nor the masses have any influence upon it: in periods of restoration even the wisest and most charismatic characters in opposition are condemned to failure, and at the end of a stagnation revolutions will succeed even if they are led by complete nonentities. In the absence of a civil society, power encounters no opposition and therefore when it loses all credibility it collapses under its own weight; thus a revolution occurs even without any revolutionaries (this is, in essence, what happened in 1801).1 Any ‘clamp-down’ begins with the expulsion of the ‘oligarchs’ – supporters of reform who have enriched themselves unlawfully – and is accompanied by the canonisation of the reformer on the one hand, and a complete disavowal of all his achievements on the other. The ‘thaw’ is accompanied by a fervent blossoming of the arts because it combines relative freedom with relative stability, the optimal conditions for an artist. The difference between all thaws and all periods of reform is that reformers intend to change the structure of the state radically, while the masterminds of the thaw only optimise it, introducing cosmetic changes.
The period of Lenin’s reforms concluded with the rebellion of the right opposition, after which came the unambiguous and clear Stalinist clamp-down with the exile of Trotsky, the canonisation of the Leader, and the complete disavowal of the content of Lenin’s reforms. The restoration of the empire then progressed at full speed. It was precisely this situation which, apparently, Pasternak fully recognised, and which is described in his poem ‘To Boris Pilnyak’, also dated 1931:
In vain in the days of great council,
Where the highest passions receive their due,
The position of the poet is abandoned:
It’s dangerous, if it’s not empty.
Subsequently, when he was giving an offprint of the poem to the poet and autograph collector Aleksei Kruchenykh, Pasternak explained: ‘It is dangerous when it is not vacant (when it is occupied.)’ Dangerous for the authorities and for the poet. This line demonstrates how well Pasternak understood the operation of Russian history: in fact, in the era of ‘clamp-downs’ there is always a vacancy for the Premier Poet, who stands in opposition to the authorities, is appropriated by them, and counterbalances them. A strong, individual leader presupposes the existence of an equally strong and lone opponent in literature. In the time of Nicholas this role was played by Pushkin, and Pasternak understood who was in line for the position in his time.
He was prouder than anyone. Not only because there was no one equal to him in talent, and not even because analogies with Pushkin were now often voiced – exulting readers noted he was as swarthy, as impetuous, even had the same negro lips! – but above all because he had not been associated with the preceding period of stormy reform, and had remained rather out of the limelight. We recall that it was precisely at the time of liberal Alexander I that Pushkin had been in exile, and under Nicholas he returned and found favour. The period of the clamp-down and general ‘cooling’ demanded a poet who leaned towards tradition and classical models – a poet of imperial resonance and scale. All eyes were fixed on Pasternak and he felt quite discomfited by it. Had Stalin paid excessive court to Zinaida Nikolaevna, the parallel would have been complete, but history is more subtle than this and does not indulge in literal analogies. It is enough that both lived in the ’30s (one hundred years apart) and married beautiful women who shared a patronymic.
Why does an era of post-reform clamp-down characteristically feature this ‘vacancy for a poet’? It is the only instrument through which state and society can influence each other, being protected from oppression by the status of Premier Artist. The poet must possess a collection of specific qualities: a rebellious youth, participation in debates between conservative and reformists on the side of the latter, and a certain number of punitive experiences through which the reforming regime singled out the rebel, so that the new ‘wintry’ regime might shower him with mercy. He must have a talent on an epic scale, a penchant for grandiose forms that he has repeatedly attempted (Pushkin dreamed all his life of writing a long prose work). He must strive to objectify, as Nadezhda Mandelshtam noted so precisely of Pasternak. He should be disinclined towards rebellion and sectarianism, be a moderate conservative in his maturity, and yearn for home and comfort (‘Youth has no need of “at home”’, Pushkin noted with bitterness in 1836). He should experience a subsequent sudden disappointment in his short-lived loyalty, and a serious spiritual crisis.
The niche attracted Pasternak, the vacancy demanded him. Responsibility piled up on him. His creative habits were in fact characterised by secretiveness, hiding away, and in a letter to Stalin he described this secretiveness as the necessary condition of his poetic and human survival. But the vacancy of the Poet is historically conditioned – there is no escaping it. In 1947 he would say:
If it’s possible, Abba, Father,
Let this cup pass from me.
…………………………………..
But the order of the acts is planned,
and there’s no escaping where it ends…
The vacancy is a feature of the same order as the immutable order of the acts. Leaders might perhaps desire the destruction of this order, but this is no more within their power than it is in the power of actors to delete one or other of the roles in Shakespeare’s histories. Where it is written ‘the poet enters’ he must enter. The only advantage of this deeply tragic role is that you are not touched – you are cursed, cast out of favour, but preserved. Thus you appear yet more ambiguous in the eyes of your contemporaries – both those who survive and those who perish.
Lidia Chukovskaya recalled her father complimenting Pasternak on the soaring language of his translation of Shakespeare. Pasternak, standing in a snowy field in Peredelkino, shouted, ‘roared’, ‘loudly, with anguish, with despair; he even slumped to the ground abruptly from the strain, as if the words were choking him. ‘Stop it! Please! Please stop talking. “Soaring language!” I have to know in my own mind that I am a decent person… it can’t come from you. Not even you!’
Such is the burden of the vacancy.
But there is a yet more terrible burden – the burden of loyalty; the tradition of artists loyal to the state in Russia is not so populous, and almost all those that belong to it paid for their loyalty with either their talent or their reputation.
If there is no unity between society and the state, there can be no way out of this crisis, but such unity can only be countenanced under conditions in which the people and the powers have a common aim. The illusion of such a common aim (and correspondingly of unity) in Russian history has arisen only infrequently. Could Pasternak seriously have considered the possibility of cooperation with the authorities with the example of Mayakovsky, who had given his all in the service of the state, staring him in the face?
But in fact in 1931–5 Pasternak had dealings with a different state and accounted for himself most satisfactorily. The utopia of the 1920s had been constructed on a negation of life, the anti-utopia of the 1930s on a return to the norm, to comfort, almost to philistinism. As an opponent of the preceding era, who had not discovered himself in the period of utopia on Earth, Pasternak could not fail to feel more at home in a time of defeated radicalism and cautious reform. He categorically condemned ‘licensed rage’ but completely accepted ‘licensed construction’.
Only in 1939, or even later, would Pasternak understand that there was no difference of principle between the two types of government; the authorities appeared sober and orderly, but turned out to be far more terrible than ‘licensed rage’. It was ‘licensed murder’, but at the beginning of the ’30s Pasternak, of course, could not have realised this. His position in 1931 is perfectly respectable and human because he was prepared to take a risk, to lose his way, and to take on some responsibility for the times. Bulgakov shared this position and treated ‘sniping at Soviet power from under the bedclothes’ with irony. Those who, even back then, ‘understood everything’ did not experience a ‘second birth’: the error of the Premier Poet is more valuable than the perspicacity of people who have the plain skill of always being right and of repeating their favourite incantation: ‘We told you so…’
Pasternak was effectively appointed Premier Poet in May 1934. On the night of 13 May Osip Mandelshtam was arrested.
1 Vladimir Grigorievich Benediktov (1807Ð73), an officer, official in the Ministry of Finance, amateur mathematician and astronomer, and poet
2 Pasternak fell in love with Ivinskaya in 1964 and remained close to her throughout his later years
1 When the Tsar, Paul I, was murdered
1 When the Tsar, Paul I, was murdered