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 later in 1961) one of the ugliest women I have ever met. Evgenia was softer, more sensitive and far more attractive than 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,