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,’ one of the poems that Pasternak had translated. Stalin, who was born in Gori in Georgia, was moved by Pasternak’s lyrical translations of Georgian poetry. Instead of having him imprisoned or killed, as 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