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 of literary suicide, the audience were stunned. No one risked so public a speech as this until after Stalin’s death. After this, there were no more efforts to draw Pasternak into the literary establishment. For the main part he was left alone, while the purges on writers continued with terrifying frequency and force. In October 1937, his great friend Titsian Tabidze was expelled from the Union of Georgian Writers and arrested. Paolo Yashvili, rather than be forced into denouncing Tabidze, shot himself dead at the offices of the Writers’ Union.
When in 1937 Osip Mandelstam was allowed to return from exile, Zinaida feared having any contact with him and his wife, in case it threatened her family’s safety. Boris abhorred what he saw as such moral cowardice. On several occasions, Zinaida prevented him from receiving friends and colleagues at Peredelkino for fear of contagion by association. Once, when Osip and Nadezhda turned up at the Peredelkino dacha, Zinaida refused to receive them. She forced her husband back onto the verandah to tell his friends lamely and with considerable embarrassment: ‘Zinaida seems to be baking pies.’ According to Olga Ivinskaya, Zinaida always ‘loathed’ the Mandelstams, who she considered were compromising her ‘loyal’ husband. Olga claimed that Zinaida was famous ‘for her immortal phrase: “My sons love Stalin most of all – and then their Mummy.”’
Zinaida’s antipathy towards the Mandelstams would have incensed Boris and caused further rifts between them. Boris’s belief in his destiny at this time gave him a certain fearlessness that Zinaida could not begin to match. She later admitted: ‘no one could know on whose head the rock would fall and yet he showed not an ounce of fear’.
On 28 October 1937, Boris’s friend and neighbour at Peredelkino, Boris Pilnyak, was arrested by the secret police. His typewriter and the manuscript of his new novel were confiscated and his wife arrested. The NKVD report implicated Boris too: ‘Pasternak and Pilnyak held secret meetings with [the French author André] Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book attacking the USSR.’ In April, after a trial lasting just fifteen minutes, Pilnyak was condemned to death and executed. His final words to the court after months of imprisonment were: ‘I have so much work to do. A long period of seclusion has made me a different person; I now see the world through new eyes. I want to live, to work, to see in front of me paper on which to write a work that will be of use to the Soviet people.’
Another of Pasternak’s friends, the playwright A. N. Afinogenov, who had been expelled from the Communist Party and from the Writers’ Union for daring to criticise the dictatorship through his work, was abandoned by all his friends except Boris. On 15 November he wrote: ‘Pasternak is going through a hard time now; he has constant quarrels with his wife. She tries to make him attend all the meetings; she says he doesn’t think about his children, and his reserved behaviour seems suspicious and he will be arrested if he continues to be aloof.’
Pasternak confided to the literary scholar and critic Anatoly Tarasenkov in 1939: ‘In those horrendous, blood-stained years anyone might have been arrested. We were shuffled like a pack of cards. I have no wish to give thanks, in a philistine way, for remaining alive while others did not. There is a need for someone to show grief, to go proudly into mourning, to react tragically – for someone to be tragedy’s standard bearer.’
In spite of unimaginable pressures, Pasternak stayed true to himself in his professional life. His loyalty to his friends was unwavering. Osip Mandelstam was again arrested in 1938 and eventually died in the gulag. The only person to visit Mandelstam’s widow after his death was Boris. ‘Apart from him no one had dared to come and see me,’ said Nadezhda.
It is almost miraculous that Pasternak was not exiled or killed during these years. Why did Stalin save his ‘cloud dweller’? Another quirk that may have saved the writer’s life was that Stalin believed the poet had prescient powers, some sort of second sight.
In the early hours of 9 November 1932, Stalin’s wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, committed suicide. At a party the previous evening, a drunken Stalin had flirted in front of the long-suffering Nadya and had publicly diminished her. That night, when she heard rumours that her husband was with a lover, she shot herself in the heart.
The death certificate, signed by compliant doctors, said that the cause of death was appendicitis (as suicide could not be acknowledged). Soviet ritual required collective letters of grief from different professions. Almost the whole of the literary establishment – thirty-three writers – signed a formal letter of sympathy to Stalin. Pasternak refused to add his name to it. Instead, he wrote his own letter in which he hinted that he shared some mythical communion with Stalin, empathising with his motives, emotions and presumed sense of guilt.
In his letter, Boris wrote: ‘I share the feelings of my comrades. On the evening before, I found myself thinking deeply and continually about Stalin for the first time from the point of view of an artist. In the morning I read the news, and I was shaken just as if I had been present, and as though I had lived through it, as though I had seen it all.’ It appears that Stalin may well have believed that Pasternak was a ‘poet-seer’ who had prophetic powers. According to the émigré scholar Mikhail Koryakov, writing in the American Russian-language newspaper Novy Zhurnal: ‘from that moment onwards … it seems to me, Pasternak, without realising it, entered the personal life of Stalin and became some part of his inner world’.
As neither Pasternak nor an increasingly nervous Zinaida could have known about this golden protection from on high, that he continued to work on Doctor Zhivago, drafting the structure throughout the mid-thirties,