Pasternak forced himself to stand on his head yet again in 1937 when the Writers’ Union asked him to sign a joint letter endorsing the death sentence of a high-ranking official plus several other prominent military figures on charges of espionage. Pasternak refused. Incensed, he told the union: ‘the lives of people are disposed of by the government, not by private individuals. I know nothing about them [the accused]. How can I wish their death? I did not give them life. I can’t be their judge. I prefer to perish together with the crowd, with the people. This is not like signing complimentary tickets to the theatre.’ Pasternak then penned a letter to Stalin: ‘I wrote that I had grown up in a family where Tolstoyan convictions were very strong. I had imbibed them with my mother’s milk, and he could dispose of my life. But I did not consider I was entitled to sit in judgement over the life and death of others.’
Tensions now erupted with Zinaida, who argued with Boris and urged him to sign the Writers’ Union letter, fearing the consequences for their family if he did not. His adherence to his beliefs made him seem selfish in her eyes. Zinaida was pregnant, which sadly did not seem cause for great celebration at the time. Their marriage was struggling due to their extreme ideological differences and to the political pressures of the times. When Boris first learned of Zinaida’s pregnancy, he wrote to his parents that her ‘present condition is entirely unexpected, and if abortion weren’t illegal, we’d have been dismayed by her insufficiently joyful response to the event, and she’d have had the pregnancy terminated.’ Zinaida later wrote that she very much wanted, ‘Boria’s child’, but her acute fear that Boris could be arrested at any moment made it hard to carry the pregnancy. So convinced was Zinaida that Boris was likely to be arrested at any moment that she had even packed a small suitcase for this emergency.
‘My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn’t,’ wrote Boris. ‘That day I examined the pros and cons of my own survival. I was convinced I would be arrested – my turn had come. I was prepared for it. I abhorred all this blood and I couldn’t stand it any longer. But nothing happened. I was later told that my colleagues had saved me – at least indirectly. Quite simply no one dared to report to the hierarchy that I hadn’t signed.’
It offers insight into his bullish mentality that, fully aware that he might be shot or seized that night, Pasternak wrote: ‘We expected that I would be arrested that night. But, just imagine, I went to bed and at once fell into a blissful sleep. Not for a long time had I slept so well and peacefully. This always happens to me after I have taken some irrevocable step.’
On 15 June Pasternak saw his signature displayed on the front page of the Literaturnaya Gazeta, along with those of forty-three other writer colleagues. He rushed from Peredelkino to Moscow to protest to the secretariat of the Writers’ Union about the unauthorised inclusion of his signature, but by then the heat had gone and no one took much notice. Again, against his better instincts, he had been saved.
Boris’s dear friend Titsian Tabidze was not so lucky. After his early morning arrest on 11 October 1937, he had been charged with treason, sent to the gulag and tortured. He was executed two months later, though no announcement was made at the time. It was not until after Stalin’s death in the mid-1950s that the truth emerged. Boris mourned his friend keenly, remaining loyal to Titsian’s wife, Nina, and daughter Nita. All through the 1940s, when they all prayed that Titsian was alive somewhere in Siberia, Boris assisted the family financially, sending them all the royalties from his translations of Georgian poetry and regularly inviting them to stay at Peredelkino. Titsian’s crime was similar to Pasternak’s. He had written with conscience about Russia, and been openly defiant at a time when literary modernity was crushed by the Soviet state. After an attack on Titsian in the press, Boris had urged him in a letter: ‘Rely only on yourself. Dig more deeply with your drill without fear or favour, but inside yourself, inside yourself. If you do not find the people, the earth and the heaven there, then give up your search, for then there is nowhere else.’
Pasternak’s second son, Leonid, was born just into the new year, 1938. Boris wrote to his family in Berlin on New Year’s Day: ‘The boy was born lovely and healthy and seems very nice. He managed to appear on New Year’s night with the last 12th strike of the clock. And he was mentioned in the statistics report of the maternity hospital as “the first baby, born at 0 o’clock of the 1st January 1938”. I named him Leonid in your honour. Zina suffered a lot in childbirth, but she seems to be created for difficulties and bears them easily and almost silently. If you’d like to write to her and can do so without feeling obligated, please write.’
It is a mark of how far his marriage to Zinaida was unravelling that, eighteen months earlier, while Zinaida organised the house move to Peredelkino from Moscow all by herself – moving her sons and all the family’s furniture – Boris went to stay with his former wife Evgenia, at her Tverskoi Boulevard home. ‘He was very drawn to young Zhenya and to me. He lived a few days with us and entered our lives so naturally and easily, as though he had only been away by chance,’ Evgenia later wrote to her friend Raisa Lomonosova of Boris’s stay with her that summer; ‘But despite the fact that, in his words, he is sick to death of that life, he will never have the courage to break with her [Zinaida]. And it is pointless him tormenting me and reviving old thoughts and habits.’
For Boris, Evgenia’s artistic temperament suddenly seemed less stifling, compared with Zinaida’s bland domesticity. It gave rise to a nostalgia in Boris for his first family and underlined his dour sense of duty to his second. He found Zinaida’s personality ‘challenging’ and ‘inflexible’ and was by now aware that their characters were too different for them to reside together in any sort of harmony. Years later, Zinaida’s daughter-in-law, Natasha (who married Boris and Zinaida’s son, Leonid), said of her mother-in-law: ‘She had a very rigid character. She was practical and disciplined. She would say “now we go to lunch” and everyone would sit down. She was the head of the table, like a captain running a ship.’
Pasternak’s friend the poet Anna Akhmatova observed that at the beginning, being blindly in love, Boris failed to see what others perceived: that Zinaida was ‘coarse and vulgar’. To Boris’s literary friends, she did not share his desire for spiritual and aesthetic pursuits, preferring to play cards and chain-smoke into the early hours. But Akhmatova correctly predicted that Boris would never leave Zinaida because he ‘belonged to the race of conscientious men who cannot divorce twice’. It was inevitable that his emotional journey was not yet over. He was about to meet Olga, the soul mate who would be his Lara, for whom he had longed all his life.
4
Six months after their first meeting at the Novy Mir offices, when Olga introduced Boris to her two young children, it was clear their love was incontrovertible. Both were obsessed by each other, consumed by an irresistible power of attraction. After Boris met Irina and Mitia that April evening in 1947, he was more forcefully drawn to Olga than ever. Yet this was further complicated by his heightened awareness of the pain and trauma he was awakening for them all in betraying Zinaida. ‘Boris suffered immensely from the ramifications of his romantic decisions,’ reflected Irina.
When the children were tucked up in bed that spring night, Boris sat with Olga in her tiny bedroom until midnight, the two of them alternating between elation at the strength of their passion and fevered despair at the practical reality of their situation.
Boris told Olga that he was tormented by his feelings for her and for his own family in Peredelkino. That every time he returned to Zinaida after walking with Olga in Moscow, when he saw his ‘no longer young’ wife waiting for him, he was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood abandoned in the forest. He just could not get out the words that he had rehearsed over and over about how he wished to leave her. Boris