During the summer of 1930 Pasternak composed the poem ‘To a Friend’, bravely addressing it ‘To Boris Pilnyak’ whose recent novella, Mahogany, which presented an idealised portrait of a Trotskyite communist, had been published in Berlin and banned in the Soviet Union. Pasternak’s poem was published in Novy Mir in 1931 and in a reprint that year of Above the Barriers. Written as a statement of solidarity with Pilnyak, and as a warning that writers were under assault, it drew damning comment from Pasternak’s orthodox colleagues and critics. Paradoxically it caused more controversy than the stance taken by Pilnyak and his novella. In ‘To a Friend’, Pasternak wrote:
And is it not true that my personal measure
Is the Five-Year Plan, its rise and its fall?
Yet what can I do with my rib-cage’s pressure
And with my inertia, most sluggish of all?
In vain in our day, when the Soviet’s at work
By high passion all seats on the stage have been taken.
But the poet has forsaken the place they reserved.
When that place is not vacant, the poet is in danger
By 1933, it had become clear that collectivisation – during which at least five million peasants died – had been a terrible and irreversible disaster. As Pasternak would write in Zhivago: ‘I think that collectivisation was both a mistake and a failure, and because that couldn’t be admitted, every means of intimidation had to be used to make people forget how to think and judge for themselves, to force them to see what wasn’t there, and to maintain the contrary of what their eyes told them … And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’ At another point Yury says to Lara: ‘everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common round, has crumbled into dust and been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganisation of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred … ’
During the Great Terror in the 1930s, during which much of the old Bolshevik elite, generals, writers and artists perished, Pasternak was increasingly forced to retreat into silence, sure that he too would not have to wait long for the late-night knock at his door. His fear and distress were compounded when soon after Vsevolod Meyerhold had invited him to translate Hamlet, the director and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, perished at the hands of the secret police. Boris valiantly persisted in his translation, finding in it ‘the mental space to escape constant fear’.
His courage paid off. On 14 April 1940 he was asked to read his Hamlet aloud at the Moscow Writers’ Club. Of the evening, he wrote to his cousin Olga Freidenberg: ‘The highest incomparable delight is to read aloud, without cuts, even though it is only half of your work. For three hours you are feeling Man in the highest sense, independent, hot for three hours, you are in spheres you know from the day you were born, from the first half of your life, and then, exhausted, with your energy spent, you are falling back down, nobody knows where to come back to reality.’
The first time that Olga Ivinskaya saw Boris properly, at close range, and ‘feeling Man’ and ‘hot for three hours’, was the autumn evening in 1946 when he read out his Shakespeare translations at the Moscow museum library. She found him ‘tall and trim, extraordinarily youthful, with the strong neck of a young man, and he spoke in a deep, low voice, conversing with the audience as one talks with an intimate friend or communes with oneself’. In the interval some of the audience summoned up the courage to ask him to read work of his own, but he declined, explaining that the evening was supposed to be devoted to Shakespeare and not to himself. Olga was too nervous to join the ‘privileged people’ brave enough to approach the writer, and left. She arrived home after midnight and, having forgotten her door key, was forced to wake her mother. When her mother angrily reprimanded her, Olga retorted: ‘Leave me alone, I’ve just been talking to God!’
Olga had spent her adolescent years, along with her friends at school and ‘everybody else of my age’, infatuated with Boris Pasternak. As a teenager she frequently wandered through the streets of Moscow repeating the seductive lines of his poetry over and over to herself. She knew ‘instinctively that these were the words of a god, of the all-powerful “god of detail” and “god of love”.’ When as a teenager she went for her first trip to the sea, in the south, a friend gave her a small volume of Pasternak’s prose, The Childhood of Luvers. Lilac-coloured and shaped like an elongated school exercise book, the binding was rough to the touch. This novella, which Boris started writing in 1917 and had published in 1922, was his first work of prose fiction. Originally published in the Nashia Dni almanac, Pasternak wanted this to be the first part of a novel about the coming-into-consciousness of a young girl, Zhenia Luvers, the daughter of a Belgian factory director in the Urals. Although Zhenia Luvers has typically been viewed as the prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak based much of the characterisation on the childhood of his sister, Josephine.
Lying on the upper bunk of her sleeping compartment, as the train sped south, Olga tried to fathom how a man could have such insight into a young girl’s secret world. Like many of her peers, she often found it hard to understand Pasternak’s poetic images, as she was accustomed to more traditional verse. ‘But the answers were already in the air all around us,’ she wrote. ‘Spring could be recognised by its “little bundle of laundry/of a patient leaving hospital”. Those “candle-drippings” stuck on the branches in springtime did not have to be called “buds” – it was sorcery and a miracle. It gave you the feeling of personally discovering something hitherto unknown and locked away by a god behind a closed door.’ Olga could now barely believe that the ‘magician who had first entered my life so long ago, when I was sixteen, had now come to me in person, living and real’.
Their courtship moved at a furious pace. Not for one moment did Boris attempt to hide his attraction for the beguiling editor, nor fight his desire for her. He phoned her every day at her offices, where Olga, ‘dying of happiness’ yet fearing to meet or talk with the poet, always told Pasternak that she was busy. Undeterred, her suitor arrived at the offices every afternoon. He walked her home through the boulevards of Moscow to her apartment in Potapov Street, where she lived with her son and daughter, Mitia and Irina, and her mother and stepfather.
As both Boris and Olga had family at home, most of their initial romance was spent walking the wide streets of Moscow, talking. They met at the memorials of great writers; their usual rendezvous was by the Pushkin statue in Pushkinskaya Square, at the crossing of Tverskoy Boulevard and Tverskaya Street. On one of their city walks, they passed a manhole cover with the name of the industrialist ‘Zhivago’ written on it. The translation of Zhivago is ‘life’ or ‘Doctor Lively’ and Boris was suitably inspired by the name. As he fell in love with Olga, finding his true Lara, he changed the working title of the novel, from Boys and Girls to Doctor Zhivago.
In the new year, on 4 January 1947, Olga received her first note from Boris: ‘Once again I send you all best wishes from the bottom of my heart. Wish me godspeed (cast a spell over me in your thoughts!) with the revision of Hamlet and 1905, and a new start on my work. You are very marvellous, and I want you to be well. B.P. ’ Although Olga was pleased to have her first written communication from her esteemed admirer, she was a little disappointed by the tone of cool formality. The romantic in her, hoping for something warmer, worried that this was his way of warding her off. She need not have been concerned. For the obsessive writer wooing his young beauty, soon even daily contact with Olga was not enough.
Because Olga had no telephone in her apartment, and as Boris wanted to speak to her in the evenings as well, she boldly gave him the number of her neighbours, the Volkovas, who lived below them on the same staircase and were the proud owners of a telephone – rare in Moscow at that time. Every evening Olga would hear a Morse code-like knocking on the hot-water pipes, a signal that Pasternak was on the telephone for her. She would knock back on the damp walls of her apartment, before rushing