She did go straight into the pages of his book. In Doctor Zhivago Pasternak describes Lara’s daughter Katenka: ‘A little girl of about eight came in, her hair done up in finely braided plaits. Her narrow eyes had a sly, mischievous look and went up at the corners when she laughed. She knew her mother had a visitor, she had heard his voice outside the door, but she thought it necessary to put on an air of surprise. She curtsied and looked at Yury with the fearless, unblinking stare of a lonely child who had started to think early in life.’
From the moment that Boris entered Olga’s family’s life, he felt torn – torn between his love and loyalty to them, and to his wife Zinaida and their son Leonid. Just as years before he had previously been torn between Zinaida and his first wife, Evgenia, and their son, Evgeny. Almost a decade earlier, on 1 October 1937, Pasternak had written to his parents about the unsettled air of regret in his home: ‘A divided family, lacerated by suffering and constantly looking over our shoulders at that other family, the first ones.’
Although Boris was tortured by guilt for the suffering he caused Zinaida (and to Evgenia before her), part of him seemed to enjoy – or at least need – the drama of anguish. Renouncing Olga was never something he seriously considered. Early into his affair with Olga he told his artist friend Liusia Popova that he had fallen in love. When asked about Zinaida, he replied: ‘What is life if not love? She [Olga] is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person. And now this golden sun has come into my life, it is so wonderful. So wonderful. I never thought I would still know such joy.’
2
Pasternak inherited his prodigious work ethic from his father, Leonid, a post-impressionist painter, who exerted the greatest influence on his son’s creative life. All Leonid’s four children – Boris, Alexander, Josephine and Lydia – grew up acutely aware of their father’s ‘shining perennial example of artistry’ and felt discomfiture that Boris’s fame eclipsed their father’s.
Before the Revolution, when the family lived together in Moscow, it was Leonid, not Boris, who was the better known. Leonid worked through one of the greatest periods of Russian cultural life. He painted and socialised with Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, the composer Alexander Scriabin and the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, who founded the St Petersburg Conservatory. The Russian painter Ilya Repin gained such respect for Leonid that he later sent him art students. There was definitely the feeling in the family that Leonid and his pianist wife, Rosalia, were overlooked. There was a silent shame, unspoken by all but Boris, that he had outshone them both.
In 1934, when Boris was forty-four, he wrote to Leonid: ‘You were a real man, a Colossus, and before this image, large and wide as the world, I am a complete nonentity and in every respect still a boy as I was then.’ In November 1945, a few months after Leonid died, Boris told Josephine: ‘I wrote to father that he need not have been dismayed that his enormous services have not received even a hundredth of the recognition they deserve … that there is no justice in our lives, that he will ultimately triumph, having lived such a sincere, natural, interesting, itinerant and rich life.’
Where Leonid undoubtedly triumphed was in his rich personal life. His marriage to Rosalia was blessed; the couple were genuinely devoted to each other. Leonid was a rare artist in that he was a truly contented man. He considered himself lucky both to pursue a profession he revered and to marry a woman he loved. Unlike many artists, he always had time for his children. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Boris. The writer always put his work before his family, while they would not have considered it appropriate to challenge this. ‘He was a genius,’ Evgeny said of his father, Boris, by way of explanation for the writer’s parenting shortfalls. ‘He was that rare thing – a free man. He was much ahead of his time and it was not easy for him to follow his dream. It is so sad if you have to sacrifice your genius for your family. We only went to him when strictly necessary. I was glad of his assistance but never asked for it. We didn’t bother him. He was a man of power and we knew and respected that.’
None of Leonid’s children ever felt that they were secondary to his art or that anything could be more important in their father’s life. In fact they became his art. Contemporaries used to joke that ‘Pasternak’s children were the main breadwinners in the family’, as they were his favoured subjects. A master of rapid drawings, capturing characteristic movements and poses, his charcoal sketches of family life are considered some of his most powerful compositions. From these affectionate drawings alone, it is clear that Rosalia was a devoted mother. Her body is always portrayed leaning in towards her children; whether she is sitting with them at the piano or watching them study or draw, her quiet maternal presence is palpable.
Leonid met Rosalia Isidorovna Kaufman in Odessa, where he grew up, in 1885 when he was twenty-three and she was eighteen. The Pasternaks were of Jewish descent, whose forebears had settled in Odessa in the eighteenth century. Leonid had blue eyes, was slender and handsome with a trim goatee beard. ‘He always wore a kind of cravat,’ remembers his grandson Charles: ‘Never a tie but a loose white silk scarf tied in a bow. He was not a vain man but he must have fancied his visage as he never stopped making self-portraits.’ Charles had a boyish fascination with the nail on the fourth finger of Leonid’s right hand. ‘He specifically let it grow long so that he could scrape paint that he didn’t want off a canvas.’
Like Leonid, Rosalia possessed precocious talent. She was a concert pianist who, as a child of nine, had made her public debut to great acclaim in a Mozart piano concerto. From the age of five, she would sit under the grand piano and listen to her older sister’s piano lessons, then reproduce by memory the pieces her sister was playing. Rosalia was a comforting-looking woman, well padded, with thick chestnut hair always in a neat bun and knowing dark eyes. ‘I felt more attracted to Rosa than to her girlfriends and other young women,’ Leonid recalled. ‘This was not only because of her exceptional musical talent – like any natural gift, this conquered all – but also because of her mind, her rare good nature and her spiritual purity.’ Despite Leonid’s attraction to her, he initially fought against a relationship, worried that it might impede her career as a pianist. Leonid was also unsure what he, as an impoverished artist, could offer her, as she was already a professor of the Odessa Conservatory. Fate decreed otherwise, as they kept bumping into each other. Before proposing to her (they married on Valentine’s Day in 1889) Leonid sank into an uncharacteristic period of reflective apathy: ‘One unsolved question did not cease to torment me: was it possible to combine the serious and all-embracing pursuit of art with family life?’
He need not have worried; for him it definitely was. Sadly, less so for Rosalia. After Boris was born on 10 February 1890, she stopped playing in public, although she still played privately and in her spare time earned money giving piano lessons. In 1895 she came out of retirement to play part of a series of benefits for the Moscow School of Painting and Architecture, where Leonid taught. The journal Moskovskiye Vedomosti reported that ‘the very talented pianist Mrs Rosalia Isidovna Pasternak (wife of a famous artist) played the piano part of Schumann’s quintet’. The concerts were a resounding success.
As they grew up, the children bore witness to their mother’s career sacrifice and it saddened them. During a family holiday in Schliersee, Bavaria, Josephine overheard her father say to her mother: ‘I now realise that I ought not to have married you. It was my fault. You have sacrificed your genius to me and the family. Of us two, you are the greater artist.’ The children considered this too noble. ‘It would have been better if we had not been born,’ wrote Lydia, ‘but maybe it was vindicated by the existence of Boris.’
Josephine recalled of their childhood: ‘When I think back about our family as it was before we parted (during the Revolution) I see it thus: three suns or stars, and three minor bodies related to them. The minor bodies were: Alexander, Lydia and myself. The suns were father, mother and Boris. Mother