Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

Chapter 15

“An unbearably blue sky”

Pasternak turned seventy on February 10, 1960. When he arrived at Ivinskaya’s to celebrate, he was red-faced from the piercing wind; there were frost flowers on the windows and snow fluttered in the air. Pasternak warmed his stomach with cognac and settled in with the assembled company, including the German journalist Heinz Schewe. Ivinskaya served roast chicken with homemade cabbage salad, and the meal was washed down with more cognac and two bottles of Georgian red wine. Pasternak was happy and loquacious. He spoke at length about a number of German writers. There were lots of presents, and notes of congratulations from around the world. Pasternak’s sisters sent a telegram. An alarm clock in a leather case came from Prime Minister Nehru. The owner of a gas station in Marburg mailed him earthenware pots.

“How late everything has come for me,” he told Ivinskaya. “If only we could live forever like this.”

Pasternak had 109 days.

Late the previous year, he had written to a Western correspondent, “A short time ago I began to notice now and then a disturbance at the left side of my breast. This is allied to my heart—I am telling no one about it as, if I do mention it, I shall have to give up my habitual daily routine. My wife, relatives, friends will stand over me. Doctors, sanatoriums, hospitals crush out life before one is yet dead. The slavery of compassion begins.” Earlier that winter, Katya Krasheninnikova, one of his young devotees, visited Pasternak. He told her he had lung cancer, and one or two years to live. He asked her to tell no one but to go to communion with him.

On his birthday, Pasternak still appeared vigorous; he hid the sometimes sharp pain in his chest. But in letters to distant friends, there were hints of an end foreseen, a summing up. “Some benign forces have brought me close to that world where there are no circles, no fidelity to youthful reminiscences, no distaff points of view,” he told Chukurtma Gudiashvili, the young Georgian ballerina, “a world which the artist prepares himself all his life to enter, and to which he is born only after death, a world of posthumous existence for those forces and ideas for which you have found expression.”

Among his more exotic valedictory thoughts was that Feltrinelli should buy his body from the Soviet Union, bury him in Milan, and have Ivinskaya watch over his tomb. His lover began to notice that his strength was ebbing. He would tire while working on commissioned translations and seemed less buoyant during their walks. She was frightened by a grayness that had begun to creep into his complexion.

At Easter, a German admirer, Renate Schweitzer, came to visit. The two had shared an intimate correspondence since Schweitzer, a poet who worked as a masseuse, first wrote to him in early 1958. She was entranced by a newspaper photo of Pasternak and then by the Russia of Pasternak’s Zhivago. Schweitzer was a thunderstruck fan, and Pasternak was somehow transported by this epistolary relationship to the Germany of his student days in Marburg. Schweitzer became so moved by the confessional, tender tone in Pasternak’s letters—in one he ruminated on his complicated life with Zinaida and Olga—that she considered trying to become a Soviet citizen and moving to Peredelkino. Pasternak preferred her as a creature of their correspondence and was ambivalent about the visit, particularly because he was feeling so poorly.

At the dacha, where she ate Easter dinner with the Pasternaks and their guests, Schweitzer noted the pallor in Pasternak’s face and how little he ate. She also visited Ivinskaya with Pasternak, and emboldened by alcohol and in front of her hostess, she kissed her hero with more ardor than affection. She asked the unamused Ivinskaya if she could “have him for a week.”

After walking Schweitzer to the train station, Pasternak complained that his coat was “so heavy.” He also felt compelled to ask for Ivinskaya’s forgiveness, but she was more troubled by his overwrought state—sobbing, on his knees—than the brazen kisses with Schweitzer. Later that week, he also told Nina Tabidze that he thought he had lung cancer but swore her to secrecy. As the pain in his chest became more pronounced, he wondered to Ivinskaya if he was “falling ill as a punishment for what I did to you over Renate.”

The following week, Pasternak began to keep a journal on his health, scribbling notes in pencil on loose sheets of paper. “I have heart complaints, pain in the back. I think I’ve overtaxed myself during Easter. Can hardly stay on my legs. Tiring to stand at my writing desk. Had to stop writing the play. The left arm feels dull. Have to lie down.” He sent Ivinskaya a note that he would have to stay in bed for a few days. “I give you a big kiss. Everything will be alright.”

On the twenty-third, he surprised Ivinskaya when she saw him approaching her on the road, carrying his old suitcase. He was expecting money from Feltrinelli to be brought to him by Schewe or an Italian courier. He looked “pale and haggard, a sick man.”

“I know you love me, I have faith in it, and our only strength is in this,” he told her. “Do not make any changes in our life, I beg you.”

They never spoke again.

On the twenty-fifth, Pasternak was examined by a doctor, who diagnosed angina and recommended complete bed rest. Pasternak was unconvinced. “I find it hard to imagine that such a constant pain, as firmly embedded as a splinter, should be due only to something wrong with my heart, very overtired and in need of attention as it is.”

Two days later, Pasternak felt better and the results of a cardiogram were encouraging. “It will all pass,” Pasternak wrote in his journal.

At the end of April, Pasternak was struggling to get up the stairs to his study, and a bed was made for him in the music room downstairs. He told Ivinskaya not to make any attempt to come to see him. “The waves of alarm set off by it would impinge on me and at the moment with my heart in this condition, it would kill me,” he told her in a note. “Z in her foolishness would not have the wit to spare me. I have already taken soundings on the subject.” He told her not to get upset, that they had come through worse things. But he was now in some physical distress. “The effect on my heart of the slightest movement is instantaneous and horribly painful,” he told her. “All I can do that is relatively painless is lie flat on my back.”

On May 1, Pasternak was visited by Katya Krasheninnikova, the young woman with whom he wanted to have communion at the church. “I’m dying,” he told her. Pasternak asked her to go through the sacrament of confession with him; he read the prayers aloud with his eyes closed, his face serene. Pasternak asked Krasheninnikova to open the door so his wife could hear and then loudly complained that Zinaida refused to call a priest or organize a church burial. Krasheninnikova said she passed Pasternak’s confession on to her own priest, and he said the prayer of absolution. “That’s how they used to do it in the camps,” she later told Pasternak’s son.

A few days later, Pasternak again thought he felt better. He got out of bed, but after washing his hair he suddenly felt very unwell. He continued to advise Ivinskaya that the condition was temporary and counseled her to be patient. “If I were really near death, I should insist that you be called over here to see me,” he told her in another note. “But thank goodness this turns out to be unnecessary. The fact that everything, by the looks of it, will perhaps go on again as before seems to me so undeserved, fabulous, incredible!!!”

On the night of May 7, Pasternak suffered a heart attack. The USSR Literary Fund Hospital dispatched Dr. Anna Golodets and several nurses to provide care for him around the clock. Golodets found her patient battling a high temperature and severe lung congestion. She thought the low, slanting bed set up downstairs had to be very uncomfortable, but she found Pasternak uncomplaining and determined to hide the extent of his disease from his loved ones. He liked the window open during the day; outside, his garden was in full bloom.

Marina Rassokhina, the youngest nurse at just sixteen, delivered updates to Ivinskaya and sometimes spent the night with her. She relayed to Ivinskaya how Pasternak, without his false teeth, felt unbearably ugly. “Olyusha won’t love me anymore,” he told the nurse. “I look such a fright now.” He was frustrated that he couldn’t shave but allowed his son Leonid to do it for him. One of the other nurses, Marfa Kuzminichna, who had served at the front during the war, admired Pasternak’s courage as death neared. “I already feel the breath of the other world on me,” he told her. He spoke about his “double life” and asked her not to condemn him. He didn’t entirely lose his sense of humor. As the nurses prepared for a blood transfusion, he told them they looked like “Tibetan lamas at their altars.”

In mid-May, Pasternak was examined by four doctors, who diagnosed a heart attack and stomach cancer. Pasternak was given a series of injections that led to some hallucinations. He thought he spoke to the writer Leonid Leonov about Faust and was very upset when he learned that event had not happened. An oxygen tent seemed to ease his breathing and reduce the nightmares.

Zinaida sent a telegram to Oxford, assuring his sisters that he was being treated by Moscow’s best doctors. She was draining her savings to pay for some of the care. Western correspondents in the capital tried to obtain antibiotics for him through their embassies.

By now the foreign press was at the gates of the dacha seeking updates in what became a round-the-clock death watch. There were concerned visitors—Akhmatova, the Ivanovs, the Neigauzes, among others—but Pasternak declined to see them. He told them he loved them, was comforted they were nearby, but said the Pasternak they knew was gone. The patient only wanted his wife or his son Leonid, or the nurses, in his sickroom. He didn’t even like to see doctors without being freshly shaved with his false teeth in. Silence enveloped the house, and Zinaida, monosyllabic and unsentimental, managed the daily routine, helped by Pasternak’s brother, Alexander, and his wife, who had moved out to Peredelkino to assist.

Zinaida several times offered to allow Ivinskaya to see Pasternak and to leave the house while she visited. Over the previous year, she was tormented by gossip about the affair with “that lady,” which grew to humiliating proportions because of Pasternak’s fame. Pasternak said he couldn’t bear to see Zinaida “in tears” because of all the whispers. Zina, he said, is “for me like my own daughter, like my youngest child. I love her as her dead mother would.”

Pasternak was adamant that his lover should not come over. Instead, she came to the gate of the dacha weeping and Pasternak’s brother would speak to her. Zinaida thought it was “monstrous” that Pasternak would not see her. She wondered if her husband was disappointed in Ivinskaya, and if the relationship had soured. Pasternak’s notes to Ivinskaya suggest not. He simply could not bear the stress and the pitched emotion of an Ivinskaya visit. He did not want her to see him in his reduced state, and he did not wish to foist all the drama of a visit on his family. He was too decorous, and his lives with these two women were, for him, distinctly separate. It wasn’t who Pasternak loved, but how he wanted to die that kept Ivinskaya hovering near the dacha gate and Zinaida nursing his dying body.

In late May, a portable X-ray machine was brought to the house and it showed cancer in both lungs that was metastasizing to other major organs. There was no hope of recovery. Pasternak asked to see his sister Lydia. Alexander sent a telegram to England: “SITUATION HOPELESS COME IF YOU CAN.” Despite pleas directly to Khrushchev, Lydia spent a week in London waiting for the Soviet authorities to make a decision; by the time they issued a visa it was too late.

On the twenty-seventh, Pasternak’s pulse dropped, but the doctors worked to revive him. Opening his eyes again, he told them he had felt so good while asleep and now his worries were back. He was still feeling low, and unusually blunt, when he spoke to his son Yevgeni later that day.

“How unnatural everything is. Last night I suddenly felt so good, but it proved to be bad and dangerous. With quick injections they tried to bring me back and they did.

“And now, just five minutes ago, I started calling the doctor myself, but it proved to be nonsense, gas. On the whole, I feel everything is steeped in shit. They said I had to eat to make my stomach work. But that’s painful. And it’s the same in literature, recognition, which is no recognition at all, but obscurity. It would seem I was already buried once, and for good; enough. No memories. Relationships with people all ruined in different ways. All fragmentary, no unbroken memories. Everything is steeped in shit. And not only we, but everywhere, the whole world. My whole life has been a single-handed fight against the ruling banality, for the human talent, free and playing.”

By the evening of the thirtieth, it was clear to the doctors that death was imminent. Zinaida went in to see Pasternak. “I have loved life and you very much,” he said, his voice momentarily strong, “but I am leaving without any regrets. Around us there is too much banality, not only around us, but in the whole world, I simply cannot reconcile myself to it.”

His sons followed at about 11:00 p.m. “Borenka, Lydia will soon be here, she’s on her way,” Yevgeni told his father. “Hold on for a while.”

“Lydia, that’s good,” said Pasternak.

He asked everyone but his sons to leave the room. He told them to stay aloof from that part of his legacy that lay abroad—the novel, and the money, and all the attendant complications. Lydia, he said, would manage it.

Pasternak’s breathing became more and more labored. The nurses brought in the oxygen tent. He whispered to Marfa Kuzminichna: “Don’t forget to open the window tomorrow.”

At 11:20 p.m. on May 30, Pasternak died.

Zinaida and the housekeeper washed and dressed the body. The family stayed up through much of the night.

At 6:00 a.m., on the road near Pasternak’s dacha, Ivinskaya saw Kuzminichna coming off duty, her head bowed. She knew without asking that Pasternak was dead and stumbled, crying and unannounced, into the big house: “And now you can let me in, now you don’t have to fear me anymore.”

Nobody bothered her. She found her way to the body. “Borya was lying there still warm, and his hands were soft. He lay in a small room, with the morning light on him. There were shadows across the floor, and his face was still alive—not at all inert.”

She summoned his voice and could hear him recite “August,” one of the Zhivago poems.

Farewell, azure of Transfiguration,

Farewell the Second Savior’s gold.

Ease with a woman’s last caress

The bitterness of my fatal hour.

Farewell, years fallen out of time!

Farewell, woman: to an abyss

Of humiliations you threw down

The challenge! I am your battlefield.

Farewell, the sweep of outspread wings,

The willful stubbornness of flight,

And the image of the world revealed in words,

And the work of creation, and working miracles.

Word spread through the village. Lydia Chukovskaya told her father, whose hands began to tremble. He sobbed without tears.

“The weather has been unbelievably beautiful: hot and stable,” Chukovsky wrote in his diary later that day. “The apple and cherry trees are in bloom. I’ve never seen so many butterflies, birds, bees and flowers. I spend entire days out on the balcony. Every hour there’s a miracle, every hour something new, while he, the singer of all these clouds, trees and pathways … is now lying in state on a pitiful folding bed, deaf and blind, destitute, and we shall never again hear his impetuous, explosive bass.”

The Soviet press did not report Pasternak’s death, although it was front-page news around the world. Prime ministers, queens, and ordinary people sent their condolences. In Milan, Feltrinelli said in a statement, “The death of Pasternak is a blow as hard as losing a best friend. He was the personification of my nonconformist ideals combined with wisdom and profound culture.”

In Moscow, there was silence. Finally, on June 1, a small notice appeared on the bottom of the back page of a minor publication Literatura i Zhizn (Literature and Life): “The board of the Literary Fund of the USSR announces the death of the writer and member of Litfond, Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, which took place May 30 in the seventy-first year of his life after a severe and lengthy illness, and expresses its condolences to the family of the deceased.”

There was not even the standard expression of regret in this final attempt at insult. A writer as prominent as Pasternak would normally be memorialized with numerous obituaries in all the leading dailies as well as an appreciation signed by many of his fellow writers in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Pasternak was still a pariah worthy of only one run-on sentence, and the Central Committee in an internal memo said that the snub “was welcomed by representatives of the artistic intelligentsia.” On June 2, the literary newspaper reprinted the perfunctory notice from Literatura i Zhizn and gave it the same small play at the bottom of the back page. But on the same page was a large article about the Czech poet Víte˘zslav Nezval under the headline “A Magician of Poetry.” For some readers, the juxtaposition was no coincidence but the sly tribute of some unknown editor.

There were other notices about Pasternak’s death, handwritten and taped to the wall near the ticket office in Moscow’s Kiev Station, where the suburban trains departed for Peredelkino. “At three o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday June 2, the last leave-taking of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the greatest poet of present-day Russia, will take place.” Other versions of this message appeared in different locations around the city. When they were torn down by the police, new ones took their place.

The afternoon of the funeral was another in what had been a series of hot days, and one with an “unbearably blue sky.” The apple and lilac trees in Pasternak’s garden were ablaze with pink and white and purple blossoms, and underfoot there was a carpet of wildflowers peeking out from the freshly cut pine boughs that had been laid to protect the young grass.

When the American journalist Priscilla Johnson caught the train around 1:00 p.m., it was clear that many of the passengers, wearing black and carrying sprigs of lilac, were on their way to the funeral. And when the train pulled into Peredelkino, it emptied out, disgorging passengers who seemed to her to be either very young or very old. The authorities described them as “mostly intelligentsia” and young people, students from the Institute of Literature and Moscow State University. They formed a loose procession to the dacha. The police were stationed at all the intersections, and they told those who arrived by car, including the foreign press, that they would have to park and walk the last part of the way.

The authorities hoped to manage the funeral, and how it was seen by the world. On the eve of the burial, the local Communist Party chief had provided a tour of the village for foreign correspondents, including the cemetery, where a freshly dug grave stood in the shade of three tall pine trees and within sight of Pasternak’s dacha. It was a cemetery of competing ideas: crosses or red stars marked the different graves. “Pasternak will be buried in the best site in the graveyard,” the functionary boasted.

Representatives of the USSR Literary Fund had visited the family after Pasternak’s death and said they would pay for the burial and help manage the logistics. The KGB set up temporary headquarters in a local office, and agents were sent out to mingle with the crowd and record who attended. Word had already spread among members of the Moscow branch of the Union of Soviet Writers that they should not attend, and in the days before the funeral some writers had snuck in and out through the backyard to pay their respects without being seen by the ubiquitous informers.

Only a few writers were willing to risk the wrath of the authorities by attending the funeral. When the playwright Alexander Shtein was asked why he didn’t go to the funeral, he replied, “I don’t take part in anti-government demonstrations.”

The curtains were drawn in the house of Pasternak’s neighbor Konstantin Fedin, Surkov’s successor as secretary of the writers’ union. Fedin was ill, but his absence was taken as an affront. Two mourners clashed by Pasternak’s coffin over Fedin’s failure to attend. One had claimed that Fedin was so sick he didn’t know about Pasternak’s death. Another had angrily retorted: “He can see perfectly well from his windows what is going on here.”

The novelist Veniamin Kaverin was so incensed he later wrote to Fedin. “Who can forget the senseless and tragic affair of Pasternak’s novel—an affair which did so much damage to our country? Your part in this business went so far that you even felt compelled to pretend you had not heard of the death of the poet who was your friend and lived next door to you for 23 years. Perhaps you could see nothing from your window as people came in their thousands to take their leave of him, and as he was carried in his coffin past your house.”

The garden quickly filled to overflowing. Western newsmen stood on boxes by the dacha gates; some climbed into the trees to get a better view. The mourners waited silently to enter the house by the side door and file by the body before exiting out the front door. Pasternak was dressed in his father’s dark gray suit and a white shirt. “He could have been lying in a field, rather than in his own living room, for the coffin was banked with wild flowers, with cherry and apple blossoms, as well as red tulips and branches of lilac.” The flowers became more and more heaped as mourners left their own sprays. A group of women dressed in black—sometimes including Zinaida and Yevgenia, Pasternak’s first wife—stood at the head of the coffin.

The journalist Priscilla Johnson was shocked when she saw the body, “for the face had lost all of its squareness and strength.” Veniamin Kaverin thought that Pasternak’s familiar face was now “sculpted in white immobility,” and he detected what he thought was “a tiny smile lingering on the left corner of his mouth.” The body had been embalmed on May 31 after the artist Yuri Vasilyev had made a death mask. On June 1, a local priest held a private requiem service in the dacha for the family and some close friends.

When Johnson asked Pasternak’s sister-in-law if the burial would be preceded by a service in the nearby fifteenth-century Russian Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration, she looked the American up and down. “You,” she said, “are very naïve.”

Ivinskaya passed by the body, unable to linger because of the stream of people behind her. “Inside people were still taking leave of my beloved, who lay there quite impassive now, indifferent to them all, while I sat by the door so long forbidden to me.” She was approached by Konstantin Paustovsky, the eighty-year-old dean of Soviet letters, and Ivinskaya began to cry as he bent down to speak to her. Paustovsky must have imagined that she was unable to enter the house because of her complicated situation. “I want to go past the coffin with you,” he said, taking Ivinskaya by the elbow.

Paustovsky remarked on what “an authentic event the funeral was—an expression of what people really felt.” He said one was bound to recall “the funeral of Pushkin and the Tsar’s courtiers—their miserable hypocrisy and false pride.”

The secret police moved among the crowd, eavesdropping or taking photographs. They were unmistakable to many of the mourners and the “sole alien element in the crowd which, with all its diversity, was united in its shared feeling.”

“How many were there altogether?” Pasternak’s old friend Alexander Gladkov wondered. “Two or three thousand, or four? It was hard to say but it was certainly a matter of several thousand.” Western correspondents placed the number at a more conservative one thousand and the authorities counted five hundred. Even a crowd of a few hundred was remarkable. Gladkov had worried that the funeral would turn out to be “rather poorly attended and pathetic.”

“Who could have expected so many when nobody had to come just for form’s sake, by way of duty, as is so often the case,” Gladkov marveled. “For everybody present, it was a day of enormous importance—and this fact itself turned it into another triumph for Pasternak.”

People ran into old friends in the front garden—comrades, in some cases, from the camps. Gladkov met two former inmates he had known and not seen in years. It seemed entirely natural to meet again at this moment, and Gladkov recalled Pasternak’s lines from “Soul”:

My soul, you are in mourning

For all those close to me

Turned into a burial vault

For all my martyred friends.

Around the back of the dacha, people sat on the grass as some of Russia’s finest pianists played on an old upright, the notes wafting through the open windows of the music room. Stanislav Neigauz, Andrei Volkonsky, Maria Yudina, and Svyatoslav Richter took turns, performing slow dirges and some of the melodies Pasternak loved, particularly those by Chopin.

Shortly after 4:00 p.m. Richter ended the music with a rendition of Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” The family asked those still inside the house to move into the front garden so they could have a last moment alone with the deceased. Ivinskaya, outside by the front porch, strained to see inside, at one point climbing up on a bench and looking through a window. One observer thought that “in her humiliated position, she looked overwhelmingly beautiful.”

After a short period, Zinaida, dressed in black, her hair highlighted with henna, stepped onto the front porch. It was time for the funeral procession.

The mounds of flowers from around the coffin were passed through the windows to the crowd. The organizers from Litfond had driven up a blue minibus to carry the coffin quickly and ahead of the mourners to the grave, where the casket was to be hastily buried. The pallbearers, including Pasternak’s two sons, refused to put the body in the vehicle. The open coffin was hoisted on their shoulders, and the crowd parted as they set off, through the garden, right on Pavlenko, and along “the melancholy dirt road” which “bitterly threw up dust” as the crowd made its way to the cemetery.

The young writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both disciples of Pasternak, followed with the coffin lid. In the Russian tradition, it would not be screwed on until the moment just before interment. The pallbearers, at the head of the throng, walked with such haste that the body appeared to be bobbing on an ocean of humanity. Young men stepped out of the crowd to assist in carrying the coffin when the pallbearers appeared to tire.

Some of those in attendance took a shortcut across the newly plowed field in front of Pasternak’s dacha. It led directly down to the cemetery, which stood on a small hillside near the brightly colored cupolas of the local church. The graveyard was already crowded when the procession with the coffin arrived. When the pallbearers reached the edge of the grave, they raised the casket high above the crowd just for a moment before placing it on the ground.

“For the last time, I saw the face, gaunt and magnificent, of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” recalled Gladkov.

The philosopher Valentin Asmus, a professor at Moscow State University and an old friend of Pasternak’s, stepped forward. A young boy leaned in to Priscilla Johnson and told her who he was. “Non-party,” he added.

“We have come to bid farewell to one of the greatest of Russian writers and poets, a man endowed with all the talents, including even music. One might accept or reject his opinions but as long as Russian poetry plays a role on this earth, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak will stand among the greatest.

“His disagreement with our present day was not with a regime or a state. He wanted a society of a higher order. He never believed in resisting evil with force, and that was his mistake.

“I never talked with a man who demanded so much, so unsparingly, of himself. There were but few who could equal him in the honesty of his convictions. He was a democrat in the true sense of the word, one who knew how to criticize his friends of the pen. He will forever remain as an example, as one who defended his convictions before his contemporaries, being firmly convinced that he was right. He had the ability to express humanity in the highest terms.

“He lived a long life. But it passed so quickly, he was still so young and he had so much left to write. His name will go down forever as one of the very finest.”

The actor Nikolai Golubentsov then recited Pasternak’s poem “O Had I Known” from the 1932 collection Second Birth.

A slave is sent to the arena

When feeling has produced a line

Then breathing soil and fate take over

And art has done and must resign.

A young man, nervous and stammering, read “Hamlet” from the Zhivago cycle of poems. The poem, like the novel, had never been published in the Soviet Union but still “a thousand pairs of lips began to move in silent unison” and a charge seemed to course through the crowd. Someone shouted, “Thank you in the name of the working man. We waited for your book. Unfortunately, for reasons that are well known, it did not appear. But you lifted the name of writer higher than anyone.”

The officials from Litfond, sensing the hostile murmur of the crowd, moved to bring the funeral to an end. Someone began to carry the lid toward the coffin. The closest mourners bent over the body to kiss Pasternak farewell. Among the last was Ivinskaya, crying uncontrollably. At certain points during the graveside ceremony, she and Zinaida were just steps away from one another at the head of the coffin. Zinaida was irritated that Ivinskaya and her daughter had pushed their way to the front. As Ivinskaya said her farewell, Zinaida “stood smoking by a fence, not 20 feet from the coffin … and throwing baleful glances now and then at the man whose body was about to be lowered into the grave.”

Spontaneous shouts continued from the crowd.

“God marks the path of the elect with thorns, and Pasternak was picked out and marked by God!”

“Glory to Pasternak!”

“The poet was killed!” someone cried, and the crowd responded, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

One of the Litfond officials yelled, “The meeting is over; there will be no more speeches!”

A copy of a prayer for the dead was placed on Pasternak’s forehead by his longtime housekeeper, and the lid was hammered shut. There were more cries as the coffin was lowered and the first thuds of dirt hit the wood—“faint, muffled and terrifying.”

The sky clouded over. Most of the crowd quickly dispersed but about fifty young people stayed at the grave, reciting Pasternak’s poetry. They were still there when the sun began to set—“the voice now of one, now another, rising and falling in an eloquent singsong.” The KGB decided not to interfere, but the Central Committee later told the Ministry of Culture and the Union of Soviet Writers to pay attention to the education of students because “some of them (and their number is trifling) have been poisoned with unhealthy, oppositional ideas and are trying to position Pasternak as a great artist and writer who was not understood by his epoch.”

Through the long, exhausting day, Lydia Chukovskaya, despite her sorrow, had a “strange feeling of triumph, of victory.

“The victory of what? I don’t know. Maybe of his poetry. Of Russian poetry?” she wondered. “Of our unbreakable bond with him?”