Zhivago Affair : The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (9780307908018)

Chapter 3

“I have arranged to meet you in a novel.”

Pasternak began to write Doctor Zhivago on a block of watermarked paper from the desk of a dead man. The paper was a gift from the widow of Titsian Tabidze, the Georgian poet who was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1937. Pasternak felt the weight of those empty pages, writing to Tabidze’s widow, Nina, that he hoped his prose would be worthy of putting down on her husband’s paper. Pasternak visited Georgia in October 1945 to mark the centenary of the death of the Georgian poet Nikoloz Baratashvili, whose work he had recently translated. He stipulated that 25 percent of the advance for translating Baratashvili should be paid to Nina Tabidze.

Through much of his life Pasternak assisted people imprisoned or impoverished by the regime, and his surviving papers included large numbers of receipts for money orders sent all over the Soviet Union, including to prison camps. Nina Tabidze had not appeared in public in eight years, quarantined from the artistic circles in the capital, Tbilisi, where her husband was once feted. Nina had no word of the fate of Titsian, who was arrested on manufactured treason charges, and she would not learn definitively that he had been executed until after Stalin’s death in 1953. While Nina Tabidze held on to some small flicker of hope that her husband survived in some distant camp, Pasternak later said he had not believed in the possibility that the Georgian poet was alive: “He was too great, too exceptional a man, who shed light all around him, to be hidden—for the signs of existence not to have filtered through any bars.” When Pasternak arrived in Tbilisi, he said he would only participate in the festivities if Nina Tabidze also attended. At public events he sat her next to him. When he was asked to recite some of his translations of the poems of Baratashvili at the Rustaveli Theatre he turned to look at Nina Tabidze and asked if she wanted him to read. It was a defiant signal to the audience that he was embracing this outcast. Nina Tabidze returned the politically risky demonstration of respect with the gift of writing paper for the novel Pasternak planned.

Although Pasternak’s reputation rested almost exclusively on his poems, he had written prose, including some well-received short stories, a long autobiographical essay, and drafts of a novel. Ideas and characters from these writings, but more fully developed, would eventually find their way into Doctor Zhivago, as if Pasternak were on a lifelong journey toward his novel. He was burdened over many decades by the sense that he had yet to create something big and bold, and came to believe that such an achievement could only be earned through prose—“what it can be, real prose, what a magic art—bordering on alchemy!” Pasternak also believed that “major works of literature exist only in association with a large readership.” As early as 1917, Pasternak wrote in one poem, “I shall bid goodbye to verse; my mania. I have arranged to meet you in a novel.” He told Tsvetaeva that he wanted to write a novel “with a love intrigue and a heroine in it—like Balzac.” The reader of an early draft dismissed the effort as “dreamy, boring and tendentiously virtuous.” It was abandoned. Pasternak projected some of this failed ambition onto his ultimate hero, Yuri Zhivago: “Still in his high school years, he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place, in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astonishing things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.”

World War II heightened Pasternak’s preoccupation with the need for some singular piece of work. His friend the playwright Alexander Gladkov said that “his usual sense of acute dissatisfaction with himself now found an outlet in an exaggerated feeling that he was doing too little when set by the side of the enormous exertions of the country as a whole.” In October 1941, as Nazi forces approached Moscow, Pasternak along with other writers was evacuated to Chistopol, a small town of 25,000 people nearly six hundred miles east of Moscow. He subsisted there for nearly two years on thin cabbage soup, black bread, and readings in the dining room of the Literary Fund. It was a drab, cold existence.

Pasternak visited the front near Oryol in 1943 and read his poems to the wounded. General Alexander Gorbatov invited a group of writers to “a sober dinner” of potatoes, a little ham, one shot of vodka per person, and tea. The meal was marked by speeches. Unlike some of his colleagues who were dull and soporific, Pasternak gave a clear, patriotic address leavened with humor and poetic dashes. The officers listened in complete silence, pale and moved. The visit to the front inspired some war poems and two pieces of short prose, and some of the destruction he witnessed would appear in the epilogue to Doctor Zhivago.

Pasternak, however, was never among those writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, whose poems and dispatches, circulated by the millions, were woven into the country’s bloody resilience. “I am reading Simonov. I want to understand the nature of his success,” he said. He considered a novel in verse, and he contracted with theaters to write a play, but nothing ever came of these aspirations. Pasternak complained that he lived “with the constant, nagging sense of being an imposter” because he felt he was “esteemed for more than I have actually done.” His poems were published in the newspapers, and small volumes of poetry appeared in 1943 and 1945. He continued to earn a living through his translations. “Shakespeare, the old man of Chistopol, is feeding me as before.”

In 1944, Pasternak received some wrenching encouragement to continue to reach for a greater artistic achievement. Anna Akhmatova, who had been evacuated to Tashkent in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, arrived in Moscow in 1944 carrying an old letter for Pasternak from Osip Mandelstam, written two years before he perished. Mandelstam’s widow had found it. Mandelstam, who had once warned Pasternak that his translation work would overwhelm his original creations, said in the letter, “I want your poetry, by which we have all been spoiled and undeservedly gifted, to leap further out into the world, to the people, to children. Let me say to you at least once in life: thank you for everything, and for the fact that this ‘everything’ is still ‘not everything.’ ” For Pasternak, the letter, even if it referred to poetry, was a bitter prompt that there was more to strive for. The following year, in May 1945, Pasternak’s father, Leonid, died in Oxford. Pasternak felt he should “burn with shame” when his “own role is so monstrously inflated” and his father’s talent hadn’t gained “a hundredth of the recognition it deserves.”

Guilt, grief, dissatisfaction with himself, the need for that “great painting,” the desire finally to write a classic were all combining to produce what one friend called a “profound inner change” that would propel Pasternak toward Doctor Zhivago. The first recorded mention of the novel appears in a letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam in November 1945, when Pasternak told her that he had been doing some new writing, a novel that would span the whole of their lives. On New Year’s Eve 1945, Pasternak bumped into Gladkov on Mokhovaya Street near the Kremlin. The two were jostled by revelers, but they managed to exchange a few words as they stood in light snow, which dusted Pasternak’s collar and cap. Pasternak said he was working on a novel “about people who could be representative of my school—if I had one.” He smiled sheepishly before moving off.

In an end-of-year letter to his sisters in England, he said that he was compelled to portray the great events of his country in clear, simple prose. “I have started on this, but it’s all so remote from what’s wanted from us here, and what people are used to seeing from us, that it’s difficult to write regularly and assiduously.”

Pasternak’s mood became more buoyant as the writing accelerated. “I am in the same high spirits I enjoyed more than 30 years ago; it’s almost embarrassing.” It seemed to him that the days and weeks were whistling past his ears. “I wrote it with great ease. The circumstances were so definite, so fabulously terrible. All that I had to do was listen to their prompting with my whole soul and follow obediently their suggestions.” Pasternak was also cheered that spring of 1946 by the enthusiastic reception he received from Muscovites at a series of literary evenings. At Moscow University, in April 1946, the audience called for him to continue to recite as he made to leave the stage. The following month, there was another series of encores at a solo recital at the Polytechnic Museum. Pasternak told his sisters that he was experiencing a kind of unexpected fairy tale in this romance with his audience. “You see it in the concert halls which sell out as soon as my name appears on a poster—and if I ever hesitate while reciting any of my poems, I’m prompted from three or four different directions.” (One acquaintance suggested Pasternak, who prepared for recitals, faked some memory lapses to test his audience, and bind it to him.)

On April 3, 1946, at a reading by Moscow and Leningrad poets, Pasternak arrived late and the audience burst into applause as he tried to sneak onto the stage. The poet who was speaking was forced to halt his recital until Pasternak sat down. The man who was interrupted and no doubt irritated was Alexei Surkov, his old and future foe, the poet who said Pasternak needed to imbibe the revolution to achieve greatness. The disruption seemed more than coincidental when much the same thing happened nearly two years later when Surkov was speaking at “An Evening of Poetry on the Theme: Down with the Warmongers! For a Lasting Peace and People’s Democracy” at the Polytechnic Museum. The venue was one of the largest in Moscow, and it was so packed that people were sitting in the aisles while the street outside was crowded with those who couldn’t get in. Surkov was nearing the end of a versified condemnation of NATO, Winston Churchill, and sundry Western belligerents when the audience erupted in applause, which seemed out of key with that moment in his recital. Over his shoulder, it was Pasternak again, stealing a little thunder from his rival, and supposedly slipping onto the stage. He stretched out his arms to hush the crowd, and allow Surkov to continue. When he was eventually called to the microphone Pasternak remarked coyly, “Unfortunately, I have no poem on the theme of the evening, but will read you some things I wrote before the war.” Each poem drew bursts of delighted enthusiasm from the crowds. Someone shouted, “Shestdeesiat shestoi davai!” (Give us the Sixty-Sixth!), a call for Shakespeare’s sonnet, which Pasternak had translated in 1940, in which the Bard declaims:

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall’d simplicity

And captive good attending captain ill:

Tir’d with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Pasternak was smart enough not to recite the politically charged lines. But the sustained applause had become a clapping, stomping public demonstration—a potentially dangerous display of affection for its recipient. (When Akhmatova was similarly received at a reading during the war, Stalin is reported to have said: “Who organized that standing ovation?”) The chairman of the meeting tried to restore order by ringing his bell, and Pasternak sported a smile of satisfied triumph. A large group from the audience followed him on his walk home.

Surkov could only fume. He had made his reputation during the war with unsubtle, patriotic verse that proclaimed:

Death to Fascism! The Soviet

Calls the brave to battle

The bullet fears the brave,

The bayonet the courageous.

One Western reporter in Moscow described Surkov as “emphatically masculine.” Rudely pink-faced and muscular, he spoke in a loud voice—sometimes at such a decibel that he appeared to be addressing a crowd, not conversing—and he walked in exaggerated strides, fast and long. Nine years younger than Pasternak, Surkov grew up the son of a peasant in a district northeast of Moscow and on reaching the capital was consumed with his status there; the Hungarian writer György Dalos, who attended college in Moscow and knew Surkov, described him as a special Soviet case of Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme. Dalos concluded that “in order to understand a figure like Surkov, good and evil must be regarded not as opposites but as parts of one inseparable whole.” A Soviet defector to the West later testified before the U.S. Congress that Surkov was “a KGB man,” meaning he was one of a number of trusted prominent figures who would do the bidding of the secret police when called upon.

Nadezhda Mandelstam noted that in conversation, Surkov always referred to a mysterious entity called “they.” He often wished to extend a kindness, but was unable to act until he had sounded out some superior entity.

“ ‘They,’ as I noticed, were always thinking this, that or the other, or giving it as their view. Once I asked him outright: ‘Who are they?’ As far as I am concerned you are ‘they.’ He was quite bowled over by such a question.… Later I realized that in a world horizontally divided, as it were, into floors, ‘they’ were always those on the next floor.” Mandelstam concluded that “like all his kind he stultifies language, stifles thought and life. In so doing, he also destroys himself.”

Surkov nursed a particular hostility toward Pasternak, yet he showed genuine kindness to Akhmatova, mitigating the worst of her persecutions and bringing her flowers. However, “he worked heart and soul for a system that had a pathological fear of every unfettered word, and so especially of poetry.” And no poet focused his animus more than Pasternak. One Pasternak intimate concluded simply that Surkov “hated him.” Pasternak, on the other hand, was never angered by Surkov’s hostility or criticism. After the war, he praised Surkov’s verse as exemplary of a new realism and said he was among his favorite poets because of his roughhewn, boisterous style. “Yes, really, don’t be surprised. He writes what he thinks: he thinks ‘Hurray!’ and he writes ‘Hurray!’ ”

The novel, which Pasternak initially entitled Boys and Girls, began to come into focus as he worked on it intensely in the winter months of 1945 and 1946, and his ambitions for it grew. “This is a very serious work. I am already old, I may soon die, and I must not perpetually put off giving free expression to my true thoughts.” He called it an epic, and said it was “a sad, dismal story, worked out in fine detail, ideally, as in a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel.” He became absorbed with the writing. “I could not go on living another year unless this novel, my alter ego, in which with almost physical concreteness certain of my spiritual qualities and part of my nervous structure have been implanted, went on living and growing, too.” He promised to give his views on art, the Gospels, on the life of man in history. He said it would “square accounts with Judaism” and with all forms of nationalism. And he felt that his subjects and their varying colors were “arranging themselves so perfectly on the canvas.”

Like many of his contemporaries, Pasternak believed, or at least strongly hoped, that the sacrifice of the people in war, the millions dead and the awful struggle to defeat Nazism, would preclude a return to repression. But Pasternak was also alert enough to observe that the seemingly relaxed postwar atmosphere was eroding as tensions with the Western powers grew into the Cold War. In June 1946, Pasternak told his sisters that he moved around “on a knife-edge.… It’s interesting, exciting and probably dangerous.”

The crackdown on the intelligentsia came in August 1946. The targets, initially, were the satirical writer Mikhail Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. Stalin opened the campaign when the editors of two Leningrad journals were summoned to Moscow and harangued for publishing “silly” material. Zoshchenko, Stalin railed, “writes all kind of cock and bull stories, nonsense that offers nothing for the mind or the heart.… That’s not why we built the Soviet order, to teach people drivel.” The party’s Central Committee followed with a resolution that said Zoshchenko had specialized in writing “vapid, content-less and vulgar things, in the advocacy of rotten unprincipledness … calculated to disorient our young people and poison their minds.” The resolution singled out a story, “The Adventures of a Monkey,” which depicted an escaped monkey who returned to his cage in the zoo rather than deal with everyday life in Leningrad. The resolution described the story as a “hooliganish depiction of our reality.” Akhmatova was also charged with causing damage to young people with her “bourgeois-aristocratic aestheticism and decadence—‘art for art’s sake.’ ”

That a new unforgiving period of cultural repression had begun was driven home in a shrill, vulgar speech by Andrei Zhdanov, a member of Stalin’s inner circle since the 1930s, a colossal boozer, and the piano player when the Leader sang on drunken evenings. Zhdanov spoke in the Great Hall of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad before an invited audience of writers, journalists, publishers, and bureaucrats. The location was well chosen; Lenin announced the Soviet takeover of power in the same hall in 1917. One attendee later wrote that the meeting, which began at five p.m. and lasted almost until midnight, was marked by “sycophantic contributions from the floor and hysterical self-criticism from writers taking part.”

“Anna Akhmatova’s subject-matter is thoroughly individualistic,” said Zhdanov. “The range of her poetry is pitifully limited—this is the poetry of a feral lady from the salons, moving between the boudoir and the prayer stool. It is based on erotic motifs linked with motifs of mourning, melancholy, death, mysticism and isolation … she is half nun, half whore, or rather both whore and nun, fornication and prayer being intermingled in her world.”

Zhdanov’s campaign for conformity, which was infused with a chauvinistic hostility to all things Western, spread to the theater, cinema, music, the university, and eventually the sciences. Pasternak’s cousin Olga, who taught at Leningrad University, wrote in her diary that the new academic year began with the rector appearing before the faculty in a peasant shirt to symbolize a shift in ideology towards the “great Russian people.” She rued that “anyone who in any way shows respect for European culture is dubbed a toady.” New grounds for arrest included “Praising American Democracy” or “Abasement before the West.”

It was inevitable that Pasternak would become a target, and the new head of the writers’ union, Alexander Fadeyev, accused him of being out of touch with the people—“not one of us.” When it was suggested that Pasternak should condemn Akhmatova in print, he refused and said he loved her too much; to help Akhmatova, who had been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and left with no way to earn a living, Pasternak would slip a thousand rubles under her pillow when she came to Moscow and stayed with mutual friends. Pasternak was removed from the board of the Union of Soviet Writers in August 1946 when he failed to attend a meeting called to denounce Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. Pasternak was warned that he was no less suspect as an aesthete than Akhmatova, but he replied with characteristic insouciance: “Yes, yes, [out of touch with] the people, modern times … you know, your Trotsky once told me the same thing.”

On September 9, 1946, Pravda reported that the Union of Soviet Writers had passed a resolution stating that Pasternak was “an author lacking in ideology and remote from Soviet reality.” On the same evening, Pasternak had scheduled one of his first readings of the early part of the novel at his home in Peredelkino. He didn’t read the newspapers and his wife didn’t tell him about the attack, so the reading went ahead. It was attended by his neighbor Chukovsky and his son Nikolai; the literary scholar Korneli Zelinsky, who would, in time, launch a vicious attack on Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago; and about ten or eleven other listeners.

Chukovsky found himself perplexed by Doctor Zhivago. “For all the charm of certain passages,” he wrote in his diary, “it struck me as alien, confusing and removed from my life, and much of it failed to involve me.” The novel bewildered others who were close to Pasternak and steeped in the lyrical beauty of his poetry. When Akhmatova first heard an excerpt at a reading in a flat in Moscow, she “was acutely unhappy with the novel.” She told the physicist Mikhail Polivanov, a friend of Pasternak’s, that “it is a failure of genius.” When Polivanov protested that the novel captures “the spirit and people of that age,” Akhmatova replied, “It is my time, my society, but I don’t recognize it.” His neighbor Vsevolod Ivanov complained after a reading that he had heard none of the exquisite craft he would expect from Pasternak and that the writing seemed hurried and rough.

Pasternak was unmoved by those who complained of the admixture of styles, the reliance on coincidence, slackened writing, and a torrent of characters even compared with the bounteous peopling of the standard Russian novel. Pasternak responded that every aspect of the novel, including its “failings,” was, to him, conscious. Writing much later, in his idiosyncratic English to the poet Stephen Spender, he explained that there is “an effort in the novel to represent the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and versions.” He said he didn’t so much delineate characters as efface them, and coincidence showed “the liberty of being, its verisimilitude touching, adjoining improbability.” Pasternak was no longer interested in stylistic experiment but “understandability.” He said he wanted the novel “gobbled down” by everyone, “even a seamstress or a dishwasher.”

Other listeners were enthusiastic, and moved by the passages they heard. Emma Gerstein, who heard Pasternak read the first three chapters of the novel to a small audience in April 1947, came away feeling that she had “heard Russia,” adding, “With my eyes, my ears and my nose I sensed the era.” Pasternak’s friend the Leningrad poet Sergei Spassky said, “A spring of pristine, creative energy has gushed forth from inside you.”

Pasternak continued to read drafts to small gatherings at apartments in Moscow, and those evenings formed a kind of dialogue with his audience and led him to make some adjustments to the text. At a reading in May 1947, the audience included Genrikh Neigauz, the first husband of his wife and long since reconciled to Pasternak, and Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter, among others. Pasternak arrived with the pages rolled in his hand. He kissed the hand of his hostess and embraced and firmly kissed Neigauz before sitting behind a table and saying, without any ceremony, “Let’s start.” He told the audience he hadn’t yet decided on a title and for now was simply subtitling the novel Scenes of Half a Century of Daily Life. The following year, with four chapters completed, he would settle on the title Doctor Zhivago. While sounding like a Siberian name, Zhivago was derived from an Orthodox prayer. Pasternak told the Gulag survivor and writer Varlam Shalamov, who was the son of a priest, that as a child while saying the prayer lines “Ty est’ voistinu Khristos, Syn Boga zhivago” (You truly are the Christ, the living God), he used to pause after Boga (God) before saying zhivago (the living).

“I did not think of the living God, but of a new one, who was only accessible to me through the name Zhivago,” Pasternak said. “It took me a whole life to make this childish sensation real by granting the hero of my novel this name.”

For Pasternakians, invitations to these literary evenings were cherished. On February 6, 1947, the home of the pianist Maria Yudina was packed despite the raging blizzard outside. Yudina told Pasternak that she and her friends were looking forward to the reading “as to a feast.”

“They will all squeeze into my luxurious single-celled palazzo,” she told the poet in a note. Pasternak almost didn’t make it because he was uncertain of the address and snow drifts were making it increasingly difficult to maneuver the car carrying him and his companions to the event. Finally, a candle in a window drew the group to the right location. Yudina’s house was stiflingly hot because of the number of people inside, and it reeked of kerosene from a vain attempt to kill bugs earlier in the day; they still visibly scuttled across the wall. Yudina was dressed in her best black velvet dress and moved among the guests passing out sandwiches and wine. She played Chopin for a long time. Pasternak seemed nervous, or perhaps he was just uncomfortable from the heat, wiping sweat off his face. He read about the young student Zhivago dancing with his fiancée, Tonya, and the Christmas tree lights at the Sventitskys’ house. When he stopped reading he was bombarded with questions about how the story would unfold. As Pasternak left at first light, he told his mistress that the evening, almost lost because of the snow, had inspired a poem, which would become Yuri Zhivago’s “A Winter Night”:

It snowed, it snowed over all the world

From end to end.

A candle burned on the table,

A candle burned.

The gatherings were also attracting some unwelcome attention. The deputy editor of Novy Mir described them as the “underground readings of a counter-revolutionary novel.” The secret police were also monitoring the soirees and noting the book’s contents for the moment when they would strike.

The attacks on Pasternak continued into 1947. Among those who singled him out for criticism was Fadeyev, the head of the writers’ union. But Fadeyev also embodied the establishment’s duality toward Pasternak. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled meeting Fadeyev after he had publicly inveighed against the “aloofness from life” of writers like Pasternak. Fadeyev took Ehrenburg to a café where, after ordering brandy, he asked Ehrenburg if he would like to hear some real poetry. “And he began to recite from memory verses by Pasternak, going on and on, and only interrupting himself from time to time to say: ‘Wonderful stuff, isn’t it?’ ” Pasternak had once remarked that Fadeyev was “well-disposed to me personally but if he received orders to have me hung, drawn and quartered he would carry them out conscientiously and make his report without batting an eyelid—though the next time he got drunk he would say how sorry he was for me and what a splendid fellow I had been.” Fadeyev shot himself in 1956. As Pasternak bowed before his open coffin in the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions, he said in a loud voice, “Alexander Alexandrovich has rehabilitated himself.”

Official criticism of Pasternak in 1947 reached a pitch in a virulent signed piece by Surkov in the newspaper Kultura i Zhizn (Culture and Life), a principal mouthpiece for enforcing Zhdanov’s line and labeled the “Mass Grave” by some of the intelligentsia. Surkov charged that Pasternak had a “reactionary backward-looking ideology,” that he “speaks with obvious hostility and even hatred about the Soviet Revolution,” and that his poetry was a “direct slander” of Soviet reality. He also said that Pasternak had “meager spiritual resources,” which were incapable of “giving birth to major poetry.”

On the totem of denunciation, which had its own semiotics in the Soviet Union, this was a couple of notches below a call for Pasternak’s isolation and ruin—because if the article was signed, it was less menacing. Gladkov, who had anticipated the official censure and feared for his friend, said he could breathe easily again after reading it. “With all its dishonesty and deliberate obtuseness it did not amount to a definite ‘excommunication.’ ” An anonymous piece in a major newspaper would have signaled ruin. “At least they are not going to let me starve,” quipped Pasternak after getting a commission to translate Faust.

The times, however, demanded some punishment. The journal Novy Mir rejected some of his poems. The publication of his translated Shakespeare compendium was put on hold. And 25,000 printed copies of his selected lyric poetry were destroyed “on orders from above,” on the eve of distribution in the spring of 1948. The readings stopped and he noted that “public appearances by me are regarded as undesirable.”

Pasternak was able to exact some sly revenge. In a revision of his translation of Hamlet, he introduced lines that bear little if any fidelity to the original. Even allowing for Pasternak’s belief that a translation should never be an attempt at “literal exactitude,” the lines from Hamlet, when translated back into English again, were a biting commentary on the politics of the hour. Where Shakespeare wrote of the “whips and scorns of time,” Pasternak had Hamlet say: “Who would bear the phony greatness of the rulers, the ignorance of the bigwigs, the common hypocrisy, the impossibility to express oneself, the unrequited love and illusoriness of merits in the eyes of mediocrities.”

The renewed sterility of cultural life after a flush of postwar optimism was both dismaying to Pasternak and a prompt to burrow further into his new project. “I started to work again on my novel when I saw that all our rosy expectations of the changes the end of the war was supposed to bring to Russia were not being fulfilled. The war itself was like a cleansing storm, like a breeze blowing through an unventilated room. Its sorrows and hardships were not as bad as the inhuman lie—they shook to its core the power of everything specious and unorganic to the nature of man and society, which has gained such a hold over us. But the dead weight of the past was too strong. The novel is absolutely essential for me as a way of expressing my feelings.” His attitude to the state, which had fluctuated between ambivalence and cautious embrace, was now consistently if quietly hostile. He told his cousin that he was as cheerful as ever despite the changed atmosphere in Moscow. “I write no protests and say nothing when addressed. It’s no use. I never try to justify myself or get involved in explanations.” He had other reasons for ignoring the deadening hand of the authorities.

Pasternak had fallen in love.