Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago. Anna Pasternak
as inhuman. ‘Among them was the war with its bloodshed and its horrors, its homelessness, savagery and isolation, its trials and worldly wisdom which is taught,’ he later wrote in Doctor Zhivago. ‘Here too were the lonely little towns where you were stranded by the war, and the people with whom it threw you together. Such a new thing, too, was the Revolution, not the one idealised in student fashion in 1905, but this new upheaval, today’s born of the war, bloody, pitiless, elemental, the soldiers’ revolution, led by the professional, the Bolsheviks.’ It made you question your loyalty to what mattered in life. Everything and everyone felt deposed. Nothing seemed sacred anymore; not even loyalty to your spouse:
Everything had changed suddenly – the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, who to listen to. As if all of your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgement you respected. At such a time you felt the need to entrust yourself to something absolute – life or truth or beauty – of being ruled by it now that man-made rules had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life which was now abolished and gone for good.
Josephine Pasternak last set eyes on Boris at Berlin train station in the summer of 1935. On 23 June the Kremlin had insisted that Boris attend an anti-fascist writers’ congress in Paris. This summons was a rushed exercise in Soviet propaganda, as the ‘Congress for the Defence of Culture’ had already commenced in Paris two days earlier. The Kremlin recognised suddenly that Boris Pasternak’s absence from a line-up that included the world’s leading writers – including Gide, Bloch and Cocteau from France, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley from Britain, as well as Brecht and Heinrich Mann from Germany – would be a cause of international dismay. Despite suffering from chronic insomnia and depression so debilitating that it had led him to spend months in the writers’ country sanatorium outside Moscow earlier that spring, the Kremlin ordered Pasternak to go immediately to Paris. He was, however, granted six hours free to stop off in Berlin.
Boris had telegrammed his family from Russia prior to his departure to say that he dearly hoped to see Josephine and Frederick along with his parents during this fleeting visit. Rosalia and Leonid were in Munich at the time and regrettably were not strong enough to make an impromptu journey to Berlin. But Josephine and Frederick immediately travelled overnight from Munich, arriving at the family’s Berlin apartment the following morning to await Boris’s arrival.
Josephine was troubled by a new fragility in her older brother’s emotional state. He had been unwell for months, exhausted and distressed by Stalin’s reign of terror on writers and his own inner torment. Despite being hailed as ‘one of the greatest poets of our time’ when he was introduced at the writers’ congress the following day, he felt ashamed of his esteemed reputation. Afterwards he wrote to his father that the whole event had left him with ‘the bitter dregs of a terrible, inflated self-importance, ludicrous over-estimation and embarrassment, and – worst of all – a sort of gilded captivity’. So severe was his nervous exhaustion and depression that when initially requested to go to Paris for the conference, he had rung Stalin’s secretary in person to protest that he was too unwell to attend. ‘If there was a war and you were called to serve, would you go?’ he was asked. Yes, Boris replied. Well, ‘regard yourself as having been called to serve’, was the reply.
Within twenty-four hours an ill-fitting suit was bought for him and two days later he arrived at midday by taxi at his parents’ apartment in Berlin, which Josephine and Frederick had opened up in readiness for his visit. ‘I do not remember my brother’s first words or his greeting, or how we all embraced each other: everything was overshadowed by the strangeness of his bearing,’ recalled Josephine. ‘He behaved as if only a few weeks, not twelve years, had separated us. Every now and again he burst into tears. And he had one wish only: to sleep!’
Josephine and Frederick drew the curtains and insisted that Boris lie down on the sofa. They sat with him while he slept for two or three hours. Josephine was increasingly anxious, as she knew that Boris had to be at the Friedrichstrasse train station for around six that evening and as yet they had not had time to talk. When Boris woke up he seemed mildly refreshed; however Frederick tried to persuade him to rest further and continue on to Paris the following morning. The three of them travelled by underground to the Soviet embassy to request permission for an overnight stay in Berlin. Despite Frederick pleading that his brother-in-law was in no fit state to continue the journey, the request was turned down.
En route to the station, they stopped off at a nondescript hotel to have something to eat. Sitting in the visitors’ lounge, with guests drifting through, Josephine observed that her brother’s face clouded with sadness. Occasionally he would speak in his familiar booming voice, complaining about the journey ahead to Paris. While Frederick went to the train station to make enquiries, Boris at last opened up to his sister during their last precious hour together. Oblivious to the people coming and going around them, they sat huddled close, while the distraught writer tried to control his emotion and suppress his tears.
All of a sudden he spoke with perfect clarity. ‘He said: “You know, I owe it to Zina – I must write about her. I will write a novel … A novel about that girl … Beautiful, misguided. A veiled beauty in the private rooms of night restaurants … Her cousin, a guardsman would take her there. She, of course, could not help it. She was so young, so unspeakably attractive …”’ Boris, who had not yet met Olga Ivinskaya, was referring to his second wife, Zinaida Neigaus, whom he had married the year before. The marriage was already running into difficulties, which caused Boris fierce guilt and disquiet, not least because he had already left his first wife for Zinaida, who was then married to his friend, the eminent pianist Genrickh Gustavovich Neigaus.
Josephine was stunned: ‘I could not believe my ears. Was this the man as I had known him, unique, towering above platitudes and trivialities, above easy ways in art and above cheap subjects – this man now forgetting his austere creative principles, intending to lend his inimitable prose to a subject both petty and vulgar? Surely he would never write one of those sentimental stories which flourished at the turn of the century?’
An hour later, choking back tears as she waved him off from the platform, Josephine tried to take in Boris’s anguished face as he stood by the window of the departing train. She clutched the arm of Frederick, who called out to his brother-in-law: ‘Go to bed straightaway.’ Yet it was only early on a summer’s evening. And then, Josephine heard Boris’s deep, distinctive voice for the last time in her life: ‘Yes … if only I could go to sleep.’
In his personal life Boris was conflicted on many levels. He could not assuage his guilt at the way he had treated his first wife and, feeling emotionally shredded, he was unproductive in his work. His parents were bitterly disappointed that he did not return to Munich after the writers’ congress in Paris, en route to Russia, which he had promised them he would try to do. Boris wrote rather defensively to his father on 3 July: ‘I’m incapable of doing anything whatever on my own, and if you imagine that a week’s stay near Munich is going to put right what’s been wrong for two months (progressive loss of strength, sleeplessness every night and growing neurasthenia), you’re expecting too much. I don’t know how it all came about. Perhaps it’s all a punishment to me for Zhenia [Evgenia] and the suffering I caused her at the time.’
If only Boris had known that this visit would be his last chance to see his parents again. In the summer of 1938, Leonid and Rosalia left fascist Germany for London, where they intended to rest and get strong enough for their eagerly anticipated final journey home to Russia. They wanted to visit Lydia, who had previously moved to Oxford in 1935 and married the British psychiatrist Eliot Slater, whom she had met in Munich. She was expecting her first child. Leonid and Rosalia were followed to England by Josephine and Frederick, along with their children Charles and Helen. With the German invasion of Austria, Josephine and Frederick’s Austrian passports no longer protected them and they had fled from Munich, abandoning their home. After a family reunion and period of recuperation, Leonid and Rosalia fully planned to move back to the country where their hearts lay: their homeland, Russia.
Rosalia’s