Читать книгу Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago - Anna Pasternak - Страница 11

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 was the brightest sun. However outstanding they were, both with father and Boris one could detect endeavour, quest, in their art. Mother never tried to shine: she shone as naturally as people breathe.’

In 1903 the Pasternaks took a summer cottage on an estate in the village of Obolenskoye, 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow. Evenings were spent with Rosalia at the piano, her music flooding through the open windows. While the teenage Boris played Cowboys and Indians with his brother Alexander, they stumbled across the next-door house where the pianist Scriabin was staying. Listening to him compose his The Divine Poem, part of his Symphony No 3 in C Minor, Boris was so enchanted that he decided that he too would become a composer. Thanks to Rosalia’s tutelage, he was already an accomplished pianist. ‘From his childhood, my brother was distinguished by an inordinate passion to accomplish things patently beyond his powers, ludicrously inappropriate to his character and cast of mind,’ said Alexander.

Part of what Alexander was referring to was a fantasy of his brother’s which ended in disaster. The veranda of the family’s rented dacha had a sweeping view across water meadows and every evening peasant girls galloped by on their unsaddled horses, taking the herd to the grazing land for the night. They were illuminated by the setting sun. Its glowing rays captured the bay horses, the motley skirts and shawls and the sunburnt faces of the riders. Boris longed to ride in this romantic cavalcade, despite having no riding experience. When, on 6 August, one of the peasants failed to show up, Boris rode off on a wild horse that bucked him to the ground. The whole family watched, aghast, as he fell under the horse and the herd thundered over him. The accident left him with a broken leg which, when the cast came off after six weeks, remained shorter than the other. This caused a lifelong limp. As a result, he was unfit for military service – which may, in the long run, have saved his life.

The disability rankled. Boris hated failure in anything, and this helps explain why, despite considerable success in composition, he decided to give up his musical aspirations when he realised that he had a ‘secret trouble’. ‘I lacked perfect pitch,’ Pasternak wrote later. ‘This was quite unnecessary to me in my work but the discovery was a grief and humiliation and I took it as proof that my music was rejected by heaven or fate. I had not the courage to stand up to all these blows and I lost heart. For six years I had lived for music. Now I tore it up and flung it from me as you throw away your dearest treasure.’

However, when he had abandoned music, fate played her hand: he took up verse and found his true calling. Once he discovered his vocation as a writer, it was his father’s working relationship with Leo Tolstoy that was to indelibly influence Boris’s creative life and stringent writing ethic.

In 1898 Leonid’s career hit a high note when Leo Tolstoy commissioned him to illustrate Resurrection, which had taken him ten years to write. Tolstoy had met Leonid five years earlier in 1893 when he attended the regular exhibition of the Wanderers (a show case of distinguished Moscow and St Petersburg artists). Tolstoy was introduced to Leonid and shown Pasternak’s painting The Debutante. Leonid was invited to Tolstoy’s Moscow home the following Friday for tea and told to bring his portfolio. When Tolstoy saw some illustrations that Leonid had done with War and Peace in mind, he turned to Leonid and said: ‘They offer the squirrel nuts when it’s lost its teeth. You know, when I wrote War and Peace, I dreamed of having such illustrations. It’s really wonderful, just wonderful!’

Working with Tolstoy on Resurrection at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoys’ country estate situated in the Tula region, was a privileged, immensely enjoyable yet challenging time for Leonid. ‘Some of the most memorable and happiest days of my life were spent reading the manuscript in the daytime and conversing with Tolstoy in the evenings.’ He would walk up and down the hall with the writer, discussing what he had read and planned to illustrate the following day. Once, when Tolstoy saw one of Leonid’s illustrations he exclaimed: ‘Ah, you express that better than me. I must go and change my prose.’

Under incredible pressure to meet the deadlines of Tolstoy’s St Petersburg publisher and do the writer he worshipped justice, Leonid diligently completed thirty-three illustrations in six weeks, afterwards falling ill, burnt out with exhaustion. This intense collaboration made an enduring impression on Boris. ‘It was from our kitchen that my father’s remarkable illustrations for Tolstoy’s Resurrection were dispatched,’ he said.

The novel appeared, chapter by chapter, in the journal Niva, a periodical edited by the Petersburg publisher Fyodor Marx. Boris was struck by how feverishly his father had to work to meet the deadline. ‘I remember how pressed for time father was. The issues of the journal came out regularly without delay,’ he wrote. ‘One had to be in time for each issue. Tolstoy kept back the proofs, revising them again and again. There was the risk that the illustrations would be at variance with the corrections subsequently introduced into it. But my father’s sketches came from the same source whence the author obtained his observations, the courtroom, the transit prison, the country, the railway. It was the reservoir of living details, the identical realistic presentation of ideas that saved him from the danger of digressing from the spirit of the original.’

In view of the urgency of the matter, special precautions were taken to prevent any delay in the sending of the illustrations. The services of the conductors of the express trains at the Nikolayevsky railway were enlisted; the guards on the express trains to St Petersburg acted as messengers.

‘My imagination was impressed by the sight of a uniformed guard waiting outside our kitchen door, as on a station platform outside a railway carriage,’ wrote Boris. ‘Joiner’s glue sizzled on the range. The drawings were hastily sprinkled with fixative and glued on sheets of cardboard, and the parcels, wrapped up, tied and sealed up with sealing wax and handed over to the guard.’ The whole family was involved in this endeavour – Rosalia used to help with the pressured business of packing and mailing the illustrations, while the children watched, rapt.

Thirty years later, on 21 May 1939, Pasternak wrote to his father: ‘Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter [Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya-Esenina] came to see me with a friend of hers and they talked a great deal about you. She had already spoken to me several times before about how she loved your illustrations. “Of all Tolstoy’s illustrators, not one has come close to him or embodies his ideas so faithfully as your father” – “Yes, yes, the drawings for Resurrection, they’re just brilliant,” put in the other. And we all agreed that you have no equal.’

Tolstoy died on 7 November 1910 while ‘fleeing the world’ at Astapovo train station. The world’s press was camped out on the platform. Leonid was summoned to make a drawing of the deceased writer on his death bed and took the twenty-year-old Boris with him. Boris watched as his father drew in pastel the corner of the room where Countess Tolstoy sat ‘shrunken, mournful, humiliated’ at the head of the iron bed where her husband was lying. Sofia Tolstoy explained to Leonid that after Tolstoy left her, due to antagonisms between her and his disciples, she had tried to drown herself and had to be dragged out of the lake at Yasnaya Polyana. It took Leonid fifteen minutes to complete the death-bed drawing. In his notebook, Leonid wrote: ‘Astapovo. Morning. Sofia Andreyevna at his bedside. The people’s farewell. Finale of a family tragedy.’

The summer before the 1917 Revolution, Boris Pasternak was visiting his parents at the apartment they rented in a manor house in a Molodi estate, 60 kilometres south of Moscow. It was thought that the house had served as a lodge for Catherine II’s journeys to the south of Crimea. The generous proportions of the manor and grand layout of the park, with its converging avenues, suggested royal origins. While his first collection of poetry, Above the Barriers, was being prepared, Pasternak went to work as an industrial office clerk to support the war effort. The twenty-seven-year-old poet was given a job in a chemical works in an industrial town called Tikhiye Gory, on the banks of the River Kama in the Republic of Tatarstan. This town, known as ‘Little Manchester’, was at an important intersection of geographical and trade routes uniting East and Western Russia. While fulfilling his daily filing duties, Pasternak did not cease his literary work. In order to earn money he began translating Swinburne’s trilogy of dramas about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.

‘In March 1917, when news of the Revolution that had broken out in Petersburg came through, I set out for Moscow,’ Pasternak later wrote. ‘At the Izhevsk factory I was to find and pick up Zbarsky, a fine fellow of an engineer who had been sent there on a work assignment, place myself at his disposal and then continue my journey with him. From the Tikhiye Gory we sped on in a covered wagon on runners, for an evening, right through the night and part of the following day. Wrapped up in three long coats and half buried in hay, I rolled on the floor of the sleigh like some bulky sack, robbed of any freedom of movement.’

The February Revolution was focused around Petrograd (now St Petersburg). In the chaos, members of the Imperial Parliament assumed control of the country, forming a provisional government. The army leadership felt that they did not have the means to suppress the Revolution, resulting in Tsar Nicholas’s abdication. A period of dual power ensued, during which the provisional government held state power while the national network of ‘soviets’, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the working classes and the political left. During this period there were frequent mutinies, protests and strikes as attempts at political reform failed and the proletariat gained power. In the October Revolution (November in the Gregorian calendar) the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, overthrew the provisional government and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, moving the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918 out of fear of imminent foreign invasion. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside. Civil war subsequently erupted among the ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks) and ‘Whites’ (anti-socialist factions). It continued for several years, creating poverty, famine and fear, especially amongst the intelligentsia. The Bolsheviks eventually defeated the Whites and all rival socialists, paving the way for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.

In Doctor Zhivago, Yury Zhivago bears witness to the momentous political upheaval:

The paper was a late extra, printed on one side only; it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People’s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were established in Russia. There followed the first decrees of the new government and various brief news items received by telegraph and telephone.

The blizzard slashed at Yury’s eyes and covered the printed page with a grey, rustling snowy gruel, but it was not the snowstorm that prevented Yury from reading. He was shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment and the thought of its significance for centuries to come.

After 1917 life in Moscow was harrowing. Food and fuel were scarce and living conditions poor. Fortunately, Boris’s brother Alexander, a budding architect, knew exactly which bits of roof beams could be cut away and sawn up for firewood without causing the whole house to collapse, as a number did in the Moscow winter of 1918–19. Fuel was in such demand that at night Boris broke planks from rotten fences or stole firewood from government places, and guests invited for tea brought a log as a gift instead of sweets or chocolates. In the grey hours before sunrise, the Pasternak children would set out for the Boloto, a market where villagers sold what vegetables they could. In Zhivago, Pasternak recalls the privations and pressures of war, the resulting famine and spread of typhoid:

Winter was at hand and in the world of men the air was heavy with something as inexorable as the coming death of nature. It was on everybody’s lips.

Food and logs had to be got in. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become an abstract notion, and food and firewood were replaced by the problems of alimentation and fuel supply.

The people in the towns were as helpless as children in the face of the unknown – of that unknown which swept every known usage aside and left nothing but desolation in its wake – although it was the offspring and creation of the towns.

People were still talking and deceiving themselves as their daily life struggled on, limping and shuffling to its unknown destination. But Yury saw it as it was, he could see that it was doomed, and that he and such as he were sentenced to destruction. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. The days were counted, and these days were running out before his eyes.

… He understood that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future. He both feared and loved that future and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if saying good-bye, was avidly aware of the trees and clouds and of the people walking in the streets, of the great Russian city struggling through misfortune – and he was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better but was powerless to do anything.

In 1921, to Boris’s great distress, his sisters and parents left Russia and travelled to Germany. Unbeknownst to any of them, they would never live in Russia together again. Deprived of her rights for higher education in Russia – just as any offspring of a non-proletarian family in the post-revolutionary climate was – Josephine went to Berlin on her own, keen to enter a university and rent accommodation for her parents, who intended to come after her. She was soon joined by Lydia, Leonid and Rosalia. Boris and Alexander stayed on at the family’s studio apartment at 14 Volkhonka Street in Moscow, as they had embarked on their respective careers as writer and architect. Rosalia and Leonid had managed to obtain visas for Germany for a long course of health treatment – Leonid had to have a cataract removed and Rosalia had heart problems. The hungry years of the Revolution had undermined their health, strength and spirit, while Leonid Pasternak was deeply concerned by the threat that he would lose his Moscow apartment to state requisition. However, it never occurred to any of the family that they would not be reunited in Russia after the country’s upheavals.

Josephine’s last memories of her childhood in Moscow were the gruelling winters when the town was covered in snow and the citizens had to report at labour centres. ‘They were given spades and perhaps a day’s ration and had to clear the roads,’ she remembered. ‘Lydia was underage and did not need to report, but she went instead of me as I was not strong enough to shovel the heavy snow. She and Boris were in the same group. It must have been an unforgettable day … A day of such brilliance of sun and snow, of purity of landscape, of concerted effort and of friendliness among the people at work.’ In Doctor Zhivago, to escape starvation and the political uncertainties in Moscow after the 1917 Revolution, the Zhivago family travels to Varykino, Tonya’s ancestral estate in the Urals. When their train is halted by snowdrifts, the civilian passengers are commandeered to clear the rails. Yury Zhivago remembers these three days as the most pleasant part of their journey:

But the sun sparkled on the blinding whiteness and Yury cut clean slices out of the snow, starting landfalls of dry diamond fires. It reminded him of his childhood. He saw himself in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn into the curly fleece, cutting the same dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream buns and fortresses and cave cities. Life had had a splendid taste in those far-off days, everything had been a feast for the eyes and for the stomach!

But at this time, too, during their three days of work in the open air, the workers had a feeling of pleasantly full stomachs. And no wonder. At night they were issued with great chunks of hot fresh bread (no one knew where it came from or by whose orders); it had a tasty crisp crust, shiny on top, cracked at the side and with bits of charcoal baked into it underneath.

Berlin in the 1920s was a period of high productivity for Leonid Pasternak, as the city had become a meeting place of the Russian intelligentsia. Over 100,000 Russians were living in exile. Leonid painted and befriended Albert Einstein, and the opera singer Chaliapin, who was rehearsing for his Berlin recital. He also sketched and painted the Russian composer, pianist and conductor Prokofiev at the piano, painter Max Liebermann and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was to enjoy an intense correspondence with Boris.

It was an immeasurable source of pain for Boris that after his parents left Moscow, he only saw them once again. He visited them in Berlin in 1922 and lived with them for nearly a year with his first wife, Evgenia. Afterwards, in the ensuing correspondence, lasting over twenty years, the constant ache of his missing them and echo of regret is tangible.

Conditions meanwhile were worsening throughout Russia, with food shortages and ration cards introduced in 1929. Collectivisation was regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution, mainly in grain deliveries in Russia. In 1930, there was a decree of the Federation of Soviet Writers’ Associations providing for the formation of writers’ shock brigades, to be sent out to the collective and state farms.

The conditions that Pasternak witnessed at the state farms stressed and depressed him; he regarded what he saw 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 unexpected death, from a brain haemorrhage in her sleep, on 22 August 1939, left the family reeling and desolate. Boris wrote to his siblings on 10 October from Moscow: ‘this is the first letter that I have been able to write to you, for various reasons, after Mama’s death. It has turned my life upside down, devastated it and made it meaningless; and in an instant, as though drawing me after it, it has brought me closer to my own grave. It aged me in an hour. A cloud of unkindness and chaos has settled over my whole existence; I’m permanently distracted, downcast and dazed from grief, astonishment, tiredness and pain.’

A week after Rosalia’s death, world war broke out. Leonid lived the rest of his life in Oxford, surrounded by his daughters and grandchildren. He would never see his sons, Boris or Alexander, again.

During the war, Pasternak was actively involved and served as a firewatcher on Volkhonka Street. Several times he dealt with the incendiary bombs that fell on the family apartment’s roof. With others, he spent time on drill, fire-watching and shooting practice, delighted to discover that he had skill as a marksman. In spite of the war, Boris enjoyed moments of happiness, feeling that he was collaborating in the interest of Mother Russia and national survival. Yet amidst the camaraderie, there was the constant ‘acuteness of pain’ of the ‘excessive intolerable separation’ from his family.

Leonid Pasternak died on 31 May 1945, weeks after Russia’s final victory in the war. ‘When Mother died it was as if harmony had abandoned the world,’ said Josephine. ‘When Father died it seemed that truth had left it.’ Boris shed ‘an ocean of tears’, on Leonid’s death (he had often addressed him as ‘my wonder papa’ in his letters). It troubled the writer greatly that he had never been able to replicate the rare depth and quality of enduring, harmonious marital love that his parents had experienced. In most of his correspondence with his father, he rails against his own emotional shortcomings, endlessly verbally flagellating himself – ‘I’m like someone bewitched, as if I’d cast a spell on myself. I’ve destroyed the lives of my family’ – and relentlessly exposing his acute sense of guilt, which runs like a continuous fever through him.

Given how profoundly he revered his parents and loved his siblings, his choice to stay in Soviet Russia and to live apart from them was surprising. Despite the unbearable oppression of Stalin’s censorship of the 1920s and ’30s, he did not consider leaving Russia. On 2 February 1932 he had written to his parents about his calling to his beloved ‘Mother land’: ‘This fate of not belonging to oneself, of living in a prison cell warmed from all sides – it transforms you, it makes you a prisoner of time. For herein too lies the primeval cruelty of poor Russia; once she bestows her love upon someone, her beloved is caught forever within her sights. It is as if he stands before her in the Roman arena, forced to provide her with a spectacle in return for her love.’

He continuously made it plain that he did not want to live the life of an exile. Yet, after the Revolution he was in emotional exile from his family. However successful he became, there is a sense that he was rudderless without them. Always searching, in many ways, he was lost. It was a constant source of shame and self-reproach that he was not able to emulate his parents’ stable and happy union. He may have fallen in love easily, but his inability to sustain a happy marriage was one of his greatest torments.