How can Pasternak possibly be accused of such a thing—particularly since Stalin started off by telling him he had already exercised mercy? According to the present rumors, Stalin asked Pasternak to vouch for M., but Pasternak supposedly refused to do so. Nothing of this kind happened, and the question of it never even arose.
When I gave M. an account of the whole business, he was entirely happy with the way Pasternak had handled things, particularly with his remark about the writers' organizations not having bothered with cases like this since 1927. "He never said a truer word," M. said with a laugh. The only thing that upset him was that the conversation had taken place at all. "Why has Pasternak been dragged into this? I have to get out of it myself—he has nothing to do with it." Another comment of M.'s was: "He [Pasternak] was quite right to say that whether I'm a genius or not is beside the point. . . . Why is Stalin so afraid of genius? It's like a superstition with him. He thinks we might put a spell on him, like shamans." * And yet another remark: "That poem of mine really must have made an impression, if he makes such a song and dance about commuting my sentence."
Incidentally, it's by no means certain how things might have ended if Pasternak had started praising M. to the skies as a genius— Stalin might have had M. killed off on the quiet, like Mikhoels, or at least have taken more drastic measures to see that his manuscripts were destroyed. I believe that they have survived only because of the constant attacks on M. as a "former poet" by his contemporaries
* Shaman: Siberian witch doctor.
in LEF and among the Symbolists.* As a result, the authorities felt that M. had been so discredited and was such a has-been that they did not bother to track down his manuscripts and stamp them out completely. All they did was to burn whatever came into their hands —this, they thought, was quite enough. If they had been led to think more highly of M.'s poetry, neither his work nor I would have survived. It would have been a case, as they say, of scattering our ashes to the winds.
The version of the telephone call from Stalin that has been told abroad is completely absurd. According to accounts published there, M. supposedly read his poem at a party in Pasternak's apartment, after which the poor host was "summoned to the Kremlin and given hell." Every word of this shows a total ignorance of our life— though one might well ask how any outsider could be expected to have enough imagination to picture the extent of our bondage! Nobody would have dared to breathe a word against Stalin, let alone read a poem like that "at a party." This is the sort of thing that only a provocateur would do, but even a provocateur would scarcely have dared to recite a poem against Stalin at a party. And then, nobody was ever summoned to the Kremlin for questioning. One was invited to the Kremlin for gala receptions and the ceremonial award of decorations. The place for interrogations was the Lubianka, but Pasternak was not asked to go there in connection with M. Indeed, Pasternak came to no harm at all as a consequence of his talk with Stalin, and it is not necessary to feel sorry for him because of this particular episode. One final point: it so happens that we never visited Pasternak at his home, and we saw him only when he came to see us from time to time. This arrangement suited us very well.
3 з The Antipodes
I
n certain respects M. and Pasternak were antipodes, but since antipodes are by definition located at opposite poles of the same sphere, it is possible to draw a line between them. In other words, they had common features and qualities that united them. Neither of them could ever have been the antipode of, say, Fedin, Oshanin or Blagoi.
* For LEF and Symbolists, see page 419.
There are two poems of M.'s which seem to be in the nature of rejoinders to Pasternak—one occasioned by some lines of Pasternak's, and the other by an unfinished conversation between them. First I will tell about the second poem—the one beginning "The apartment is quiet as paper." It was written in response to an almost casual remark by Pasternak. He had looked in to see how we were getting on in our new apartment in Furmanov Street. As he was leaving, he lingered for quite a time in the entrance, saying how wonderful it was: "Now you have an apartment, you'll be able to write poetry," he said as he finally went out.
"Did you hear what he said?" M. asked me. He was furious. He couldn't stand it when people blamed their inability to work on external circumstances, such as bad living conditions or lack of money. It was his profound conviction that nothing should prevent an artist from doing what he had to do, and, conversely, that material comfort was not in itself a stimulus to work—though he wasn't against comfort as such and would not himself have turned up his nose at it. At that time, as we saw all around us, there was furious competition among the writers for the good things of life, among which the greatest prize of all was an apartment. A little later country villas were also handed out "for services rendered." Pasternak's words touched M. to the quick: he cursed the apartment and said it should go to one of those it was intended for: "the worthy traitors, the portrait-painters," and all the other time-servers. This curse he pronounced on our apartment does not mean that he thought it better to be homeless—he was simply expressing his horror at the price one was expected to pay. We got nothing—apartments, villas or money —without paying the price.
In Pasternak's novel [Dr. Zhivago] there is also some concern with apartments, or, rather, with the writing table that a creative person supposedly needs for his work. Pasternak could not do without his writing table—he could only work with pen in hand. But M. composed his verse in his head, while walking around, and only needed to sit down briefly to copy out the result. Even in their manner of working they were antipodes. M. would scarcely have wanted to assert the poet's special claims to a writing table at a time when the whole nation was utterly deprived of basic needs.
The second poem connected with Pasternak is the one beginning "It's night outside. . . ." This is a reply to those lines of Pasternak where he says: "Rhyme is not the echoing of line-ends, but a cloakroom check, the ticket for a seat by the columns." This is a clear allusion to the main auditorium of the Moscow Conservatory, to which people like us were always admitted even if we didn't have tickets, and was thus symbolic of the privileged social position of the poet. In his reply M. renounced his "seat by the columns." In his attitude toward worldly goods and his refusal to come to terms with the age he lived in, M. was much closer to Tsvetayeva than to Pasternak. But with Tsvetayeva the rejection was more abstract, whereas for M. it was a head-on collision with something more precisely defined, the shape of which he knew fairly well, just as he knew the nature of his quarrel with it.
As early as 1927 I remember once saying to Pasternak: "Watch out, or they'll adopt you." He often reminded me of these words— for the last time thirty years later, after Dr. Zhivago had appeared. During our conversation in 1927—I was comparing him with M.—I said that he [Pasternak] was a domesticated creature of a familiar Moscow type, very much attached to the comforts of home and his dacha in the country. Thanks to this "Muscovite" quality, I continued, our literary bigwigs understood him very well and they would be glad to come to terms with him, but he was bound nevertheless to break with them—because they were set on a course he could never accept. I then said that M., on the other hand, was a nomad, a wanderer, whom the walls of Moscow houses could never hold. Later I realized that it was not quite like this, and that M. was deliberately being made into a nomad, whether he liked it or not. As for Pasternak, I was not trying to be a Cassandra—it was simply that I had come up against the facts of life a little earlier than he, just as the housekeeper in the Cherdyn hospital had seen many things before I had. In any case, I have noticed that sooner or later everybody's eyes are opened, even though many won't admit it. At one of our very last meetings Pasternak reminded me of how I had prophesied his break with his fellow writers.