In the cases of both Pasternak and M., destiny was hatched from character, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Both were doomed to be rejected by the literary establishment, but whereas Pasternak, for a time at any rate, sought points of contact with it, M. always shied away. Seeking for a stable life, particularly in the material sense, Pasternak knew that the path to it lay through membership in the literary community, and he never shunned it or tried to leave it. Like his creator, Dr. Zhivago is a poet, but he becomes a literary outcast only because Pasternak had seen that his own break with the world of Soviet literature was inevitable.
As a young man Pasternak had given much thought to the question of what form of literature would assure him of a stable situation in life. In a letter to M. he wrote that he had once considered becoming an editor. Of course this was sheer fantasy on the part of the still unfledged Pasternak, but even in their fantasies he and M. were strikingly unlike each other. All his life M. refused to have anything to do with the literary profession as such—such things as translating, editing, going to meetings in Herzen House or making the sort of pronouncements expected of writers. None of this was for him. Pasternak was drawn to all these things, while M. was repelled by them. The world of literature treated them both accordingly, smiling on Pasternak (at least to begin with) and seeking, right at the start, to destroy M. Fadeyev once said to me, as he glanced through some of M.'s poems, "You know, Pasternak is not one of us either, but all the same he is a little closer to us and we can come to terms with him in some things." At that time Fadeyev was editor of Krasnaya Nov and M. was already under a ban. I had taken the poems to Fadeyev on behalf of M., who was ill. These were the poems which are now gathered in the "First Voronezh Notebook." Fadeyev paid no attention to the "Wolf" poem or any other of that cycle. His eye was caught only by one eight-line poem in which the twinkling stars in the night sky are compared to officials sitting up late writing their reports. Fadeyev noted that the word for "reports" (rapportichki in Russian) was spelled with two "p's." "Why is it with two 'p's'?" he asked, but then suddenly realized that it was a dig at RAPP.* He shook his head and handed the poems back to me with the words: "Things are easier with Pasternak—he only writes about nature." But, of course, it was not just a question of subject matter—the fact was that Pasternak had some points of contact with the traditional world of literature, and consequently with such things as RAPP, whereas M. had none whatsoever. Pasternak wanted to be friendly, while M. turned his back on them. There is no point in debating which of them was right, this is not the issue. But it is noteworthy that at the end of their lives both of them acted in ways quite at variance with the whole of their previous stands. While Pasternak, by writing Dr. Zhivago and publishing it abroad, put himself in open conflict with the Soviet literary world, M. was ready to seek a rapprochement with it—only, as it turned out, he had left it too late. In essence it was an attempt by M. to save himself when the noose
* The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, of which Fadeyev was a leading member. See page 419.
had already been put around his neck, but the fact remains that it was made. What happened with Akhmatova was a little different— they got what they wanted by keeping her son Lev as a hostage. If it hadn't been for this, her "positive" verse would never have been written.*
In one thing Pasternak was consistent throughout his life: in his feelings about the intelligentsia, or rather those members of it for whom the Revolution meant the end of gracious living and the destruction of their peaceful mode of life. He virtually ignored the situation of the intelligentsia as a whole—university teachers, for instance, with their commonplace notions were not considered worthy of Zhivago's friendship. It was the destruction of the way of life of such intellectuals as Zhivago that concerned him, and he put the blame for it on the revolt of the ordinary people. Pasternak would have liked to see a protective wall between the intelligentsia and the people. Who is Zhivago's mysterious younger brother, Evgraf, the man of aristocratic appearance with the slanting Kirgiz eyes, who always arrives like a good genie with food supplies, money, advice, patronage and help? "The mystery of his power remained unexplained," says the author, but in fact his connection with the victorious revolutionaries and the new State is quite clear from the whole of the novel, and the help which he gives his brother is obviously one of those "miracles" which were wrought only by telephone calls to the right people, "transmission belts" and "commissions for assistance to scholars" of the kind set up on the advice of Gorki. Evgraf holds such a high position that he even promises to send his brother abroad, or have his exiled family brought back to Moscow. Pasternak knew very well how high up you had to be to do this kind of thing at the beginning of the thirties. If Zhivago had not died, his brother would certainly have got him a "ticket for a seat by the columns." It was simply not in M.'s nature to bank like this on the State with its miracles. He understood early what to expect from the new State, and he placed no hopes in its patronage. He also believed that, "like a judge, the people judges," or, as he puts it in another line, "In years of desolation you rise, о sun, people, judge." I share this faith, and I know that, even when reduced to silence, the people still sits in judgment.
In his novel Pasternak describes the killing at the front by his troops of a Provisional Government commissar named Linde (in the novel he is called Gints). In Pasternak's eyes his death was retribu-
# In 1952 Akhmatova wrote several poems in praise of Stalin.
tion for the fact that he and his like had failed to keep the troops under control, as Cossack officers would have done, and had stirred up the ordinary people. M. knew Linde well—he had probably met him at the Sinanis'. To show what he thought about his death it is enough to quote the following lines: "To bless him, treading lightly, Russia will descend to farthest hell."
In his article on Hamlet, Pasternak wrote that the Prince's tragedy was not his lack of will, but the fact that in carrying out the act incumbent on him as a son, he would lose his birthright—that is, his "ticket for a seat by the columns." Moscow had belonged to Pasternak from the time of his birth. There was a moment when he might have felt he was ready to give it up, but the moment passed and he remained in possession of his heritage. Marina Tsvetayeva also came to Moscow as a rightful heiress, and was greeted as such, but she had no time for heritages of anv kind, and as soon as she had found her own voice in poetry, she quickly turned her back on it. The reception given to the Acmeists—Akhmatova, Gumilev and M.—was quite different. They brought something with them that provoked blind fury in both literary camps: Viacheslav Ivanov and his entourage, as well as the Gorki circle, met them with hostility. (With Gumilev this didn't happen all at once, but only after his first book of Acmeist poems, Alien Skies.) For this reason the war against them was one of annihilation, and it was waged much more fiercely than against any other group of poets. M. always said that the Bolsheviks preserved only those who were passed on to them by the Symbolists —a favor certainly not shown to the Acmeists. In Soviet times the LEF group and the remnants of the Symbolists made common cause in their battle against the surviving Acmeists—Akhmatova and M. The campaign sometimes took on comic forms—as, for example, in articles by Briusov in which he extolled the "Neo-Acmeist" school supposedly headed by M. and then proceeded to describe as his disciples the most compromising people he could think of. Even more grotesque were M.'s personal encounters with Briusov. Briusov once called M. into his office and lavished praise on his verse, while constantly quoting a Kiev poet called Makaveiski who was notorious for his use of dog Latin. Another time, during a meeting held to decide on food rations for writers and scholars, Briusov insisted that M. be given a ration of the second category, pretending he had confused him with a lawyer of the same name. Such tricks were very much in the style of the decade before the Revolution, and it must be said that Briusov never applied political discrimination—this was left to the younger people in LEF.