Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956

Every attempt to produce coherent memories amounts to falsification. No human memory is so arranged as to recollect everything in continuous sequence. Letters and diaries often turn out to be bad assistants.

Anna Akhmatova1

I

IN THE SUMMER OF 1945, while I was working as a temporary official in the British Embassy in Washington, I was informed that I was to be seconded to our Moscow Embassy for a few months; the reason given was that it was short-handed, and since I knew Russian, and had, at the San Francisco Conference (and long before it), learnt something of official and unofficial American attitudes to the Soviet Union, I might be of some use in filling a gap until the New Year, when someone less amateur would be free to come. The war was over. The Potsdam Conference had led to no overt rift among the victorious allies. Despite gloomy forebodings in some quarters in the West, the general mood in official circles in Washington and London was cautiously optimistic; among the general public and in the press it was much more hopeful and even enthusiastic: the outstanding bravery and appalling sacrifices of Soviet men and women in the war against Hitler created a vast wave of sympathy for their country which, during the second half of 1945, silenced many of the critics of the Soviet system and its methods; mutual understanding and co-operation at every level were very widely and ardently desired. It was during this season of good feeling, which, one was told, reigned equally in the Soviet Union and in Britain, that I left for Moscow.

IB’s diplomatic pass, issued in Moscow on 15 September 1945, and signed by the Soviet foreign minister, V. M. Molotov

I had not been in Russia since my family left in 1920 (when I was eleven years old) and I had never seen Moscow. I arrived in the early autumn, was given a table in the Chancery, and did such odd jobs as were assigned to me. Although I reported for work at the Embassy every morning, the task (the only one I was ever asked to do) of reading, summarising and commenting on the content of the Soviet press was not exactly arduous: the contents of periodicals were, by comparison with the West, monochrome, predictable and repetitive, and the facts and propaganda virtually identical in them all. Consequently I had plenty of spare time on my hands. I used it to visit museums, historic places and buildings, theatres, bookshops, to walk idly about the streets, and so on; but unlike many foreigners, at any rate non-Communist visitors from the West, I had the extraordinary good fortune to meet a number of Russian writers, at least two among them persons of outstanding genius. Before I describe my meetings with them, I should say something about the background of the literary and artistic situation in Moscow and Leningrad as it appeared to me during the sixteen or so weeks that I spent in the Soviet Union.

The magnificent flowering of Russian poetry which had begun in the 1890s – the bold, creative, numerous, vastly influential experiments in the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, the main currents within the new movements, the symbolist, post-impressionist, cubist, abstract, expressionist, futurist, suprematist and constructivist movements in painting and sculpture; their various tributaries and confluences in literature, as well as Acmeism, ego- and cubo-futurism, imagism, ‘trans-sense’ (the zaumnye) in poetry; realism and anti-realism in the theatre and the ballet – this vast amalgam, so far from being arrested by war and revolution, continued to derive vitality and inspiration from a vision of a new world. Despite the conservative artistic tastes of the majority of the Bolshevik leaders, anything that could be represented as a ‘slap in the face’ to bourgeois taste was in principle approved and encouraged: and this opened the way to a great outpouring of exciting manifestos and audacious, controversial, often highly gifted experiments in all the arts and in criticism, which, in due course, were to make a powerful impact on the West. The names of the most original among the poets whose work survived the Revolution, Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov and, in the next generation, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Velemir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandel′shtam, Anna Akhmatova; of the painters, Benois, Roerich, Somov, Bakst, Larionov, Goncharova, Kandinsky, Chagall, Soutine, Klyun, Malevich, Tatlin, Lissitzky; of the sculptors, Arkhipenko, Gabo, Pevsner, Lipchitz, Zadkine; of the producers,1 Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Tairov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin; of the novelists, Aleksey Tolstoy, Babel′, Pil′nyak – all these became widely known in the West. They were not isolated peaks, but were surrounded by foothills. There was a genuine renaissance, different in kind from the artistic scene in other countries, in Russia during the 1920s. Much cross-fertilisation between novelists, poets, artists, critics, historians, scientists took place, and this created a culture of unusual vitality and achievement, an extraordinary upward curve in European civilisation.

Plainly all this was too good to last. The political consequences of the devastation of war and civil war, of the famine, the systematic destruction of lives and institutions by the dictatorship, ended the conditions in which poets and artists could create freely. After a relatively relaxed period during the years of the New Economic Policy, Marxist orthodoxy grew strong enough to challenge and, in the late 1920s, crush all this unorganised revolutionary activity. A collectivist proletarian art was called for; the critic Averbakh led a faction of Marxist zealots against what was described as unbridled individualistic literary licence – or as formalism, decadent aestheticism, kowtowing to the West, opposition to socialist collectivism. Persecution and purges began; but since it was not always possible to predict which side would win, this alone, for a time, gave a certain grim excitement to literary life. In the end, in the early 1930s, Stalin decided to put an end to all these politico-literary squabbles, which he plainly regarded as a sheer waste of time and energy. The leftist zealots were liquidated; no more was heard of proletarian culture or collective creation and criticism, nor yet of the non-conformist opposition to it. In 1934 the Party (through the newly created Union of Writers) was put in direct charge of literary activity. A dead level of State-controlled orthodoxy followed: no more argument; no more disturbance of men’s minds; the goals were economic, technological, educational – to catch up with the material achievements of the enemy – the capitalist world – and overtake it. If the dark mass of illiterate peasants and workers was to be welded into a militarily and technically invincible modern society, there was no time to be lost; the new revolutionary order was surrounded by a hostile world bent on its destruction; vigilance on the political front left no time for high culture and controversy, or concern for civil liberties and basic human rights. The tune must be called by constituted authority; writers and artists, the importance of whose influence was never denied or ignored, must dance to it.

Some conformed, some did not, to a lesser or greater degree; some felt State tutelage to be oppressive, others accepted and even welcomed it, since they told themselves, and one another, that it conferred upon them a status denied them by the philistine and indifferent West. In 1932 there were some symptoms of a coming relaxation; it did not come. Then came the final horror: the Great Purge, heralded by the repression which followed the assassination of Kirov in 1934 and the notorious political show trials, and culminating in the Ezhov Terror of 1937–8, the wild and indiscriminate mowing down of individuals and groups, later of whole peoples. While Gorky, with his immense prestige in the Party and the nation, was alive, his mere existence may have exercised some moderating influence. The poet Mayakovsky, whose fame and reputation as a voice of the Revolution were almost equal to Gorky’s, had committed suicide in 1930 – Gorky died six years later. Soon after that Meyerhold, Mandel′shtam, Babel′, Pil′nyak, Klyuev, the critic D. S. Mirsky, the Georgian poets Yashvili and Tabidze – to mention only the most widely known – were arrested and done to death. A few years later, in 1941, the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who had not long before returned from Paris, committed suicide. The activities of informers and false witnesses exceeded all previously known bounds; self-prostration, false and wildly implausible confessions, bending before, or active co-operation with, authority usually failed to save those marked for destruction. For the rest it left painful and humiliating memories from which some of the survivors of the Terror were never completely to recover.

The most authentic and harrowing accounts of the life of the intelligentsia during that murderous period, neither the first nor, probably, the last in the history of Russia, are to be found in Nadezhda Mandel′shtam’s and Lidiya Chukovskaya’s memoirs; and, in a different medium, in Akhmatova’s poem Requiem. The number of writers and artists exiled and destroyed was such that in 1939 Russian literature, art and thought emerged like an area that had been subjected to a terrible bombardment, with some splendid buildings still relatively intact, but standing bare and solitary in a landscape of ruined and deserted streets. Finally Stalin called a halt to the proscriptions: a breathing-space followed; nineteenth-century classics were again treated with respect, old street-names replaced revolutionary nomenclature. The period of convalescence was virtually blank so far as the creative and critical arts were concerned.

Then came the German invasion, and the picture changed again. Such authors of distinction as had survived the Great Purge and had managed to retain their human semblance responded passionately to the great wave of patriotic feeling. Some degree of truth returned to literature: war poems, not only those by Pasternak and Akhmatova, sprang from profound feeling. In the days when all Russians were caught up in the high tide of national unity, and the nightmare of the purges was succeeded by the tragic but inspiring and liberating sense of patriotic resistance and heroic martyrdom, writers, old and young, who expressed it, particularly those who had a vein of genuine poetry in them, were idolised as never before. An astonishing phenomenon took place: poets whose writing had been regarded with disfavour by the authorities, and who had consequently been published rarely and in very limited editions, began to receive letters from soldiers at the fronts, as often as not quoting their least political and most personal lines. I was told that the poetry of Blok, Bryusov, Sologub, Esenin, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky was widely read, learnt by heart and quoted by soldiers and officers and even political commissars. Akhmatova and Pasternak, who had for a long time lived in a kind of internal exile, received an amazingly large number of letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems, for the most part circulated privately in manuscript copies; there were requests for autographs, for confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author’s attitude to this or that problem. In the end this did not fail to impress itself on some of the Party leaders: the value of such writers as patriotic voices of which the State might one day be proud came to be realised by the bureaucrats of literature. The status and personal security of the poets were improved in consequence.

Akhmatova and Pasternak after a joint public reading at the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow, on 2 April 1946

During the immediate post-war years, and, indeed, until the end of their lives, the most distinguished among the older writers found themselves in an odd condition of being objects of simultaneous worship on the part of their readers and of a half-respectful, half-suspicious toleration by the authorities: a small, diminishing Parnassus, sustained by the love and admiration of the young. Public readings by poets, as well as the reciting from memory of poetry at private gatherings and parties of all kinds, had been common in pre-revolutionary Russia; what was novel was a fact described to me by both Pasternak and Akhmatova, that when they read their poems before the vast audiences who packed assembly halls to hear them, and occasionally halted for a word, there were always scores of listeners present who prompted them at once – with passages from works both published and unpublished (and in any case not publicly available). No writer could help being moved or could fail to draw strength from this most genuine form of homage; they knew that their status was unique, that this absorbed attention was something that poets in the West might well envy; and yet, despite this sense of contrast, which most Russians feel between what they regard as the open, passionate, spontaneous, ‘broad’ Russian nature and the dry, calculating, civilised, inhibited, sophisticated approach usually attributed to the West (enormously exaggerated by Slavophils and populists), a good many among them still believed in the existence of an unexhausted Western culture, full of variety and free creative individuality, unlike the grey on grey of daily life in the Soviet Union, broken only by sudden acts of repression; nothing I could say – I speak of more than thirty years ago1 – could shake this passionate conviction.

However this may be, famous poets were, at this time, heroic figures in the Soviet Union. It may well be so still. What is certain is that the vast increase in literacy, together with the wide circulation of the best-known Russian and foreign literary classics, particularly of translations into the various national languages of the USSR, created a public the responsiveness of which was, and probably still is, unique in the world. There is plenty of evidence that the majority of the avid readers of foreign masterpieces tended at that time to think that life in England and France was similar to that described by Dickens or Balzac; but the intensity of their vision of the worlds of these novelists, their emotional and moral involvement, their often childlike fascination with the lives of characters in these novels, seemed to me to be more direct, fresh, un-used-up, far more imaginative than the corresponding response of the average readers of fiction in, say, England or France or the United States. The Russian cult of the writer as hero – which began early in the nineteenth century – is bound up with this. I do not know how it is today: perhaps it is all quite different – I can testify only that in the autumn of 1945 the crowded bookshops, with their understocked shelves, the eager literary interest – indeed, enthusiasm – of the government employees who ran them, the fact that even Pravda and Izvestiya sold out within a few minutes of their appearance in the kiosks, argued a degree of intellectual hunger unlike that found elsewhere. The rigid censorship which, with so much else, suppressed pornography, trash and low-grade thrillers such as fill railway bookstalls in the West served to make the response of Soviet readers and theatre audiences purer, more direct and naive than ours; I noticed that at performances of Shakespeare or Sheridan or Griboedov members of the audience, some of them obviously country folk, were apt to react to the action on the stage or to lines spoken by the actors – rhyming couplets in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, for example – with loud expressions of approval or disapproval; the excitement generated was, at times, very strong and, to a visitor from the West, both unusual and touching.

These audiences were, perhaps, not far removed from those for which Euripides or Shakespeare wrote; my neighbours in the theatre, when they talked to me, often seemed to look on the dramatic action with the sharp and unspoilt eyes of intelligent adolescents – the ideal public of the classical dramatists, novelists and poets. It may be that it is the absence of this kind of popular response that has made some avant-garde art in the West at times seem mannered, contrived and obscure – in the light of this the condemnation of much modern literature and art by Tolstoy, however sweeping, dogmatic and wrong-headed, becomes more intelligible. The contrast between the extraordinary receptivity and interest, critical and uncritical, of the Soviet public in anything that seemed authentic, new or even true, and the inferiority of the pabulum provided by government-controlled purveyors, astonished me. I had expected a far greater degree of colourless, depressing conformity at all levels. At the official level, which included critics and reviewers, this was indeed so; but not among those to whom I spoke in theatres and cinemas, at lectures, football matches, in trains and trams and bookshops.

When, before my journey to Moscow, I was given advice by British diplomats who had served there, I was warned that meetings with Soviet citizens were difficult to achieve. I was told that a certain number of carefully selected high bureaucrats were to be met at official diplomatic receptions, and that these tended by and large to repeat the Party line and avoid all real contact with foreigners, at any rate those from the West; that ballet-dancers and actors were occasionally permitted to attend such receptions because they were thought to be the simplest-minded and least intellectual among artists, and consequently least likely either to be infected by unorthodox thoughts or to give anything away. In short, the impression I received was that, apart from linguistic obstacles, the general fear of association with foreigners, in particular those coming from capitalist countries, together with specific instructions to members of the Communist Party not to engage in such activities, left all Western missions culturally insulated; that their members (and most journalists and other foreigners) lived in a kind of zoo, with intercommunicating cages, but cut off by a high fence from the outside world.

I found that this was to a large extent true, but not as much as I had been led to expect. I did, during my brief stay, meet not only the same well-regimented group of ballet-dancers and literary bureaucrats who were to be seen at all receptions, but also a number of genuinely gifted writers, musicians and producers, among them two poets of genius. One of these was the man I most of all wished to meet, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, whose poetry and prose I deeply admired. I could not bring myself to seek his acquaintance without some excuse, however transparent. Fortunately I had met his sisters, who were living in Oxford, and one of them had asked me to take a pair of boots for her brother the poet. This was the pretext I needed, and I was most grateful for it.

I arrived in Moscow just in time to attend a dinner arranged by the British Embassy to celebrate an anniversary of its Russian-language publication, The British Ally, to which Soviet writers had been invited. The guest of honour was J. B. Priestley, who was then regarded as a firm friend by the authorities of the Soviet Union; his books were much translated, and two of his plays were, I seem to recollect, then being performed in Moscow. That evening Priestley seemed out of humour: he was, I think, exhausted by being taken to too many collective farms and factories – he told me that although he had been well received, he had found the majority of these official visits inconceivably tedious; in addition to this, his royalties had been blocked, conversation through interpreters was horribly stilted, in short he was not enjoying himself, was very tired and longed to go to bed. So, at any rate, his interpreter and guide from the British Embassy whispered to me; he proposed to accompany the guest of honour back to his hotel, and asked me if I would try to do something to fill the awkward gap left by Mr Priestley’s early departure. I readily agreed and found myself sitting between the famous director Tairov and the equally distinguished literary historian, critic, translator, and inspired writer of children’s verse, Korney Chukovsky. Opposite me was the best-known of all Soviet film directors, Sergey Eisenstein. He looked somewhat depressed: the reason for this, as I learned later, was not far to seek.1 I asked him to what years of his life he looked back with the greatest pleasure. He replied that the early post-revolutionary period was far and away the best in his own life as a creative artist, and in the lives of many others. It was a time, he said wistfully, when wild and marvellous things could be done with impunity. He remembered with particular delight an occasion at the beginning of the 1920s when pigs covered with grease were let loose among the audience of a Moscow theatre, who leapt on to their seats, terrified; people shrieked, the pigs squealed. ‘This was just what was required by our surrealist spectacle. Most of us who were active in those days were happy to be living and working then; we were young and defiant and full of ideas; it did not matter whether we were Marxists or formalists or futurists – painters, writers or musicians – we all met and quarrelled, sometimes very bitterly, and stimulated each other; we really did enjoy ourselves, and produced something, too.’

Tairov said much the same. He, too, spoke wistfully about the experimental theatre of the 1920s, about the genius of both Vakhtangov and Meyerhold; about the boldness and vitality of the short-lived Russian modern movement, which, in his view, was far more interesting than anything achieved on the stage by Piscator or Brecht or Gordon Craig. I asked him what had brought the movement to an end: ‘Things change,’ he said, ‘but it was a wonderful time; not to the taste of Stanislavsky or Nemirovich, but absolutely wonderful.’ The actors of the Moscow Art Theatre were not now educated enough, he said, to understand what Chekhov’s characters were really like: their social status, their attitudes, manners, accents, their entire culture, outlook, habits were a closed book to the rising actors and actresses of the present; no one had been more aware of this than Chekhov’s widow, Olga Knipper, and, of course, Stanislavsky himself; the greatest actor who survived from those days was the peerless, but rapidly ageing, Kachalov; he would soon retire and then, with modernism gone and naturalism in decay, would something new spring up? He doubted it: ‘A few minutes ago I said to you “Things change.” But they also do not change. This is even worse.’ And he fell into gloomy silence.

Tairov proved right on both scores. Certainly Kachalov was the best actor I have seen in my life. When he was on the stage as Gaev in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard (he played the part of the student in the original performance) he literally fascinated the audience, nor did the other actors take their eyes off him: the beauty of his voice and the charm and expressiveness of his movements were such that one wished to go on looking at him and listening to him for ever; this may have distorted the balance of the play, but Kachalov’s performance that night, like Ulanova’s dancing in Prokofiev’s Cinderella, which I saw a month later (and Chaliapin in Boris Godunov many years before), remains in my memory as an unsurpassed summit in terms of which to judge all later performances. So far as power of expression on the stage is concerned, these Russians still seem to me to have no equals in the twentieth century.

The neighbour on my right, the critic Korney Chukovsky, talked with rare wit and charm about writers, both Russian and English. He said that his brisk dismissal by the guest of honour reminded him of the visit to Russia of the American journalist Dorothy Thompson. She came with her husband, Sinclair Lewis, whose fame in Russia in the 1930s was very great: ‘Several of us called on him in his hotel room – we wished to tell him how much his wonderful novels had meant to us. He sat with his back to us, typing away on his machine, and did not once turn his head to look at us; he did not utter a sound. This had a certain sublimity.’ I did my best to assure him that his own works were read and greatly admired by Russian scholars in English-speaking countries; by Maurice Bowra, for example (who, in his memoirs, gives an account of meeting him during the First World War), and by Oliver Elton – the only English writers interested in Russian literature whom at that time I knew personally. Chukovsky told me of his two visits to England, the first at the beginning of the century when he was very poor and earned a few shillings by casual work – he had learned English by reading Carlyle’s Past and Present and Sartor Resartus, the second of which he had bought for one penny, and which he extracted for me there and then out of his waistcoat pocket. He was a frequenter in those days, he told me, of the Poetry Bookshop, whose celebrated owner, the poet Harold Monro, befriended him and introduced him to various British men of letters, including Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s friend, of whom he retained an agreeable memory. He felt, he said, at ease in the Poetry Bookshop, but nowhere else in England; like Herzen, he admired and was amused by the social structure and the manners of the English, but like him had made no friends among them. He loved Trollope: ‘What wonderful parsons [popy], charming, eccentric – nothing like that here, in old Russia; here they were sunk in sloth and stupidity and greed. They were a miserable crew. The present ones, who have had a difficult time since the Revolution, are a much better lot: at least they can read and write; some are decent and honourable men. But you will never meet our priests – why should you want to? I am sure that English clergymen are still the most delightful people in the world.’ He then told me about his second visit, during the First World War, when he came with a party of Russian journalists to report on the British war effort; they were entertained by Lord Derby, with whom he had found little common ground, at a weekend at Knowsley, of which he also gave an exceedingly entertaining and not very respectful account.

Chukovsky was a writer of high distinction who had made his name before the Revolution. He was a man of the left, and welcomed the Revolution; like all intellectuals of any independence of mind, he had had his share of harassment by the Soviet authorities. There are more ways than one of preserving one’s sanity under a despotism: he achieved his own by a kind of ironical detachment, careful behaviour and considerable stoicism of character; the decision to confine himself to the relatively calm waters of nineteenth-century literature in Russian and in English, of children’s verse, of translation, may have saved himself and his family, if only just, from the dreadful fate of some of their closest friends. He informed me that he had one overmastering wish; if I could satisfy it he would do almost anything for me in return: he longed to read Trollope’s autobiography. His friend Ivy Litvinov, the wife of Maxim Litvinov, the former Foreign Minister and ambassador to the United States, who was living in Moscow, could not find her own copy and thought it unsafe to order one from England in view of the extreme suspicion in which all relations with foreign countries were held; could I supply it? I did so a few months later, and he was delighted by it. I said that what I in my turn wished for most of all was to meet Boris Pasternak, who was living in the writers’ village of Peredelkino, where Chukovsky, too, had a cottage. Chukovsky said that he admired Pasternak’s poetry deeply; personally, although he loved him, he had had his ups and downs with him – his interest in Nekrasov’s civic poetry and in populist writers of the late nineteenth century had always irritated Pasternak, who was a pure poet out of tune with the Soviet regime, with a particular distaste for committed – engagé – literature of any kind; nevertheless, he was at the moment on good terms with him, would arrange a meeting, and warmly invited me to visit him too, on the same day.

This was, as I was soon to discover, a courageous, not to say foolhardy, act: contact with foreigners – especially members of Western embassies, all of whom were regarded by the Soviet authorities, and particularly by Stalin himself, as spies – was, to say the least, strongly discouraged. Realisation of this fact led me later, in some cases too late, to exercise caution in meeting Soviet citizens informally – it placed them in a degree of danger which not all those who wished to see me seemed fully to realise; some did so, and knew that in meeting me they were taking a risk, but took it because their desire to be in contact with life in the West was overwhelming. Others were less reckless, and I respected their well-grounded fears and met fewer Soviet citizens, especially those not protected to some extent by their fame abroad, than I could have wished, for fear of compromising them. Even so, I probably did inadvertent harm to innocent people whom I met accidentally, or because they assured me, in some cases, as it turned out, mistakenly, that it involved no risk for them.

Whenever I hear of the subsequent fate of some of these, I feel qualms of conscience, and blame myself for not having resisted the temptation of meeting some of the most unspoilt, delightful, responsive, moving human beings I have ever come across, with a quality of intellectual gaiety astonishing in their circumstances, consumed, for the most part, with an enormous curiosity about life beyond the frontiers of their country, anxious to establish a purely human relationship with a visitor from that outer world who spoke their language and, it seemed to them, understood them and was understood by them. I do not know of any case of imprisonment or worse, but I do know of cases of harassment and persecution to which meetings with me may have contributed. It is difficult to tell, for the victims often never knew why they were punished. One can only hope that survivors do not feel too bitterly towards the foreign visitors for the harm of which, unwittingly and perhaps too unthinkingly, we may have been a cause.

The visit to Peredelkino was arranged for a week after the dinner at which I met Korney Chukovsky. In the meanwhile, at another festivity in honour of Priestley (for whose presence I am still grateful, since it helped to open doors to me), I met Mme Afinogenova, a Hungarian-American dancer, the widow of a playwright ‘honourably’ killed – in an air-raid on Moscow in 1941 – who was evidently authorised, and perhaps instructed, to organise a salon for foreign visitors with cultural interests. At any rate, she invited me to it, and there I met a number of writers. The best known among them was the poet Ilya Sel′vinsky (‘Sel′vinsky had his hour, but it is, thank God, long past,’ said Pasternak to me later), who had had the temerity to suggest that if socialist realism was the correct genre of imaginative writing, it might perhaps be equally compatible with Communist ideology to develop a literature of socialist romanticism – a freer use of the imagination, equally impregnated with total loyalty to the Soviet system. He had recently been harshly reproved for this, and when I met him was in an obviously nervous state. He asked me whether I agreed that the five greatest English writers were Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Wilde and Shaw; with perhaps Milton and Burns as runners-up. I said that I had no doubt about Shakespeare and Dickens, but before I could continue he went on to say that it was our new writers that they were interested in – what about Greenwood and Aldridge? What could I say about them? I realised that these were names of contemporary writers, but confessed that I had never heard of them – this was, perhaps, because I had been abroad during the greater part of the war – what had they written?

This was clearly not believed. I discovered later that Aldridge was an Australian Communist novelist and that Greenwood had written a popular novel called Love on the Dole; their works had been translated into Russian and published in large editions. Ordinary Soviet readers had little idea of what scales of values obtained in other societies, or sections of them; an official literary committee, directed by the cultural department of the Party’s Central Committee, decided what was to be translated and how widely it was to be distributed, and modern British writing at that moment was in effect represented principally by A. J. Cronin’s Hatter’s Castle, two or three plays by Somerset Maugham and Priestley, and – so it seemed – the novels of Greenwood and Aldridge (the age of Graham Greene, C. P. Snow, Iris Murdoch and the ‘angry young man’ – who have since been extensively translated – had not yet dawned).

It was my impression that my hosts thought that I was less than honest when I said that I knew nothing of the two authors whom they mentioned, because I was an agent of a capitalist power, and therefore obliged to ignore the merits of left-wing writers, much as they themselves were committed to real or pretended ignorance of most émigré Russian writers and composers. ‘I know,’ said Sel′vinsky, speaking loudly, with great rhetorical force, as if he were addressing a much wider audience, ‘I know that we are called conformists in the West. We are. We conform because we find that whenever we deviate from the Party’s directives it always turns out that the Party was right and that we were wrong. It has always been so. It is not only that they say that they know better: they do; they see further – their eyes are sharper, their horizons are wider, than ours.’ The rest of the company looked uncomfortable: these words were plainly intended for the concealed microphones without which we could scarcely have met as we did. Under dictatorships, public and private expressions of opinion may differ; but Sel′vinsky’s outburst was, perhaps because of the insecurity of his own position, too clumsy and overdone: hence the embarrassed silence which followed.

I realised none of this at the time, and argued that free discussion, even of political issues, was no danger to democratic institutions: ‘We are a scientifically governed society,’ said a handsome lady who had once been one of Lenin’s secretaries and was married to a famous Soviet writer, ‘and if there is no room for free thinking in physics – a man who questions the laws of motion is obviously ignorant or mad – why should we, Marxists, who have discovered the laws of history and society, permit free thinking in the social sphere? Freedom to be wrong is not freedom; you seem to think that we lack freedom of political discussion; I simply do not understand what you mean. Truth liberates: we are freer than you in the West.’ Lenin was quoted, so was Lunacharsky. When I said that I remembered propositions of this sort in the works of Auguste Comte, that this was the thesis of French positivists in the nineteenth century, whose views were surely not accepted by Marx or Engels, a chill fell upon the room, and we passed on to harmless literary gossip. I had learnt my lesson. To argue about ideas while Stalin was in power was to invite predictable answers from some, and to put those who remained silent in some jeopardy. I never saw Mme Afinogenova or any of her guests again. I had obviously behaved with conspicuous absence of tact, and their reaction was perfectly comprehensible.

II

A few days later, accompanied by Lina Ivanovna Prokofiev, the composer’s estranged wife, I took the train to Peredelkino. Gorky, I was told, had organised this colony to provide recognised writers with an environment in which they could work in peace. Given the temperament of creative artists, this well-intentioned plan did not always lead to harmonious coexistence: some of the personal and political tensions could be sensed even by an ignorant stranger like myself. I walked down the tree-lined road which led to the houses inhabited by the writers. On the way there we were stopped by a man who was digging a ditch; he climbed out of it, said his name was Yazvitsky, asked after our names, and spoke at some length about an excellent novel that he had written called The Fires of the Inquisition;1 he warmly recommended it to us and told us that we should read an even better novel he was in the course of writing about Ivan III and medieval Russia. He wished us Godspeed and returned to his ditch. My companion thought it all somewhat uncalled-for, but I was charmed by this unexpected, direct, open-hearted and utterly disarming monologue; the simplicity and immediacy, even when it was naive, the absence of formalities and small talk which seemed to hold everywhere outside official circles, was, and is, wonderfully attractive.

It was a warm, sunlit afternoon in early autumn. Pasternak, his wife and his son Leonid were seated round a rough wooden table in the tiny garden at the back of the dacha. The poet greeted us warmly. He was once described by his friend the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva as looking like an Arab and his horse: he had a dark, melancholy, expressive, very racé face, now familiar from many photographs and his father’s paintings; he spoke slowly, in a low tenor monotone, with a continuous, even sound, something between a humming and a drone, which those who met him almost always remarked; each vowel was elongated as if in some plaintive, lyrical aria in an opera by Tchaikovsky, but with more concentrated force and tension.

With an awkward gesture I offered him the parcel that I was holding in my hands, and explained that I had brought him a pair of boots sent him by his sister Lidiya. ‘No, no, what is all this?’ he said, visibly embarrassed, as if I were offering him a charitable gift: ‘It must be a mistake, this must be for my brother.’ I, too, became acutely embarrassed. His wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, tried to put me at my ease and asked me whether England was recovering from the effects of the war.

Before I could answer, Pasternak broke in: ‘I was in London in the 1930s – in 1935 – on my way back from the Anti-Fascist Congress in Paris. Let me tell you what happened. It was summer, I was in the country, when two officials, probably from the NKVD1 – not, I think, the Writers’ Union – called – we were not quite so afraid of such visits then, I suppose – and one of them said, “Boris Leonidovich, an Anti-Fascist Congress is taking place in Paris. You have been invited to it. We should like you to go tomorrow. You will go via Berlin: you can stay there for a few hours and see anyone you wish: you will arrive in Paris on the next day and will address the Congress in the evening.” I said that I had no suitable clothes for such a visit. They said that they would see to that. They offered me a formal morning coat and striped trousers, a white shirt with stiff cuffs and a wing collar, a magnificent pair of black patent-leather boots which, I found, fitted perfectly. But I somehow managed to go in my everyday clothes. I was later told that pressure had been brought to bear at the last minute by André Malraux, one of the chief organisers of the Congress, to get me invited. He had explained to the Soviet authorities that not to send me and Babel′ might cause unnecessary speculation, since we were very well known in the West, and there were, at that time, not many Soviet writers to whom European and American liberals would be so ready to listen. So, although I was not on the original list of Soviet delegates – how could I possibly be? – they agreed.’

He went via Berlin, as arranged, where he met his sister Josephine and her husband, and said that when he arrived at the Congress many important and famous people – Dreiser, Gide, Malraux, Forster, Aragon, Auden, Spender, Rosamond Lehmann and other celebrities – were there. ‘I spoke. I said, “I understand that this is a meeting of writers to organise resistance to Fascism. I have only one thing to say to you about that. Do not organise. Organisation is the death of art. Only personal independence matters. In 1789, 1848, 1917 writers were not organised for or against anything; do not, I implore you, do not organise.” I think they were very surprised. But what else could I say? I thought I would get into trouble at home after that, but no one ever said a word to me about it, then or now.1 I went on from Paris to London, where I saw my friend Lomonosov, a most fascinating man, like his namesake, a kind of scientist – an engineer. Then I travelled back to Leningrad in one of our boats, and shared a cabin with Shcherbakov, then the Secretary of the Writers’ Union, who was tremendously influential.² I talked without ceasing, day and night. He begged me to stop and let him sleep. But I went on and on. Paris and London had awoken me, I could not stop. He begged for mercy, but I was relentless. He must have thought me quite deranged; it may be that I owe a good deal to his diagnosis of my condition.’ Pasternak did not explicitly say that what he meant was that to have been thought a little mad, or at least very eccentric, might have helped to save him during the Great Purge; but the others present told me that they understood this all too well, and explained it to me later.

Pasternak asked me whether I had read his prose – in particular The Childhood of Lüvers, which I greatly admired. I said that I had. ‘I can see by your expression’, he said, quite unjustly, ‘that you think that these writings are contrived, tortured, self-conscious, horribly modernist – no, no, don’t deny it, you do think this and you are absolutely right. I am ashamed of them – not of my poetry, but of my prose – it was influenced by what was weakest and most muddled in the symbolist movement, which was fashionable in those years, full of mystical chaos – of course Andrey Bely was a genius – Petersburg, Kotik Letaev are full of wonderful things – I know that, you need not tell me – but his influence was fatal – Joyce is another matter – all I wrote then was obsessed, forced, broken, artificial, no good [negodno]; but now I am writing something entirely different: something new, quite new, luminous, elegant, harmonious, well-proportioned [stroinoe], classically pure and simple – what Winckelmann wanted, yes, and Goethe; and this will be my last word, and most important word, to the world. It is, yes, it is, what I wish to be remembered by; I shall devote the rest of my life to it.’

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of all these words, but this is how I remember them and his manner of speaking. This projected work later became Doctor Zhivago. He had in 1945 completed a draft of a few early chapters, which he asked me to read and take to his sisters in Oxford; I did so, but was not to know about the plan for the entire novel until much later. After that, he was silent for a while; none of us spoke. He then told us how much he liked Georgia, Georgian writers, Yashvili, Tabidze, and Georgian wine, how well received he always was there. He then politely asked me about what was going on in the West; did I know Herbert Read and his doctrine of personalism? Here he explained that the doctrine of personalism basically derived from the moral philosophy – in particular the idea of individual freedom – of Kant, and of his interpreter Hermann Cohen, whom he had known well and greatly admired when he was his student in Marburg before the First World War. Kantian individualism – Blok had misinterpreted him completely, had made him a mystic in his poem Kant – did I know it? Did I know Stefan Schimanski, a personalist who had edited some of his, Pasternak’s, work in translation? There was nothing here in Russia about which he could tell me. I must realise that the clock had stopped in Russia (I noticed that neither he nor any of the other writers I met ever used the words ‘Soviet Union’) in 1928 or so, when relations with the outer world were in effect cut off; the description of him and his work in, for instance, the Soviet Encyclopedia, made no reference to his later life or work.

He was interrupted by Lidiya Seifullina, an elderly, well-known writer who came in while he was in mid-course: ‘My fate is exactly the same,’ she said: ‘the last lines of the Encyclopedia article about me say “Seifullina is at present in a state of psychological and artistic crisis” – this has not been changed in the last twenty years. So far as the Soviet reader is concerned, I am still in a state of crisis, of suspended animation. We are like people in Pompeii, you and I, Boris Leonidovich, buried by ashes in mid-sentence. And we know so little: Maeterlinck and Kipling, I know, are dead; but Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Joyce, Bunin, Khodasevich – are they alive?’ Pasternak looked embarrassed and changed the subject to French writers generally. He had been reading Proust – French Communist friends had sent him the entire masterpiece – he knew it, he said, and had reread it lately. He had not then heard of Sartre or Camus,1 and thought little of Hemingway (‘Why Anna Andreevna [Akhmatova] thinks anything of him I cannot imagine,’ he said). He pressed me warmly to visit him in his Moscow apartment – he would be there from October.

He spoke in magnificent, slow-moving periods, with occasional intense rushes of words; his talk often overflowed the banks of grammatical structure – lucid passages were succeeded by wild but always marvellously vivid and concrete images – and these might be followed by dark words when it was difficult to follow him – and then he would suddenly come into the clear again; his speech was at all times that of a poet, as were his writings. Someone once said that there are poets who are poets when they write poetry and prose-writers when they write prose; others are poets in everything that they write. Pasternak was a poet of genius in all that he did and was; his ordinary conversation displayed it as his writings do. I cannot begin to describe its quality. The only other person who seems to me to have talked as he talked was Virginia Woolf, who, to judge from the few occasions on which I met her, made one’s mind race as he did, and obliterated one’s normal vision of reality in the same exhilarating and, at times, terrifying way.

I use the word ‘genius’ advisedly. I am sometimes asked what I mean by this highly evocative but imprecise term. In answer, I can only say this: the dancer Nijinsky was once asked how he managed to leap so high. He is reported to have answered that he saw no great problem in this. Most people when they leapt in the air came down at once. ‘Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?’ he is reported to have said. One of the criteria of genius seems to me to be the power to do something perfectly simple and visible which ordinary people cannot, and know that they cannot, do – nor do they know how it is done, or why they cannot begin to do it. Pasternak at times spoke in great leaps; his use of words was the most imaginative I have ever known; it was wild and very moving. There are, no doubt, many varieties of literary genius: Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Auden, Russell did not (in my experience) talk like this.

I did not wish to overstay my welcome: I left the poet, excited, and indeed overwhelmed, by his words and by his personality. I went on to Chukovsky’s neighbouring dacha, and although he was charming, friendly, interesting, remarkably penetrating and, indeed, brilliantly amusing as a talker, I could think only about the poet with whom I had been an hour before. At Chukovsky’s house I met Samuil Marshak, translator of Burns and also a writer of children’s verse, who, by standing aside from the main stream of ideology and political storms, and, perhaps, because he enjoyed the protection of Maxim Gorky, managed to survive intact during the darkest days. He was one of the few writers permitted to meet foreigners. During my weeks in Moscow he showed me much kindness, and was, indeed, one of the nicest and most warm-hearted members of the Moscow intelligentsia whom it was my good fortune to meet; he talked freely and painfully about the horrors of the past, showed little faith in the future, and preferred to discuss English and Scottish literature, which he loved and understood, but about which he seemed to me to have little of interest to say. There were others there, among them a writer whose name, if it was mentioned, I had not taken in. I asked him about the Soviet literary scene: who were the most notable authors? He mentioned various writers, among them Lev Kassil′. I said, ‘The author of Shvambraniya [a fantasy for adolescents]?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the author of Shvambraniya.’ ‘But that is a poor novel,’ I said: ‘I read it some years ago – I thought it had no imagination and was both dull and naive – do you like it?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do rather – it seems to me sincere and not badly written.’ I disagreed. Some hours later, when darkness fell and I said that I was very bad at finding my way anywhere, he volunteered to accompany me to the railway station. As we were parting I said to him ‘You have been wonderfully kind to me all day – I am so sorry that I never took in your name.’ ‘Lev Kassil′,’ he said. I stood rooted to the ground in shame and remorse, crushed by my gaffe. ‘But’, I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me? Shvambraniya …’. ‘I respect you for saying what you really thought – the truth is not easy for us writers to come by.’ I went on apologising until the train arrived. No one in my experience has ever behaved so admirably; I have never before or since met an author so free from vanity or amour propre of any kind.

While I was waiting for the train it began to rain. There were only two other persons on the platform, a young-looking couple, and we all huddled for cover under the only protection we could find – some planks jutting over an old, dilapidated fence. We exchanged a few words – they turned out to be young students – the young man said he was a chemist, the girl was a student of nineteenth-century Russian history, in particular of revolutionary movements. We were in complete darkness – the station had no light – and we could scarcely see each other’s faces; consequently they felt reasonably secure with a total stranger and talked freely. The girl said that they were taught that in the last century the Russian Empire was a huge prison with no liberty of thought or expression: but although they thought this generally true, radicals did seem to have got away with quite a lot, and dissidence without actual terrorism did not then, as a rule, mean torture and death; and even terrorists escaped. ‘Why’, I said, I admit not altogether innocently, ‘can people not speak their minds now on social issues?’ ‘If anyone tries,’ said the young man, ‘he is swept away as with a broom, and we do not know what happens to him; no one ever sees him or hears from him again.’

We changed the subject and they told me that what young Russians at this time read most avidly were nineteenth-century novels and stories: not Chekhov, it turned out, nor Turgenev, who seemed to them antiquated and preoccupied with problems of little interest to them; nor Tolstoy – perhaps because (so they said) they were fed on War and Peace as the great national patriotic epic too insistently during the war. They read, when they could get them, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Garshin and the more accessible foreign masters – Stendhal, Flaubert (not Balzac or Dickens), Hemingway and, somewhat unexpectedly, O. Henry. ‘And Soviet writers? What about Sholokhov, Fedin, Fadeev, Gladkov, Furmanov?’ I said, reeling off the first names of contemporary Soviet authors that came into my head. ‘Do you like them?’ the girl asked. ‘Gorky is sometimes good,’ said the young man, ‘and I used to like Romain Rolland. I suppose you have great and marvellous writers in your country?’ I said ‘No, not marvellous’, but they seemed incredulous, and may have thought that I was peculiarly jaundiced about British writers, or else was a Communist who did not care for bourgeois artists of any kind. The train arrived and we entered different carriages – the conversation could not have continued before others.

Like these students, many Russians (at least at that time) seemed convinced that in the West – England, France, Italy – there was a magnificent flowering of art and literature, inaccessible to them. When I threw doubts on this I was never really believed: at best, it was attributed to politeness or world-weary capitalist ennui. Even Pasternak and his friends were firmly convinced that there was a golden West where writers and critics of genius had created, and were creating, masterpieces concealed from them. This belief was very widespread. Most of the writers whom I met in 1945 and 1956, Zoshchenko, Marshak, Seifullina, Chukovsky, Vera Inber, Sel′vinsky, Kassil′ and a dozen others, and not only writers but musicians like Prokofiev, Neuhaus, Samosud, producers like Eisenstein and Tairov, painters and critics whom I met in public places, at official receptions given by VOKS (the Society for Promoting Cultural Relations with Foreigners), and very occasionally in their own homes, philosophers whom I met at a session of the Academy of Sciences which I was invited to address on the initiative of none other than Lazar′ Kaganovich, just before his fall from grace and power – all these persons were not only immensely curious about – indeed, hungry for news of – progress in arts and letters in Europe (rather less in America), but were firmly convinced that marvellous works of art and literature and thought were ceaselessly being born there, hidden from their eyes by the rigid Soviet censors. Omne ignotum pro magnifico.1

I had no wish to denigrate Western achievements, but I tried to indicate that our cultural development was less irresistibly triumphant than they generously supposed. It may be that some of those who emigrated to the West are still looking for this rich cultural life, or else feel disillusioned. The campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ was clearly directed in part against this extraordinary pro-Western enthusiasm, aroused in the first place, perhaps, by rumours of life in the West stemming from returned Soviet soldiers, both ex-prisoners and the conquering battalions themselves, as well as being the inevitable reaction to the steady and very crude campaign of vilification of Western culture in the Soviet press and on the radio. Russian nationalism used as an antidote against such unhealthy interest on the part of, at any rate, the educated section of the population, and fed, as so often, by ferocious anti-Semitic propaganda, in its turn produced strong pro-Jewish and pro-Western feeling which seemed to me to have taken deep root among the intelligentsia. By 1956 there was rather less ignorance about the West, and perhaps correspondingly less enthusiasm, but still a great deal more than the reality justified.

After Pasternak returned to Moscow, I visited him almost weekly and came to know him well. He always spoke with his peculiar brand of vitality, and flights of imaginative genius which no one has been able to convey; nor can I hope to describe the transforming effect of his presence, his voice and gestures. He talked about books and writers; I wish I had made notes at the time. At this distance of years I can remember only that of modern Western writers he loved Proust most of all, and was steeped in his novel and in Ulysses (he had not read Joyce’s later work). When, some years later, I brought to Moscow with me two or three volumes of Kafka in English, he took no interest in them, and later, so he told me, gave them to Akhmatova, who admired them intensely. He spoke about French symbolists and about Verhaeren and Rilke, both of whom he had met and the second of whom he greatly admired as both a man and a writer. He was steeped in Shakespeare. He was dissatisfied with his own renderings, particularly of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet: ‘I have tried to make Shakespeare work for me,’ he said early in the conversation, ‘but it has not been a success.’ And he then quoted examples of what he regarded as his own failures in translation, which, unfortunately, I have forgotten. One evening during the war, he told me, he was listening to the BBC and heard poetry being read aloud – he understood spoken English with difficulty but this seemed to him wonderful. He asked himself ‘Who is this by?’ – it seemed familiar. ‘Why, it is by me,’ he said to himself; but it turned out to be a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

He grew up, he said, in the shadow of Tolstoy, whom his father knew well – to him an incomparable genius, greater than Dickens or Dostoevsky, a writer who stood with Shakespeare and Goethe and Pushkin. His father, the painter, had taken him to see Tolstoy on his deathbed, in 1910, at Astapovo. He found it impossible to be critical towards him: Russia and Tolstoy were one. As for Russian poets, Blok was of course the dominant genius of his time, but he did not find his quality of feeling sympathetic. He would not enlarge on this. Bely was closer to him, a man of strange, unheard-of insights, magical and a holy fool in the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy. Bryusov he considered a self-constructed, ingenious, mechanical musical-box, a clever, calculating operator, not a poet at all. He did not mention Mandel′shtam. He felt most tenderly towards Marina Tsvetaeva, to whom he had been bound by many years of friendship.

His feelings towards Mayakovsky were more ambivalent: he had known him well, they had been close friends, and he had learnt from him; he was, of course, a titanic destroyer of old forms but, he added, unlike other Communists, he was at all times a human being – but no, he was not a major poet, not an immortal god like Tyutchev or Blok, not even a demi-god like Fet or Bely; time had diminished him; he was needed, he was indispensable in his day, what those times had called for – there are poets, he said, who have their hour, Aseev, poor Klyuev – liquidated – Sel′vinsky – even Esenin – they fulfil an urgent need of the day, their gifts are of crucial importance to the development of poetry in their country, and then they are no more; Mayakovsky was far and away the greatest of these – The Cloud in Trousers had a central historical importance, but the shouting was unbearable; he inflated his talent and tortured it until it burst: the sad rags of the multicoloured balloon still lay in one’s path if one was a Russian – he was gifted, important, but coarse and not grown up, and ended as a poster-artist; Mayakovsky’s love-affairs had been disastrous for him as a man and a poet; he had loved Mayakovsky as a man – his suicide was one of the blackest days in his own life.

Pasternak was a Russian patriot – his sense of his own historical connection with his country was very deep. He told me again and again how glad he was to spend his summers in the writers’ village, Peredelkino, for it had once been part of the estate of that great Slavophil, Yury Samarin: the true lines of tradition led from the legendary Sadko to the Stroganovs and the Kochubeys, to Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Tyutchev, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Lermontov, to the Aksakovs, Tolstoy, Fet, Bunin, Annensky – to the Slavophils in particular – not to the liberal intelligentsia, which, as Tolstoy maintained, did not know what men lived by. This passionate, almost obsessive, desire to be thought a Russian writer with roots deep in Russian soil was particularly evident in his negative feelings towards his Jewish origins. He was unwilling to discuss the subject – he was not embarrassed by it, but he disliked it: he wished the Jews to assimilate, to disappear as a people. Apart from his immediate family, he had no interest in relatives, past or present. He spoke to me as a believing, if idiosyncratic, Christian. Among consciously Jewish writers he admired Heine, Hermann Cohen (his neo-Kantian philosophical mentor in Marburg), whose ideas – in particular, his philosophy of history – he evidently thought profound and convincing. If I mentioned Jews or Palestine, this, I observed, caused him visible distress; in this respect he differed from his father, the painter. I once asked Akhmatova whether others of her intimate Jewish friends – Mandel′shtam or Zhirmunsky or Emma Gerstein – were sensitive on this subject: she said that they had little liking for the conventional Jewish bourgeoisie from which they sprang, but did not deliberately avoid the subject as Pasternak was apt to do.

His artistic taste had been formed in his youth and he remained faithful to the masters of that period. The memory of Scriabin – he had at one time thought of becoming a composer himself – was sacred to him; I shall not easily forget the paean of praise offered by Pasternak and Neuhaus (the celebrated musician and former husband of Pasternak’s wife Zinaida) to Scriabin, by whose music they had both been influenced, and to the symbolist painter Vrubel′, whom, with Nicholas Roerich, they prized above all contemporary painters. Picasso and Matisse, Braque and Bonnard, Klee and Mondrian seemed to mean as little to them as Kandinsky or Malevich.

There is a sense in which Akhmatova and Gumilev and Marina Tsvetaeva are the last great voices of the nineteenth century (with Pasternak and, in his very different fashion, Mandel′shtam in some interspace between the centuries), and remain the last representatives of what can only be called the second Russian renaissance, for all that the Acmeists wished to relegate symbolism to the nineteenth century, and declared themselves poets of their own time. They seemed basically untouched by the modern movement – their contemporaries Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Joyce – even when they admired them, a movement which, like many others, was aborted in Russia by political events.

Pasternak loved everything Russian, and was prepared to forgive his country all her shortcomings, all save the barbarism of Stalin’s reign; but even that, in 1945, he regarded as the darkness before a dawn which he was straining his eyes to detect, the hope expressed in the last chapters of Doctor Zhivago. He believed himself to be in communion with the inner life of the Russian people, to share its hopes and fears and dreams, to be its voice as, in their different fashions, Tyutchev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Blok had been (by the time I knew him he conceded nothing to Nekrasov). In conversation with me during my Moscow visits, when we were always alone, before a polished desk on which not a book or a scrap of paper was to be seen, he repeated his conviction that he lived close to the heart of his country, and sternly and repeatedly denied this role to Gorky and Mayakovsky, especially to the former, and felt that he had something to say to the rulers of Russia, something of immense importance which only he could say, although what this was – he spoke of it often – seemed dark and incoherent to me. This may well have been due to lack of understanding on my part – although Anna Akhmatova told me that when he spoke in this prophetic strain, she, too, failed to understand him.

It was when he was in one of these ecstatic moods that he told me of his telephone conversation with Stalin about Mandel′shtam’s arrest, the famous conversation of which many differing versions circulated and still circulate. I can only reproduce the story as I remember that he told it me in 1945. According to his account he was in his Moscow flat with his wife and son and no one else, when the telephone rang and a voice told him that it was the Kremlin speaking, and that comrade Stalin wished to speak to him. He assumed that this was an idiotic practical joke and put down the receiver. The telephone rang again and the voice somehow convinced him that the call was authentic. Stalin then asked him whether he was speaking to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak; Pasternak said that it was indeed he. Stalin asked whether he was present when a lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandel′shtam:1 Pasternak answered that it seemed to him of no importance whether he was or was not present, but that he was enormously happy that Stalin was speaking to him; that he had always known that this would happen, that they must meet and speak about matters of supreme importance. Stalin then asked whether Mandel′shtam was a master: Pasternak replied that as poets they were very different; that he admired Mandel′shtam’s poetry but felt no affinity with it; but that in any case this was not the point at all.

Here, in recounting the episode to me, Pasternak again embarked on one of his great metaphysical flights about cosmic turning points in the world’s history which he wished to discuss with Stalin – it was of supreme importance that he should do so – I can easily imagine that he spoke in this vein to Stalin too. At any rate, Stalin asked him again whether he was or was not present when Mandel′shtam read the lampoon. Pasternak answered again that what mattered most was his indispensable meeting with Stalin, that it must happen soon, that everything depended on it, that they must speak about ultimate issues, about life and death. ‘If I were Mandel′shtam’s friend I should have known better how to defend him,’ said Stalin, and put down the receiver. Pasternak tried to ring back but, not surprisingly, failed to get through to the leader. The episode evidently preyed deeply upon him: he repeated to me the version I have just recounted on at least two later occasions, and told the story to other visitors, although, apparently, in somewhat different forms. His efforts to rescue Mandel′shtam, in particular his appeal to Bukharin, probably helped to preserve him at least for a time – Mandel′shtam was finally destroyed some years later – but Pasternak clearly felt, perhaps without good reason, but as anyone not blinded by self-satisfaction or stupidity might feel, that perhaps another response might have done more for the condemned poet.1

He followed this story with accounts of other victims: Pil′nyak, who anxiously waited (‘was constantly looking out of the window’) for an emissary to ask him to sign a denunciation of one of the men accused of treason in 1936, and because none came, realised that he too was doomed. He spoke of the circumstances of Tsvetaeva’s suicide in 1941, which he thought might have been prevented if the literary bureaucrats had not behaved with such appalling heartlessness to her. He told the story of a man who asked him to sign an open letter condemning Marshal Tukhachevsky; when Pasternak refused and explained the reasons for his refusal, the man burst into tears, said that the poet was the noblest and most saintly human being that he had ever met, embraced him fervently, and then went straight to the secret police and denounced him.

Pasternak then said that despite the positive role which the Communist Party had played during the war, and not in Russia alone, he found the idea of any kind of relationship with it increasingly repellent: Russia was a galley, a slave-ship, and these were the overseers who whipped the rowers. Why, he wished to know, did a diplomat from a remote British ‘territory’, then in Moscow, whom I surely knew, a man who knew some Russian and claimed to be a poet, and visited him occasionally, why did this person insist, on every possible and impossible occasion, that he, Pasternak, should get closer to the Party? He did not need gentlemen who came from the other side of the world to tell him what to do – could I tell this man that his visits were unwelcome? I promised that I would, but did not do so, partly for fear of rendering Pasternak’s none too secure position still more precarious. The Commonwealth diplomat in question shortly afterwards left the Soviet Union, and, I was told by his friends, later changed his views.

Pasternak reproached me too; not, indeed, for seeking to impose my political or any other opinions on him, but for something that to him seemed almost as bad: here we both were, in Russia, and wherever one looked everything was disgusting, appalling, an abominable pigsty, yet I seemed to be positively exhilarated by it, I wandered about and looked at everything (he declared) with bemused eyes – I was no better than other foreign visitors who saw nothing and suffered from absurd delusions, maddening to the poor miserable natives.

Pasternak was acutely sensitive to the charge of accommodating himself to the demands of the Party or the State – he seemed afraid that his mere survival might be attributed to some unworthy effort to placate the authorities, some squalid compromise of his integrity to escape persecution. He kept returning to this point, and went to absurd lengths to deny that he was capable of conduct of which no one who knew him could begin to conceive him to be guilty. One day he asked me whether I had read his wartime volume of poems On Early Trains; had I heard anyone speak of it as a gesture of conformity with the prevailing orthodoxy? I said truthfully that I had never heard this, that it seemed to me a ludicrous suggestion.

Anna Akhmatova, who was bound to him by the deepest friendship and admiration, told me that when she was returning to Leningrad from Tashkent, where in 1941 she had been evacuated from Leningrad, she stopped in Moscow and visited Peredelkino. Within a few hours of arriving she received a message from Pasternak that he could not see her – he had a fever – he was in bed – it was impossible. On the next day the message was repeated. On the third day he appeared before her looking unusually well, with no trace of any ailment. The first thing he did was to ask her whether she had read his latest book of poems: he put the question with so painful an expression on his face that she tactfully said that she had not read them yet; at which his face cleared, he looked vastly relieved and they talked happily. He evidently felt needlessly ashamed of these poems, which, in fact, were not well received by the official critics. It evidently seemed to him a kind of half-hearted effort to write civic poetry – there was nothing he disliked more intensely than this genre.

Yet, in 1945, he still had hopes of a great renewal of Russian life as a result of the cleansing storm that the war had seemed to him to be – as transforming in its own terrible fashion as the Revolution itself – a vast cataclysm beyond our puny moral categories. Such vast mutations cannot, he held, be judged; one must think and think about them and seek to understand as much of them as one can, all one’s life; they are beyond good and evil, acceptance or rejection, doubt or assent; they must be accepted as elemental changes, earthquakes, tidal waves, transforming events which are beyond all moral and historical categories. So, too, the dark nightmare of betrayals, purges, massacres of the innocent, followed by an appalling war, seemed to him a necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit.

I did not see him again for eleven years. By 1956 his estrangement from his country’s political order was complete. He could not speak of it, or its representatives, without a shudder. By that time his friend Olga Ivinskaya had been arrested, interrogated, maltreated, sent to a labour camp for five years. ‘Your Boris,’ the Minister of State Security, Abakumov, had said to her, ‘your Boris detests us, doesn’t he?’ ‘They were right,’ Pasternak said to me: ‘she could not and did not deny it.’ I had travelled to Peredelkino with Neuhaus and one of his sons by his first wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, who was now married to Pasternak. Neuhaus repeated over and over again that Pasternak was a saint: that he was too unworldly – his hope that the Soviet authorities would permit the publication of Doctor Zhivago was plainly absurd – martyrdom of the author was far more likely. Pasternak was the greatest writer produced by Russia for decades, and he would be destroyed, as so many had been destroyed, by the State; this was an inheritance from the tsarist regime – whatever the difference between Russia old and new, suspicion and persecution of writers were common to both. His former wife had told him that Pasternak was determined to get his novel published somewhere; he had tried to dissuade him, in vain. If Pasternak mentioned the matter to me, would I – it was important – more than important – perhaps a matter of life and death, who could tell, even in these days? – would I try to persuade him to hold his hand? Neuhaus seemed to me to be right: Pasternak probably did need to be physically saved from himself.

By this time we had arrived at Pasternak’s house. He was waiting for me by the gate and let Neuhaus go in, embraced me warmly and said that after eleven years during which we had not met, much had happened, most of it very evil. He stopped and said ‘Surely there is something you want to say to me?’ I said, with monumental tactlessness (not to say unforgivable stupidity), ‘Boris Leonidovich, I am happy to see you looking so well: but the main thing is that you have survived – it seemed almost miraculous to some of us’ (I was thinking of the anti-Jewish persecution of Stalin’s last years). His face darkened and he looked at me with real anger: ‘I know what you are thinking,’ he said. ‘What, Boris Leonidovich?’ ‘I know, I know it, I know exactly what is in your mind,’ he replied in a breaking voice – it was very frightening – ‘do not prevaricate, I can see more clearly into your mind than I can into my own.’ ‘What am I thinking?’ I asked again, more and more disturbed by his words. ‘You think – I know that you think – that I have done something for them.’ ‘I assure you, Boris Leonidovich, that I never conceived of this – I have never heard this suggested by anyone, even as an idiotic joke.’ In the end he believed me. But he was visibly upset. Only after I had assured him that admiration for him, not only as a writer, but as a free and independent human being, was, among civilised people, worldwide did he begin to return to his normal state. ‘At least’, he said, ‘I can say, like Heine, “I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom.” ’1

He took me to his study. There he thrust a thick envelope into my hands: ‘My book,’ he said, ‘it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.’ I began to read Doctor Zhivago immediately on leaving him, and finished it on the following day. Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the West, I thought it was a work of genius. It seemed – and seems – to me to convey an entire range of human experience, to create a world, even if it contains only one genuine inhabitant, in language of unexampled imaginative power. When, two or three days later, I saw him again I found it difficult to say this to him, and only asked what he intended to do with his novel. He told me that he had given it to an Italian Communist, who worked in the Italian Section of the Soviet radio and at the same time acted as an agent for the Communist Milanese publisher Feltrinelli; he had assigned world rights to Feltrinelli – he wished his novel, his testament, the most authentic, most complete of all his writings – his poetry was nothing by comparison (although the poems in the novel were, he thought, perhaps the best he had written) – he wished his work to travel over the entire world, to ‘lay waste with fire’ (he quoted from Pushkin’s famous poem The Prophet) ‘the hearts of men’.²

At some point during the day, while the famous raconteur Andronikov was entertaining the company with an elaborate account of the Italian actor Salvini, Zinaida Nikolaevna drew me aside and begged me with tears in her eyes to dissuade Pasternak from getting Doctor Zhivago published abroad without official permission: she did not wish her children to suffer; surely I knew what ‘they’ were capable of. Moved by this plea, I spoke to the poet at the first opportunity. I said that I would have microfilms of his novel made, and cause them to be buried in the four quarters of the globe – in Oxford, in Valparaiso, in Tasmania, Haiti, Vancouver, Cape Town, Japan – so that a text would survive even if a nuclear war broke out; was he resolved to defy the Soviet authorities, had he considered the consequences?

For the second time during that week he showed a touch of real anger in talking to me. He told me that what I said was no doubt well intentioned, that he was touched by my concern for his own safety and that of his family (this was said a trifle ironically), but that he knew what he was doing: that I was worse than that Commonwealth diplomat eleven years ago who had tried to convert him to Communism; he had spoken to his sons; they were prepared to suffer; I was not to mention the matter again – I had read the book, I surely realised what it, above all its dissemination, meant to him. I was shamed into silence.

After an interval, perhaps to lighten the atmosphere, he said, ‘You know, my present position here is less insecure than you seem to think. My translations of Shakespeare, for example, have been acted with success: let me tell you an amusing story.’ He then reminded me that he had once introduced me to one of the most celebrated of Soviet actors, Livanov (whose real name, he added, was Polivanov). Livanov was very enthusiastic about Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, and, some years ago, wished to produce it and act in it himself. He obtained official permission for this and rehearsals began. During this period he was invited to one of the regular banquets in the Kremlin, over which Stalin presided. It was Stalin’s habit, at a certain point in the evening, to walk from table to table, exchanging greetings and offering toasts. When he approached Livanov’s table, the actor asked him: ‘Iosif Vissarionovich, how should one play Hamlet?’ He wanted Stalin to say something, anything; he could then carry this away under his arm and use it. As Pasternak put it, if Stalin had said ‘You must play it in a mauve manner’, Livanov could tell his actors that what they were doing was not mauve enough, that the Leader had distinctly ordered it to be mauve; he, Livanov, had alone grasped exactly what the Leader meant, and the director and everyone else would then be bound to obey. Stalin stopped and said ‘You are an actor? At the Arts Theatre? Then you should put your question to the artistic director of the theatre; I am no expert on theatrical matters.’ Then, after a silence, ‘However, since you have put the question to me, I shall give you my answer: Hamlet is a decadent play and should not be performed at all.’ The rehearsals were broken off on the next day. There was no performance of Hamlet until well after Stalin’s death. ‘You see,’ said Pasternak, ‘things have changed. They change all the time.’ Another silence.

He then talked about French literature, as often before. Since our last meeting he had procured Sartre’s La Nausée and found it unreadable, and its obscenity revolting. Surely after four centuries of creative genius this great nation could not have ceased to generate literature? Aragon was a time-server, Duhamel, Guéhenno were inconceivably tedious; was Malraux still writing? Before I could reply, one of his guests at lunch, a woman with an indescribably innocent and sweet expression of a kind perhaps more often found in Russia than in the West, a teacher who had recently returned after fifteen years in a labour camp, to which she had been condemned solely for teaching English, shyly asked whether Aldous Huxley had written anything since Point Counter Point; and was Virginia Woolf still writing? – she had never seen a book by her, but from an account in an old French newspaper which in some mysterious fashion had found its way into her camp, she thought that she might like her work.

It is difficult to convey the pleasure of being able to bring news of art and literature of the outer world to human beings so genuinely eager to receive it, so unlikely to obtain it from any other source. I told her and the assembled company all that I could of English, American, French writing: it was like speaking to the victims of shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civilisation – all they heard, they received as new, exciting and delightful. The Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, Pasternak’s great friend, had perished in the Great Purge; his widow Nina Tabidze, who was present, wanted to know whether Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw were still great names in the Western theatre. I told her that interest in Shaw had declined, but that Chekhov was greatly admired and often performed, and added that Akhmatova had said to me that she could not understand this worship of Chekhov: his universe was uniformly drab; the sun never shone, no swords flashed, everything was covered by a horrible grey mist – Chekhov’s world was a sea of mud with wretched human creatures caught in it helplessly – it was a travesty of life.

Pasternak said that Akhmatova was wholly mistaken: ‘Tell her when you see her – we cannot go to Leningrad freely, as you probably can – tell her from all of us here that all Russian writers preach to the reader: even Turgenev tells him that time is a great healer and that kind of thing; Chekhov alone does not. He is a pure artist – everything is dissolved in art – he is our answer to Flaubert.’ He went on to say that Akhmatova would surely talk to me about Dostoevsky and attack Tolstoy. But Tolstoy was right about Dostoevsky: ‘His novels are a dreadful mess, a mixture of chauvinism and hysterical religion, whereas Chekhov – tell Anna Akhmatova that, and from me! I love her deeply, but I have never been able to persuade her of anything.’ But when I saw Akhmatova again, in Oxford in 1965, I thought it best not to report his judgement: she might have wished to answer him; but Pasternak was in his grave. In fact, she did speak to me of Dostoevsky with passionate admiration.

But let me return to 1945 and describe my meetings with the poet (she detested the word ‘poetess’) in Leningrad. It happened in the following way. I had heard that books in Leningrad, in what in the Soviet Union were called ‘antiquarian bookshops’, cost a good deal less than in Moscow; the terrible mortality and the possibility of bartering books for food during the siege of that city had led to a flow of books, especially those of the old intelligentsia, into government bookshops. Some of the inhabitants of Leningrad, one was told, weakened by illness and undernourishment, became too feeble to carry entire books, and so had had torn out for them by friends chapters and pages of poems: books and fragments of books had found their way into the second-hand departments of the shops and were on sale. I should have done my best to go to Leningrad in any case, for I was eager to see again the city in which I had spent over four years of my childhood; the lure of books added to my desire. After the usual delays I was granted permission to spend two nights in the old Astoria hotel, and in company with the British Council representative in the Soviet Union, Miss Brenda Tripp – a most intelligent and sympathetic organic chemist – I reached Leningrad on a grey day in November.1

III

I had not seen the city since 1920, when I was eleven years old and my family was allowed to return to our native city of Riga, the capital of a then independent republic. In Leningrad my recollections of childhood became fabulously vivid – I was inexpressibly moved by the look of the streets, the houses, the statues, the embankments, the market-places, the suddenly familiar broken railings of a little shop in which samovars were mended below the house in which we had lived – the inner yard of the house looked as sordid and abandoned as it had done during the first years of the Revolution. My memories of specific events, episodes, experiences came between me and the physical reality: it was as if I had walked into a legendary city, myself at once part of the vivid, half-remembered legend, and yet, at the same time, viewing it from some outside vantage-point. The city had been greatly damaged, but still in 1945 remained indescribably beautiful (it seemed wholly restored by the time I saw it again eleven years later).

I made my way to the object of my journey, the Writers’ Bookshop of which I had been told, in the Nevsky Prospekt. There were then – I expect there still are – two sections in certain Russian bookshops: the outer room for the general public, in which one asks for books across the counter, and an inner room, with free access to the shelves, for recognised writers, journalists and other privileged persons. Because we were foreigners, Miss Tripp and I were admitted to the inner sanctum. While looking at the books, I fell into casual conversation with someone who was turning over the leaves of a book of poems. He turned out to be a well-known critic and literary historian; we talked about recent events, and he described the terrible ordeal of the siege of Leningrad and the martyrdom and heroism of many of its inhabitants, and said that some had died of cold and hunger, others, mostly the younger ones, had survived: some had been evacuated. I asked him about the fate of writers in Leningrad. He said, ‘You mean Zoshchenko and Akhmatova?’ Akhmatova to me was a figure from a remote past; Maurice Bowra, who had translated some of her poems, spoke about her to me as someone not heard of since the First World War. ‘Is Akhmatova still alive?’ I asked.1 ‘Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna?’ he said: ‘Why yes, of course, she lives not far from here on the Fontanka, in Fontanny Dom [Fountain House]; would you like to meet her?’ It was as if I had suddenly been invited to meet Miss Christina Rossetti; I could hardly speak; I mumbled that I should indeed like to meet her. ‘I shall telephone her,’ my new acquaintance said; and returned to tell me that she would receive us at three that afternoon; I was to come back to the bookshop and we would go together. I returned to the Hotel Astoria with Miss Tripp, and asked her if she would like to meet the poet – she said that she could not, she was otherwise engaged that afternoon.

IB used his 1945 diary as an address book: here he records details for, among others, Korney Chukovsky, Evgeniya Afinogenova, Pasternak, Vladimir Orlov (the critic), Akhmatova and Gennady Rakhlin (the bookseller)

I returned at the appointed hour. The critic and I left the bookshop, turned left, crossed the Anichkov Bridge and turned left again, along the embankment of the Fontanka. Fountain House, the palace of the Sheremetevs, is a magnificent late baroque building with gates of exquisite ironwork for which Leningrad is famous, and built around a spacious court, not unlike the quadrangle of a large Oxford or Cambridge college. We climbed up one of the steep, dark staircases to an upper floor, and were admitted to Akhmatova’s room. It was very barely furnished – virtually everything in it had, I gathered, been taken away – looted or sold – during the siege; there was a small table, three or four chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa and, above the unlit stove, a drawing by Modigliani. A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped about her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features, and an expression of immense sadness. I bowed – it seemed appropriate, for she looked and moved like a tragic queen – thanked her for receiving me, and said that people in the West would be glad to know that she was in good health, for nothing had been heard of her for many years. ‘Oh, but an article on me has appeared in the Dublin Review,’ she said, ‘and a thesis is being written about my work, I am told, in Bologna.’ She had a friend with her, an academic lady of some sort, and there was polite conversation for some minutes. Then Akhmatova asked me about the ordeal of London during the bombing: I answered as best I could, feeling acutely shy and constricted by her distant, somewhat regal manner.

Suddenly I heard what sounded like my first name being shouted somewhere outside. I ignored this for a while – it was plainly an illusion – but the shouting became louder and the word ‘Isaiah’ could be clearly heard. I went to the window and looked out, and saw a man whom I recognised as Randolph Churchill. He was standing in the middle of the great court, looking like a tipsy undergraduate, and screaming my name. I stood rooted to the floor for some seconds. Then I collected myself, muttered an apology and ran down the stairs: my only thought was to prevent him from coming to the room. My companion, the critic, ran after me anxiously. When we emerged into the court, Churchill came towards me and welcomed me effusively: ‘Mr X,’ I said mechanically, ‘I do not suppose that you have met Mr Randolph Churchill?’ The critic froze, his expression changed from bewilderment to horror, and he left as rapidly as he could. I never saw him again, but as his works continue to be published in the Soviet Union, I infer that this chance meeting did him no harm. I have no notion whether I was followed by agents of the secret police, but there could be no doubt that Randolph Churchill was; it was this untoward event that caused absurd rumours to circulate in Leningrad that a foreign delegation had arrived to persuade Akhmatova to leave Russia; that Winston Churchill, a lifelong admirer of the poet, was sending a special aircraft to take Akhmatova to England, and the like.

I had not met Randolph since we were undergraduates at Oxford. After hastily leading him out of Fountain House, I asked him what all this meant. He explained that he was in Moscow as a journalist on behalf of the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had come to Leningrad as part of his assignment; on arriving at the Hotel Astoria, his first concern had been to get the pot of caviar which he had acquired into an icebox: but as he knew no Russian and his interpreter had disappeared, his cries for help had finally brought down Miss Brenda Tripp. She saw to his caviar and, in the course of general conversation, told him that I was in the city. He said that he knew me and that in his view I would make an excellent substitute interpreter, and was then unfortunately told by Miss Tripp about my visit to the Sheremetev Palace. The rest followed: since he did not know exactly where I was to be found, he adopted a method which had served him well during his days in Christ Church (his Oxford college), and, I dare say, on other occasions; and, he said with a winning smile, it worked. I detached myself from him as quickly as I could and, after obtaining her number from the bookseller, telephoned Akhmatova to offer an explanation of my precipitate departure and to apologise for it. I asked if I might be allowed to call on her again. ‘I shall wait for you at nine this evening,’ she answered.

Slip of paper on which Akhmatova’s telephone number, address and name were written down for Berlin (by Antonina Oranzhireeva)

When I returned, her companion turned out to be one of her second husband’s – the Assyriologist Shileiko’s – pupils, a learned lady who asked me a great many questions about English universities and their organisation. Akhmatova was plainly uninterested and, for the most part, silent. Shortly before midnight the Assyriologist left, and then Akhmatova began to ask me about old friends who had emigrated – some of whom I might know (she was sure of that, she told me later; in personal relationships, she assured me, her intuition – almost second sight – never failed her). I did indeed know some of them: we talked about the composer Arthur Lourié, whom I had met in America during the war; he had been an intimate friend of hers and had set some of her and of Mandel′shtam’s poetry to music; about the poet Georgy Adamovich; about Boris Anrep, the mosaicist (whom I had never met); I knew little about him, only that he had decorated the floor of the entrance hall of the National Gallery with the figures of celebrated persons – Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo, Clive Bell, Lydia Lopokova and others. Twenty years later I was able to tell her that in the meantime Anrep had added a mosaic of her too, and had called it ‘Compassion’. She did not know this, and was profoundly moved; and showed me a ring with a black stone which Anrep had given to her in 1917.

She asked after Salome Halpern, née Andronikova, whom she knew well in St Petersburg before the First World War – a celebrated society beauty of that period, famous for her wit, intelligence and charm, a friend of Russian poets and painters of the time. Akhmatova told me – what, indeed, I knew already – that Mandel′shtam, who had been in love with her, dedicated one of his most beautiful poems to her; I knew Salomeya Nikolaevna (and her husband Aleksandr Yakovlevich Halpern) well, and told Akhmatova something of their lives and friendships and opinions. She asked after Vera Stravinsky, the composer’s wife, whom I did not then know; I answered these questions only in 1965, in Oxford. She spoke of her visits to Paris before the First World War, of her friendship with Amedeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her hung over her fireplace – one of many (the rest had perished during the siege); of her childhood on the Black Sea coast, a pagan, unbaptised land, she called it, where one felt close to an ancient, half-Greek, half-barbarian, deeply un-Russian culture; of her first husband, the celebrated poet Gumilev, who had done a great deal to form her – he had thought it ridiculous that a poet should be married to another poet, and on occasion had harshly criticised her writing, though he never humiliated her before others. On one occasion, when he was returning from one of his journeys to Abyssinia (the subject of some of his most exotic and magnificent poems), she had come to meet him at the railway station in St Petersburg (years later she told the story again, in the same words, to Dimitri Obolensky and me in Oxford). He looked severe: the first question he put to her was ‘Have you been writing?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Read it.’ She did so: ‘Yes, good, good,’ he said, his eyebrows unknitting, and they went home; from that moment he accepted her as a poet. She was convinced that he had not taken part in the monarchist conspiracy for which he had been executed; Gorky, who had been asked by many writers to intervene on his behalf, disliked him and, according to some accounts,1 did not intercede for him. She had not seen him for some time before his condemnation – they had been divorced some years before; her eyes had tears in them when she described the harrowing circumstances of his death.

After a silence she asked me whether I would like to hear her poetry: but before doing this, she said that she wished to recite two cantos from Byron’s Don Juan to me, for they were relevant to what would follow. Even if I had known the poem well, I could not have told which cantos she had chosen, for although she read English, her pronunciation of it made it impossible to understand more than a word or two. She closed her eyes and spoke the lines from memory, with intense emotion; I rose and looked out of the window to conceal my embarrassment. Perhaps, I thought afterwards, that is how we now read classical Greek and Latin; yet we, too, are moved by the words, which, as we pronounce them, might be wholly unintelligible to their authors and audiences. Then she spoke her own poems from Anno Domini, The White Flock, From Six Books – ‘Poems like these, but far better than mine, were the cause of the death of the best poet of our time, whom I loved and who loved me …’ – whether she meant Gumilev or Mandel′shtam I could not tell, for she broke down in tears and could not go on.

She then recited the (at that time) still unfinished Poem without a Hero. There are recordings of her readings, and I shall not attempt to describe them. Even then I realised that I was listening to a work of genius. I do not suppose that I understood that many-faceted and most magical poem and its deeply personal allusions any better than when I read it now. She made no secret of the fact that it was intended as a kind of final memorial to her life as a poet, to the past of the city – St Petersburg – which was part of her being, and, in the form of a Twelfth Night carnival procession of masked figures en travesti, to her friends and their lives and destinies and her own – a kind of artistic Nunc Dimittis before the inescapable end which would not be long in coming. The lines about the Guest from the Future had not then been written, nor the third dedication. It is a mysterious and deeply evocative work. A tumulus of learned commentary is inexorably rising over it. Soon it may be buried under its weight.

Then she read the Requiem, from a manuscript. She broke off and spoke of the years 1937–8, when both her husband and her son had been arrested and sent to prison camps (this was to happen again), of the queues of women who waited day and night, week after week, month after month, for news of their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, for permission to send food or letters to them – but no news ever came, no message ever reached them – when a pall of death in life hung over the cities of the Soviet Union while the torture and slaughter of millions of innocents were going on. She spoke in a dry, matter-of-fact voice, occasionally interrupting herself with ‘No, I cannot, it is no good, you come from a society of human beings, whereas here we are divided into human beings and …’. Then a long silence. ‘And even now …’. I asked about Mandel′shtam: she was silent, her eyes filled with tears, and she begged me not to speak of him: ‘After he slapped Aleksey Tolstoy’s face it was all over …’. It took some time for her to collect herself; then, in a totally changed voice, she said ‘Aleksey Tolstoy liked me; he wore lilac shirts à la russe when we were in Tashkent, and spoke of the marvellous time he and I would have together when we came back. He was a very gifted and interesting writer, a scoundrel, full of charm, and a man of stormy temperament; he is dead now; he was capable of anything, anything; he was abominably anti-Semitic; he was a wild adventurer, a bad friend, he liked only youth, power, vitality, he didn’t finish his Peter the First because he said that he could deal with Peter only as a young man; what was he to do with all those people when they were old? He was a kind of Dolokhov, he called me Annushka – that made me wince – but I liked him, even though he was the cause of the death of the best poet of our time, whom I loved and who loved me.’ (Her words were identical with those she had used earlier; it now seemed clear to me to whom, on both occasions, she was referring.) It was, I think, by now about three in the morning. She showed no sign of wishing me to leave. I was far too moved and absorbed to stir. The door opened and her son Lev Gumilev entered; it was plain that his relation to his mother and hers to him were deeply affectionate; he explained that he had been a student of the famous Leningrad historian Evgeny Tarle, and his field of study now was the history of the ancient tribes of central Asia (he did not mention the fact that he was there originally in a prison camp); he had become interested in the early history of the Khazars, Kazakhs and earlier peoples; he had been allowed to join a prisoners’ unit of anti-aircraft gunners and had just returned from Germany. He seemed cheerful and confident that he could once more live and work in Leningrad, and offered me a dish of boiled potatoes, which was all that they had. Akhmatova apologised for the poverty of her hospitality. I begged her to let me write down the Poem without a Hero and Requiem. ‘There is no need,’ she said: ‘a volume of my collected verse is to appear next February; it is all in proof; I shall send you a copy to Oxford.’ The Party, as we know, ruled otherwise, and she was denounced by Zhdanov (in a phrase that he had not wholly invented) as ‘half nun, half harlot’,1 as part of the condemnation of other ‘formalists’ and ‘decadents’ and of the two periodicals in which their work had been published.

After Lev Gumilev left us, she asked me what I read: before I could answer, she denounced Chekhov for his mud-coloured world, his dreary plays, the absence in his world of heroism and martyrdom, of depth and darkness and sublimity – this was the passionate diatribe, which I later reported to Pasternak, in which she said that in Chekhov ‘no swords flashed’. I said something about Tolstoy’s liking for him. ‘Why did Anna Karenina have to be killed?’ she asked. ‘As soon as she leaves Karenin, everything changes: she suddenly becomes a fallen woman in Tolstoy’s eyes, a traviata, a prostitute. Of course there are pages of genius, but the basic morality is disgusting. Who punishes Anna? God? No, society; that same society the hypocrisy of which Tolstoy is never tired of denouncing. In the end he tells us that she repels even Vronsky. Tolstoy is lying: he knew better than that. The morality of Anna Karenina is the morality of Tolstoy’s wife, of his Moscow aunts; he knew the truth, yet he forced himself, shamefully, to conform to philistine convention. Tolstoy’s morality is a direct expression of his own private life, his personal vicissitudes. When he was happily married he wrote War and Peace, which celebrates family life. After he started hating Sofia Andreevna, but was not prepared to divorce her because divorce is condemned by society, and perhaps by the peasants too, he wrote Anna Karenina and punished her for leaving Karenin. When he was old, and no longer lusted so violently after peasant girls, he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata, and forbade sex altogether.’

Perhaps this summing up was not meant too seriously: but Akhmatova’s dislike of Tolstoy’s sermons was genuine. She regarded him as an egocentric of immense vanity, and an enemy of love and freedom. She worshipped Dostoevsky (and, like him, despised Turgenev); and after Dostoevsky, Kafka (‘He wrote for me and about me,’ she told me in 1965 in Oxford – ‘Joyce and Eliot, wonderful poets, are inferior to this profoundest and most truthful of modern authors’). She said of Pushkin that of course he understood everything: ‘How did he, how could he have known it all? This curly-haired youth in Tsarskoe, with a volume of Parny under his arm?’ Then she read me her notes on Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights, and talked about the pale stranger, the mysterious poet who offered, in that story, to improvise on themes drawn at random. The virtuoso, she had no doubt, was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz; Pushkin’s relation to him became ambivalent – the Polish issue divided them, but he always recognised genius in his contemporaries. Blok was like that, with his mad eyes and magnificent genius – he too could have been an improvisateur. She said that Blok, who had, on occasion, praised her verse, had never liked her, but that every schoolmistress in Russia believed, and would go on believing, that they had had a love-affair – ‘and historians of literature will believe this too – all this is probably based on my poem A Visit to the Poet, which I dedicated to him in 1914; and perhaps on the poem on the death of The Grey-Eyed King, although that was written more than ten years before Blok died; there were other poems, too, but he did not like any of us’ – she was speaking of the Acmeist poets, above all Mandel′shtam, Gumilev and herself – and added that Blok did not like Pasternak either.

She then spoke about Pasternak, to whom she was devoted. She said that it was only when Pasternak was in a low state that he would express a wish to be with her; and then he would come, distraught and exhausted, usually after some passionate involvement, but his wife would swiftly follow and take him home. Both Pasternak and Akhmatova were apt to fall in love easily. Pasternak had occasionally proposed to her, but she had not taken this seriously; they had never been genuinely in love with one another; not in love, but they loved and adored each other and, after Mandel′shtam’s and Tsvetaeva’s deaths, felt themselves alone. The idea that the other was alive and at work was a source of infinite comfort to them both; they criticised each other, but permitted no one else to do so. She admired Tsvetaeva: ‘Marina is a better poet than I am,’ she said to me; but now that Mandel′shtam and Tsvetaeva were gone she and Pasternak were living in a desert, alone, even though they were surrounded by the love and passionate devotion of countless men and women in the Soviet Union who knew their verse by heart, and copied it and circulated it and recited it; this was a source of pride and delight to them, but they remained in exile.

Their deep patriotism was not tinged by nationalism; the thought of emigration was hateful to both. Pasternak longed to visit the West, but not at the risk of being unable to return to his native land. Akhmatova said to me that she would not move: she was ready to die in her own country, no matter what horrors were in store; she would never abandon it. Both were among those who harboured extraordinary illusions about the rich artistic and intellectual culture of the West – a golden world, full of creative life – both wished to see it and communicate with it.

As the night wore on, Akhmatova grew more and more animated. She questioned me about my personal life. I answered fully and freely, as if she had an absolute right to know, and she rewarded me by giving a marvellous account of her childhood by the Black Sea, her marriages to Gumilev and Shileiko and Punin, her relationships with the companions of her youth, and of St Petersburg before the First World War. It is in the light of this alone that the succession of images and symbols, the play of disguises, the entire bal masqué of the Poem without a Hero, with its echoes of Don Giovanni and the commedia dell’arte, can be understood. Once again she spoke of Salomeya Andronikova (Halpern), her beauty, charm, acute intelligence, her incapacity for being taken in by the second- and third-rate poets (‘they are fourth-rate now’), of evenings at the Stray Dog cabaret, performances at the Distorting Mirror theatre; of her reaction against the sham mysteries of symbolism, despite Baudelaire and Verlaine and Rimbaud and Verhaeren, whom they all knew by heart. Vyacheslav Ivanov was infinitely distinguished and civilised, a man of unerring taste and judgement, of the finest imaginable critical faculty, but his poetry was to her chilly and unsympathetic; so was Andrey Bely; as for Bal′mont, he was unjustly despised – he was, of course, ridiculously pompous, and self-important, but gifted; Sologub was uneven, but interesting and original; far greater than these was the austere, fastidious Tsarskoe Selo headmaster, Innokenty Annensky, who had taught her more than anyone, even more than Gumilev, his disciple, and who died largely ignored by editors and critics, a great, forgotten master: without him, there would have been no Gumilev, no Mandel′shtam, no Lozinsky, no Pasternak, no Akhmatova. She spoke at length about music, about the sublimity and beauty of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas – Pasternak thought them greater than the posthumous quartets, and she agreed with him, she responded with her whole nature to the violent changes of feeling within their movements. The parallel which Pasternak drew between Bach and Chopin seemed to her to be strange and fascinating. She found it easier to talk to him about music than about poetry.

She spoke of her loneliness and isolation, both personal and cultural. Leningrad after the war was for her nothing but a vast cemetery, the graveyard of her friends: it was like the aftermath of a forest fire – the few charred trees made the desolation still more desolate. She had devoted friends – Lozinsky, Zhirmunsky, Khardzhiev, the Ardovs, Olga Bergholz, Lidiya Chukovskaya, Emma Gerstein (she mentioned neither Garshin nor Nadezhda Mandel′shtam, of whose existence I then knew nothing) – but her sustenance came not from them but from literature and the images of the past: Pushkin’s St Petersburg; Byron’s, Pushkin’s, Mozart’s, Molière’s Don Juan; and the great panorama of the Italian Renaissance. She lived by translating: she had begged to be allowed to translate the letters of Rubens, and not those of Romain Rolland – permission had finally been granted; had I seen them? I asked whether the Renaissance was a real historical past to her, inhabited by imperfect human beings, or an idealised image of an imaginary world. She replied that it was of course the latter; all poetry and art, to her, was – here she used an expression once used by Mandel′shtam – a form of nostalgia, a longing for a universal culture, as Goethe and Schlegel had conceived it, of what had been transmuted into art and thought – of nature, love, death, despair and martyrdom, of a reality which had no history, nothing outside itself. Again she spoke of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg as the town in which she was formed, of the long dark night which had covered her thenceforth. She spoke without the slightest trace of self-pity, like a princess in exile, proud, unhappy, unapproachable, in a calm, even voice, at times in words of moving eloquence.

The account of the unrelieved tragedy of her life went far beyond anything which anyone had ever described to me in spoken words; the recollection of them is still vivid and painful to me. I asked her if she intended to compose a record of her literary life. She replied that her poetry was that, in particular the Poem without a Hero; and then she read it to me again. Once more I begged her to let me write it down. Once again she declined. Our conversation, which touched on intimate details of both her life and my own, wandered from literature and art, and lasted until late in the morning of the following day. I saw her again when I was leaving the Soviet Union to go home by way of Leningrad and Helsinki. I went to say goodbye to her on the afternoon of 5 January 1946, and she then gave me one of her collections of verse, with a new poem inscribed on the flyleaf – the poem that was later to form the second in the cycle entitled Cinque. I realised that this poem, in this, its first version, had been directly inspired by our earlier meeting. There are other references and allusions to our meetings, in Cinque and elsewhere.1

These allusions were plain to me when I first read them: but Academician Victor Zhirmunsky, Akhmatova’s close friend, an eminent literary scholar and one of the editors of the posthumous Soviet editions of her poems, who visited Oxford a year or two after Akhmatova’s death, went through the text with me and confirmed my impressions with precise references. He had read the texts with the author: she spoke to him both about the three dedications, their dates and their significance, and about the ‘Guest from the Future’. With some embarrassment, Zhirmunsky explained to me why the last dedication of the poem, that to myself – that this dedication existed was, so he informed me, widely known to readers of poetry in Russia – had nevertheless to be omitted in the official edition. I understood and understand the reason for this only too well. Zhirmunsky was an exceptionally scrupulous scholar, and a man of courage and integrity who had suffered for his principles; he explained his distress at being obliged to ignore Akhmatova’s specific instructions in this regard, but political conditions made it essential. I tried to persuade him that this was of little consequence: it was true that Akhmatova’s poetry was to a high degree autobiographical, and that therefore the circumstances of her life threw more light on the meaning of her words than was the case with many other poets; nevertheless, the facts were unlikely to be wholly forgotten – as in other countries under rigorous censorship, an oral tradition was likely to preserve such knowledge. The tradition might develop in various directions, and might not be free from legend and fable, but if he wished to be sure that the truth was known to a small circle of those likely to be interested, he could write an account of it all and leave it with me or someone else in the West to be published when it was safe to do so. I doubt if he followed my advice; but he remained inconsolable about his shortcomings as an editor under censorship, and apologised for it again and again, whenever we met during his visits to England.

Front (left) and back (right) of photograph given by Akhmatova to IB Akhmatova’s inscription reads ‘A. 2 янв[арь (January)] 1946’

The impact upon Akhmatova of my visit, such as it was, seems to me to have been largely due to the fortuitous fact that I happened to be only the second foreign visitor whom she had seen since the First World War.1 I was, I think, the first person from the outside world who spoke her language and could bring her news of a world from which she had been isolated for many years. Her intellect, critical power and ironical humour seemed to exist side by side with a dramatic, at times visionary and prophetic, sense of reality; she seemed to see in me a fateful, perhaps doom-laden messenger of the end of the world – a tragic intimation of the future which made a profound impact upon her, and may have had a part in creating a new outpouring of her creative energy.

I did not see her on my next visit to the Soviet Union, in 1956. Pasternak told me that though Anna Andreevna wished to see me, her son, who had been rearrested some time after I had met him, had been released from his prison camp only a short while before, and she therefore felt nervous of seeing foreigners, particularly as she attributed the furious onslaught upon her by the Party at least in part to my visit in 1945. Pasternak said that he doubted whether my visit had done her any harm, but since she evidently believed that it had, and had been advised to avoid compromising associations, she could not see me; but she wished me to telephone her – this was safe, since all her telephone calls were certainly monitored, as were his own. He had told her, when he was in Moscow, that he had met my wife and me, that he thought my wife delightful, and told Akhmatova that he was sorry that she could not meet her. Anna Andreevna would not be in Moscow long, and I was to telephone her at once.

‘Where are you living?’ he asked me. ‘At the British Embassy.’

‘You must on no account telephone her from there – you must use a public call box – not my telephone.’

Later that day I spoke to her over the telephone. ‘Yes, Pasternak told me that you were in Moscow with your wife. I cannot see you, for reasons which you will understand only too well. We can speak like this because then they know. How long have you been married?’ ‘Not long,’ I said. ‘But exactly when were you married?’

‘In February of this year.’ ‘Is she English, or perhaps American?’

‘No, she is half French, half Russian.’ ‘I see.’ There followed a long silence. ‘I am sorry you cannot see me, Pasternak says your wife is charming.’ Another long silence. ‘Have you seen a collection of Korean poems translated by me? With an introduction by Surkov? You can imagine how much Korean I know – a selection of poems, it was not I who selected them. I shall send them to you.’

After this she told me something of her experience as a condemned writer: of the turning away of some whom she had considered faithful friends, of the nobility and courage of others; she had reread Chekhov, whom she had once condemned so severely, and said that at least in Ward No. 6 he had described her situation accurately, hers and that of many others. ‘Pasternak [she always called him so when speaking to me, as has long been the habit among Russians, never ‘Boris Leonidovich’] will probably have explained to you why I cannot see you: he has had a difficult time, but not as agonising as mine. Who knows, we may yet meet in this life. Will you telephone me again?’ I promised to do so, but when I did, I was told that she had left Moscow, and Pasternak strongly advised against attempting to ring her in Leningrad.

When we met in Oxford in 1965, Akhmatova described the details of the attack upon her by the authorities. She told me that Stalin was personally enraged by the fact that she, an apolitical, little-published writer, who owed her security largely to having contrived to live comparatively unnoticed during the early years of the Revolution, before the cultural battles which often ended in prison camps or execution, had committed the sin of seeing a foreigner without formal authorisation, and not just a foreigner, but an employee of a capitalist government. ‘So our nun now receives visits from foreign spies,’ he remarked (so it is alleged), and followed this with obscenities which she could not at first bring herself to repeat to me. The fact that I had never worked in any intelligence organisation was irrelevant: all members of foreign embassies or missions were spies to Stalin. ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘the old man was by then out of his mind. People who were there during this furious outbreak against me, one of whom told me of it, had no doubt that they were speaking to a man in the grip of pathological, unbridled persecution mania.’ On the day after I left Leningrad, on 6 January 1946, uniformed men had been placed outside the entrance to her staircase, and a microphone was screwed into the ceiling of her room, plainly not for intelligence purposes but to frighten her. She knew that she was doomed – and although official disgrace followed only some months later, after the formal anathema pronounced over her and Zoshchenko by Zhdanov, she attributed her misfortunes to Stalin’s personal paranoia. When she told me this in Oxford, she added that in her view we – that is, she and I – inadvertently, by the mere fact of our meeting, had started the Cold War and thereby changed the history of mankind. She meant this quite literally; and, as Amanda Haight testifies in her book,1 was totally convinced of it, and saw herself and me as world-historical personages chosen by destiny to begin a cosmic conflict (this is indeed directly reflected in one of her poems). I could not protest that she had perhaps, even if the reality of Stalin’s violent fit of anger and of its possible consequences were allowed for, somewhat overestimated the effect of our meeting on the destinies of the world, since she would have felt this as an insult to her tragic image of herself as Cassandra – indeed, to the historicometaphysical vision which informed so much of her poetry. I remained silent.

Akhmatova in London, June 1965, with Salome Halpern (left) and Amanda Haight (right)

Then she spoke of her journey to Italy in the previous year, when she was awarded the Taormina Literary Prize. On her return, she told me, she was visited by officials of the Soviet secret police, who asked her for her impressions of Rome: had she come across anti-Soviet attitudes on the part of writers, had she met Russian émigrés? She said in reply that Rome seemed to her to be a city where paganism was still at war with Christianity. ‘What war?’ she was asked: ‘Was the USA mentioned?’ What would she answer when similar questions were put to her, as they inevitably would be, about England? London? Oxford? Did the poet who was honoured with her in the Sheldonian Theatre – Siegfried Sassoon – have any political record? Or the other honorands? Would it be best to confine herself to speaking of her interest in the magnificent font which Tsar Alexander I had given to Merton College when he was similarly honoured by the University, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars? She was a Russian, and to Russia she would return no matter what awaited her there: the Soviet regime, whatever one might think of it, was the established order in her country; with it she had lived and with it she would die – that is what being a Russian meant.

We returned to Russian literature. She said that the unending ordeal of her country in her own lifetime had generated poetry of wonderful depth and beauty, which, since the 1930s, had for the most part remained unpublished. She said that she preferred not to speak of the contemporary Soviet poets whose work was published in the Soviet Union. One of the most famous of these, who happened to be in England at this time, had sent her a telegram to congratulate her on her Oxford doctorate. I was there when it arrived – she read it, and angrily threw it into the waste-paper basket: ‘They are all little bandits, prostitutes of their gifts and exploiters of public taste. Mayakovsky’s influence has been fatal to them all.’ She said that Mayakovsky was, of course, a genius, not a great poet but a great literary innovator, a terrorist, whose bombs blew up ancient structures, a major figure whose temperament outran his talent – a destroyer, a blaster of everything; the destruction was, of course, deserved. Mayakovsky shouted at the top of his voice because it was natural to him to do so, he could not help it: his imitators – here she mentioned a few names of living poets – had adopted his manner as a genre and were vulgar declaimers with not a spark of true poetry in them, rhetoricians whose talents were theatrical, and Russian audiences had got used to being screamed at by these ‘masters of the spoken word’, as they were called nowadays.

The only living poet of the older generation about whom she spoke with approval was Maria Petrovykh; but there were many gifted young poets in Russia now: the best among them was Joseph Brodsky, whom she had, she said, brought up by hand, and whose poetry had in part been published – a noble poet in deep disfavour, with all that that implied. There were others, too, marvellously gifted – but their names would mean nothing to me – poets whose verses could not be published, and whose very existence was testimony to the unexhausted life of the imagination in Russia. ‘They will eclipse us all,’ she said, ‘believe me, Pasternak and I and Mandel′shtam and Tsvetaeva, all of us are at the end of a long period of elaboration which began in the nineteenth century. My friends and I thought we spoke with the voice of the twentieth century. But these new poets constitute a new beginning – behind bars now, but they will escape and astonish the world.’ She spoke at some length in this prophetic vein, and returned again to Mayakovsky, driven to despair, betrayed by his friends, but, for a while, the true voice, the trumpet, of his people, though a fatal example to others; she herself owed nothing to him, but much to Annensky, the purest and finest of poets, remote from the hurly-burly of literary politics, largely neglected by avant-garde journals, fortunate to have died when he did. He was not read widely in his lifetime, but then this was the fate of other great poets – the present generation was far more sensitive to poetry than her own had been: who cared, who truly cared about Blok or Bely or Vyacheslav Ivanov in 1910? Or, for that matter, about herself and the poets of her group? But today the young knew it all by heart – she was still getting letters from young people, many of them from silly, ecstatic girls, but the sheer number of them was surely evidence of something.

Pasternak received even more of these, and liked them better. Had I met his friend Olga Ivinskaya? I had not. She found both Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida, and his mistress equally unbearable, but Boris Leonidovich himself was a magical poet, one of the great poets of the Russian land: every sentence he wrote, in verse and prose, spoke with his authentic voice, unlike any other she had ever heard. Blok and Pasternak were divine poets; no Frenchman, no Englishman, not Valéry, not Eliot, could compare with them – Baudelaire, Shelley, Leopardi, that was the company to which they belonged; like all great poets, they had little sense of the quality of others – Pasternak often praised inferior critics, discovered imaginary hidden gifts, encouraged all kinds of minor figures – decent writers but without talent – he had a mythological sense of history, in which quite worthless people sometimes played mysterious, significant roles – like Evgraf in Doctor Zhivago (she vehemently rejected the theory that this mysterious figure was in any respect based on Stalin; she evidently found this impossible to contemplate). He did not really read the contemporary authors he was prepared to praise – not Bagritsky or Aseev, or Maria Petrovykh, not even Mandel′shtam (for whom he had little feeling as a man or a poet, though of course he did what he could for him when he was in trouble), nor her own work – he wrote her wonderful letters about her poetry, but the letters were about himself, not her – she knew that they were sublime fantasies which had little to do with her poems: ‘Perhaps all great poets are like this.’

IB and Akhmatova in Radcliffe Square, Oxford, on 6 June 1965, the day on which she received an Hon. D.Litt., with Dmitry Obolensky and Anna Kaminskaya, granddaughter of Nikolay Punin, Akhmatova’s third husband

Pasternak’s compliments naturally made those who received them very happy, but this was a delusion; he was a generous giver, but not truly interested in the work of others: interested, of course, in Shakespeare, Goethe, the French symbolists, Rilke, perhaps Proust, but ‘not in any of us’. She said that she missed Pasternak’s existence every day of her life; they had never been in love, but they loved one another deeply, and this irritated his wife. She then spoke of the ‘blank’ years during which she was officially out of account in the Soviet Union – from the mid-1920s until the late 1930s. She said that when she was not translating, she read Russian poets: Pushkin constantly, of course, but also Odoevsky, Lermontov, Baratynsky – she thought Baratynsky’s Autumn was a work of pure genius; and she had recently reread Velemir Khlebnikov – mad but marvellous.

I asked her if she would ever annotate the Poem without a Hero: the allusions might be unintelligible to those who did not know the life it was concerned with; did she wish them to remain in darkness? She answered that when those who knew the world about which she spoke were overtaken by senility or death, the poem would die too; it would be buried with her and her century; it was not written for eternity, nor even for posterity: the past alone had significance for poets – childhood most of all – those were the emotions that they wished to re-create and relive. Vaticination, odes to the future, even Pushkin’s great epistle to Chaadaev, were a form of declamatory rhetoric, a striking of grandiose attitudes, the poet’s eye peering into a dimly discernible future, a pose which she despised.

She knew, she said, that she had not long to live: the doctors had made it plain that her heart was weak, and therefore she was patiently waiting for the end; she detested the thought that she might be pitied; she had faced horrors and knew the most terrible depths of grief, and had exacted from her friends the promise that they would not allow the faintest gleam of pity to show itself, to suppress it instantly if it did; some had given way to this feeling, and with them she had been obliged to part; hatred, insults, contempt, misunderstanding, persecution she could bear, but not sympathy if it was mingled with compassion – would I give her my word of honour? I did, and have kept it. Her pride and dignity were very great.

She then told me of a meeting with Korney Chukovsky during the war, when they were both being evacuated to cities in Uzbekistan. Her feelings towards him had for years been somewhat ambivalent: she respected him as an exceptionally gifted and intelligent man of letters, and had always admired his integrity and independence, but did not like his cool, sceptical outlook, and was repelled by his taste for Russian populist novels and the committed literature of the nineteenth century, in particular for civic poetry; this, as well as the unfriendly ironies which he had uttered about her in the 1920s, had created a gulf between them; but now they were all united as fellow victims of Stalin’s tyranny. She said that he had been particularly amiable to her on the journey to Tashkent, and that she was on the point of offering him a royal pardon for all his sins, when suddenly he said ‘Ah, Anna Andreevna, that was the time – the 1920s! What a wonderful period in Russian culture – Gorky, Mayakovsky, the young Alesha Tolstoy – that was the time to be alive!’ The pardon she had so nearly extended was instantly withdrawn.

Unlike the survivors of the turbulent years of post-revolutionary experimentation, Akhmatova looked on these beginnings with deep distaste; to her it was a dishevelled, Bohemian chaos, the beginning of that vulgarisation of cultural life in Russia which sent true artists into bomb-proof shelters when they could find them: from which they emerged at times, only to be slaughtered.

Anna Andreevna spoke to me about her life with an apparent detachment, and even an impersonality, which only partially disguised passionate convictions and moral judgements against which there was plainly no appeal. Her accounts of the personalities and acts of others were compounded of sharp insight into the moral centre of both characters and situations – she did not spare her friends in this respect – together with a dogmatic obstinacy in attributing motives and intentions, particularly when they related to herself, which even to me – who often did not know the facts – seemed implausible, and indeed, at times, fanciful – but it may be that I did not sufficiently understand the irrational and sometimes wildly capricious character of Stalin’s despotism, which makes normal criteria of what can and cannot be believed difficult to apply with confidence even now.

Anna Akhmatova in Oxford, June 1965

It seemed to me that upon dogmatically held premisses Akhmatova constructed theories and hypotheses which she developed with extraordinary coherence and lucidity. Her unwavering conviction that our meeting had had serious historical consequences was an example of such idées fixes; she also believed that Stalin had given orders that she should be slowly poisoned, then countermanded them; that Mandel′shtam’s belief, shortly before his end, that the food he was given in the labour camp was poisoned was well founded; that the poet Georgy Ivanov (whom she accused of having written lying memoirs after he emigrated) had at one time been a police spy in the pay of the tsarist government; that the poet Nekrasov in the nineteenth century must also have been a government agent; that Innokenty Annensky had been hounded to death by his enemies. These beliefs had no apparent foundation in fact – they were intuitive – but they were not senseless, not sheer fantasies; they were elements in a coherent conception of her own and her nation’s life and fate, of the central issues which Pasternak had wanted to discuss with Stalin, the vision which sustained and shaped her imagination and her art. She was not a visionary; she had, for the most part, a strong sense of reality. She described the literary and social scene in St Petersburg and her part in it before the First World War with a sharp and sober realism which made it totally credible. I blame myself greatly for not having recorded in detail her views of persons and movements and predicaments.

Akhmatova lived in terrible times, during which, according to Nadezhda Mandel′shtam’s account, she behaved with heroism. This is borne out by all available evidence. She did not in public, nor indeed to me in private, utter a single word against the Soviet regime: but her entire life was what Herzen once described virtually all Russian literature as being – one uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality. The widespread worship of her memory in the Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself transformed her into a figure (as Belinsky once predicted about Herzen) not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in our century.

To return to the starting-point of this narrative: in a dispatch for the Foreign Office written in 1945,1 I wrote that, whatever the reason – whether it was innate purity of taste or the enforced absence of bad or trivial literature to corrupt it – it was a fact that there was, in our time, probably no country where poetry old and new was sold in such quantities and read so avidly as in the Soviet Union; and that this could not fail to act as a powerful stimulus to critics and poets alike. I went on to say that this had created a public whose responsiveness could only be the envy of Western novelists, poets and dramatists; so that if, by some miracle, political control at the top were relaxed, and greater freedom of artistic expression permitted, there was no reason why, in a society so avid for productive activity, in a nation still so eager for experience, still so young and so enchanted by everything that seemed to be unfamiliar or even true, above all a society endowed with a degree of vitality which could carry off blunders, absurdities, crimes and disasters fatal to a thinner culture, a magnificent creative art should not once again spring into life; and that the contrast between the appetite for anything that had signs of life in it, and the dead matter provided by most of the approved writers and composers, was perhaps the most striking phenomenon of Soviet culture of that day.

I wrote this in 1945, but it still seems to me to fit; false dawns have been many, but the sun has still not risen for the Russian intelligentsia. Even the most hateful despotism sometimes has the unintended effect of protecting the best against corruption, and of promoting a heroic defence of humane values. In Russia this has been, as often as not, combined, under all regimes, with an extravagant and often subtle and delicate sense of the ridiculous, to be found in the entire field of Russian literature, at times at the heart of the most harrowing pages of Gogol or Dostoevsky; it has about it something direct, spontaneous, irrepressible, different from the wit and satire and carefully contrived entertainments of the West. I went on to say that it was this characteristic of Russian writers, even of loyal servants of the regime, when they were slightly off their guard, that made their bearing and their conversation so attractive to a foreign visitor. This seems to me to be no less true today.

My meetings and conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova; my realisation of the conditions, scarcely describable, under which they lived and worked, and the treatment to which they were subjected, and the fact that I was allowed to enter into a personal relationship, indeed, friendship, with them both, affected me profoundly and permanently changed my outlook. When I see their names in print, or hear them mentioned, I remember vividly the expressions on their faces, their gestures and their words. When I read their writings I can, to this day, hear the sound of their voices.

APPENDIX

‘The Guest from the Future’

Some of the passages relevant to the ‘Guest from the Future’1 in the Poem without a Hero occur in the poems listed below. References are to the collection in one volume of Akhmatova’s poems edited by V. M. Zhirmunsky, Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (Leningrad, 1976) (hereafter Z). Included are page references to Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniya, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov, 2 vols ([Munich], 1967 (2nd ed.), 1968) (hereafter SF I and SF II). [A third volume, edited by G. P. Struve, N. A. Struve and B. A. Filippov, was published in Paris in 1983. A complete English translation of Akhmatova’s poems is also now available: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer, ed. Roberta Reeder (Somerville, Mass., 1989 [English text only: 2nd ed. 1992]; 1990 [2 volumes, with parallel Russian text]); this edition includes translations of many of Zhirmunsky’s notes. References to both versions of this edition have been added: HR is the single-volume edition, HR2 the second volume of the two-volume edition. Finally, references have also been provided to the latest Russian edition of Akhmatova’s works, Podeba nad sud′boi, ed. N. I. Kraineva (Moscow, 2005), 2 vols, except in the case of two unfinished poems, which Kraineva does not include; all the poems are in the first volume, referred to as K.]

Cinque no. 2, written down by Akhmatova for IB in a presentation copy of her From Six Books (1940).1 The poem is dated ‘1945. Dec. / Fountain House’ (it was written on 20 December). Richard McKane’s translation in Poet for Poet (London, 1998), 79, runs:

Sounds smoulder to ashes in the air,

and the dawn pretended to be darkness.

Just two voices: yours and mine

in the eternally numbed world.

And under the wind from the invisible Ladoga Lakes,

through a sound like the ringing of bells,

the night’s conversation was turned

into the light sparkle of crossed rainbows.

Cinque, Z nos 415–19: 1, 26 November 1945; 2 [see previous page] and 3, 20 December 1945; 4, 6 January 1946; 5, 11 January 1946 (Z 235–7, notes 412, 488; SF I 283–5, notes 410; HR 453–5, notes 809; HR2 234–9, notes 756; K 187–8, notes 438–9).

A Sweetbriar in Blossom: From a Burnt Notebook (Shipovnik tsvetet: iz sozhzhennoi tetradi), Z nos 420–33; 1, Burnt Notebook (Sozhzhennaya tetrad′ ), 1961; 2, In Reality (Nayavu), 13 June 1946; 3, In a Dream (Vo sne), 15 February 1946; 4, First Song (Pervaya pesenka), 1956; 5, Another Song (Drugaya pesenka), 1956; 6, A Dream (Son), 14 August 1956, near Kolomna; 7, untitled, undated [20–3 August 1956]; 8, untitled, 18 August 1956, Starki; 9, In a Broken Mirror (V razbitom zerkale), 1956; 10, untitled, [autumn] 1956 (1957 in SF), Komarovo; 11, untitled, 1962, Komarovo (Z 238–43, notes 412–13, 488–9; SF I 288–95, notes 411–12; HR 456–63, notes 809–10; HR2 240–5, notes 756–7; K 189–94, notes 439–40).

Z no. 555, untitled, 27 January 1946 [redated by Kraineva summer 1946, Leningrad] (Z 296–7, notes 499; SF I 295, printed (on the authority of Lidiya Chukovskaya) as poem 13 of A Sweetbriar in Blossom (see above), notes 412; HR 696, notes 844; HR2 624–5, notes 787; K 270, note 453). [The omission of nos 12 and 14–16 is puzzling, since these appear to be just as relevant as the others.]

Midnight Verses: Seven Poems (Polnochnye stikhi: sem′ stikhotvorenii), Z Nos 442–50: In Place of a Dedication (Vmesto posvyashcheniya), summer 1963; 1, Elegy Before the Coming of Spring (Predvesennaya elegiya), 10 March 1963, Komarovo; 5, The Call (Zov) (originally published with the epigraph ‘Arioso dolente’, the title of the third movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata, op. 110), 1 July 1963; 6, The Visit at Night (Nochnoe poseshchenie), 10–13 September 1963, Komarovo (Z 247–50, notes 414–15, 490; SF I 303–6, notes 414–15; HR 469–70, 472–3, notes 811–12; HR2 266–9, 272–5, notes 758–9; K 201, 203, notes 441).

Z no. 456, untitled, 15 October 1959, [Moscow] (October 1959 in SF), Yaroslavskoe Chaussée (Z 253, notes 415, 491; SF I 320–1, notes 418; HR 478–9, no notes; HR2 284–7, no notes; K 207, note 442; Professor Zhirmunsky has no doubt that it should be included under this heading; I feel less certain of its relevance.

From an Italian Diary (Iz italyanskogo dnevnika) (Mecelli), Z no. 597, December 1964 (Z 311–12, notes 502; HR 750–1, notes 849; HR2 716–17, notes 791; K 340, no notes).

Z no. 598, untitled, February 1965, Moscow (Z 312, notes 502; HR 754, no notes; HR2 726–7; not in K because unfinished).

A Song (Pesenka), Z no. 601, undated [1955] (Z 313, notes 422–3, 502; HR 759, notes 849; HR2 730–1, notes 792; K 210 [titled Lyubovnaya (Love Song)], no notes).

Z no. 619, untitled, undated [1956] (Z 318, notes 503; HR 726, notes 847; HR2 670–1, notes 789; not in K because unfinished).

Poem without a Hero: A Triptych (Poema bez geroya: triptykh), Z no. 648, 1940–62 (Leningrad–Tashkent–Moscow in SF): Third and Last Dedication ([Posvyashchenie] Tret′e i poslednee), 5 January 1956 (Le jour des rois); 1913: A Petersburg Tale (Devyat′sot trinadsatyi god: petersburgskaya povest′), lines 133–45 (‘The White Hall’ (‘Belyi zal’), 210 (Z 354–5, 358, 360, notes 427, 513–14; SF II 102–3, 107 (lines 82–93), 109 (line 166), notes 357–70, 603–5; HR 547, 553, 556, notes 826, 828; HR2 406–7, 418–19, 424–5, notes 771–2, 773–4; K 368, 374, 378, notes 477, 479–80, 486); Epilogue (Epilog), lines 40–50 (SF II 130–1, no notes; HR 574–5, notes 833; HR2 460–3, notes 779; K 395–6, no notes).

The reader should be warned that some of the figures who occur in the Poem without a Hero, and in the other poems referred to above, may represent a fusion of two or more persons, real, imaginary or symbolic.

This is as much assistance to scholars as I am able to provide. There is nothing that I wish to add.

1 Quoted from L. A. Mandrykina, ‘Nenapisannaya kniga: “Listki iz dnevnika” A. A. Akhmatovoi’ [‘An Unwritten Book: Anna Akhmatova’s “Pages from a Diary” ’], in Knigi, arkhivy, avtografy (Moscow, 1973), 57–76; the quotation appears at 75. Mandrykina’s article is based on material in the archive of A. A. Akhmatova in the V. I. Lenin State Library in Moscow (archive 1073, nos 47–69); the quotation appears in no. 47, fo. 2.

¹ Today called ‘directors’.

¹ [This essay, written in 1980, contains several references to the then present which have mostly not been altered in the light of more recent events.]

¹ A short while before, he had been severely reprimanded by Stalin, who had been shown the second part of his film Ivan the Terrible, and had expressed his displeasure, mainly, I was told, because Tsar Ivan (with whom Stalin may, to some degree, have identified himself) had been represented as a deeply disturbed young ruler, violently shaken by his discovery of treason and sedition among his boyars, tormented by the need to apply savage measures if he was to save the State and his own life, and transformed by this experience into a lonely, gloomy despot, suspicious to the point of neurosis, even while he was raising his country to a pinnacle of greatness.

¹ Skvoz′ dym kostrov [Through the Smoke of Martyrs’ Fires] (Moscow, 1943).

¹ [Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del (‘People’s commissariat for internal affairs’), the name of the Soviet secret police 1934–43.]

¹ I asked André Malraux about this many years later. He said that he did not remember this speech.

² Shcherbakov later became a powerful member of Stalin’s Politburo, and died in 1945.

¹ By 1956 he had read one or two of Sartre’s plays, but nothing by Camus, who had been condemned as reactionary and pro-Fascist.

¹ [‘Anything that is unknown is assumed to be splendid.’]

¹ See Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (London, 1971), 13 and chapter 32.

¹ Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandel′shtam (according to Lydia Chukovskaya) decided that he deserved 4 out of 5 for his conduct in this situation.

¹ Cf. Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911–20), iv 306.

² ‘Glagolom zhgi serdtsa lyudei!’ A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1974–8) ii 83. I have slightly amended Maurice Baring’s translation in his Russian Lyrics (London, 1943), 2 [‘Lay waste with fire the heart of man’].

¹ [Brenda Tripp’s diary records that they arrived on 13 November. See Flourishing (xxii/2), 599. The visits to Akhmatova that Berlin goes on to record probably took place on 15–16 November 1945 and 5 January 1946. The authors of ‘I eto bylo tak’ (xxii/2 on xxiii) argue that there were further visits, again lasting into the early hours, on 17–18 and either 18–19 or 19–20 November, and also a meeting on 2 January. IB never referred to any such additional meetings, but the circumstantial evidence cited for them is cumulatively not unpersuasive. IB’s account here, consistent with that in a number of letters written earlier, may originally have been intended to downplay his meetings with Akhmatova, in order to minimise the fallout for her and those close to her, and for his relatives in the Soviet Union. It is consistent, too, with the account given by Amanda Haight in her book (xxii/2). Does this derive from Akhmatova herself, Haight’s main informant, as well as from IB? If so, it seems odd that no inconsistencies revealed themselves. See also Josephine von Zitzewitz, op. cit. (ibid.). Ed.]

¹ [He knew she was alive. For example, in a letter of 7 June 1945 to Bowra he had written ‘Akhmatova lives in Leningrad and is very inaccessible on account of being a survival of an older day, although not exactly a Fascist beast.’ Flourishing (xxii/2), 574.]

¹ For example, that of Nadezhda Mandel′shtam; see her Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (London, 1974), 88.

¹ A similar formula had been used, in a very different context, by the critic Boris Eikhenbaum, in Anna Akhmatova: opyt analiza (Petersburg, 1923), 114, to describe the mingling of erotic and religious motifs in Akhmatova’s early poetry. It reappeared in 1930, in a caricatured form, in an unfriendly article on her in the Soviet Literary Encyclopedia, whence it found its way into Zhdanov’s anathema of 1946. [Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Moscow, 1929–39) i (1930).]

¹ For details see the appendix, 428–32 below.

¹ Before me, she had met only one other non-Soviet citizen – Count Joseph Czapski, the eminent Polish critic, whom she saw during the war in Tashkent.

¹ op. cit. (xxii/2), 146: ‘There was a direct link, she was convinced, between their meeting and the beginning of the Cold War.’

¹ ‘A Note on Literature and the Arts in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in the Closing Months of 1945’, in Public Record Office FO 371/56725; published as ‘The Arts in Russia under Stalin’ in The Soviet Mind (xxii/1).

¹ See 406, 413 above.

¹ In a letter to Frank Roberts of 20 February 1946 IB wrote of his return from the Soviet Union: ‘My journey was uneventful save that I repeated the performance with the poetess in Leningrad, who finally inscribed a brand new poem about midnight conversations for my benefit, which is the most thrilling thing that has ever, I think, happened to me.’ Flourishing (xxii/2), 619.