Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the Orthodox Legacy in Stalin’s Time
Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the Orthodox Legacy in Stalin’s Time
И так близко подходит чудесное
К развалившимся грязным домам,
Никому, никому неизвестное,
Но от века желанное нам.
— Akhmatova, 1921
Прощай, размах крыла расправленный,
Полета вольное упорство,
И образ мира, в слове явленный,
И творчество, и чудотворчество.
— Pasternak, 1953
How the Russian Orthodox Christian heritage survived in the Stalin era remains a subject of considerable interest. Underground literary production played no small role in assuring the continued life of the Orthodox legacy. To be clear — the Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917, was a total political, social, and cultural revolution that did everything possible to destroy the Orthodox Church and Orthodox faith and to supplant them with similar but secular rituals, saints, and symbols aimed at sanctifying the new Soviet state and its leaders[332]. And what the new leaders failed to destroy, they infiltrated with police agents.
The present discussion treats Akhmatova and Pasternak in tandem because, as I will argue, it was their poetic rivalry that helped to keep religious themes and, to a degree, the Orthodox high culture of the Russian Renaissance alive in the deadly 1920s and 1930s, when Orthodox institutions and believers were severely persecuted. Moreover, this rivalry worked creatively toward more than each rival’s diminishing of the other. Poets make their distinctive voices heard, and they develop their own signature style through creative and sometimes rivalrous dialogue with contemporary poets. This dialogue — hidden in the depths of their poems and invisible to most readers — might directly address the poetic rival or it might just mention obliquely a specific image strongly identified with that poet. The conversation between Akhmatova and Pasternak has been relatively little studied in the literary commentary, in contrast to more obvious, years-long creative dialogues between, for example, the two great Moscow poets, Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, on one hand, or the two great Petersburg poets, Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, on the other.
What is the gist of this poetic conversation between Akhmatova and Pasternak? Although Pasternak is supposed to have proposed to Akhmatova — even a number of times — their relationship was relatively distant[333]. Each a principal figure in one of Russia’s two capital cities, Akhmatova and Pasternak became trusted allies who helped to protect one another. They were co-survivors of a hellish time. Respected and admired poetic colleagues, neither was a genuine poetic soulmate of the other. At the end of their lives they became quite fierce competitors vying for poetic laurels and poetic legacy. What is important about this relationship in the context of the Cunningham Lecture is that it had everything to do with the survival of Orthodox high culture under the Stalin regime.
A brief review of the two poets’ biographies shows several parallels in the quite different trajectories of their careers. They were bоки within months of each other, Akhmatova — in June, 1889 and Pasternak in February, 1890. Both were allegedly Orthodox Christians. Akhmatova was baptized in the Orthodox Church and, even after the revolution, was broadly acknowledged to be «the last and only poet of Orthodoxy»[334]. Even in the 1920s, when it was risky to do so, Akhmatova occasionally went to church. And when Stalin died in early March of 1953, Akhmatova made a personal pilgrimage in spring 1953 to Russia’s holiest shrine at Sergiev Posad[335].
Pasternak’s situation was more complicated. He was born into the family of one of Russia’s leading pre-revolutionary painters, Leonid Pasternak, and one of its most talented young pianists, Rosalia Kaufmann. Jewish, from the Pale of Settlement, they resisted the normal path of forced conversion to Orthodox Christianity as a condition for living in the capital cities[336]. They kept their distance from all religion. Nevertheless, Pasternak claimed in a letter from 1959 that he was baptized early on by his nurse, though recent biographies on Pasternak have found no evidence to corroborate that claim[337]. Though familiar with Scripture and the Orthodox liturgy, Pasternak certainly developed a strong interest in Christianity only later.
Although the poets occasionally converge in a style marked by a tendency to write in fresh, conversational language about everyday subjects, their poetic projects diverge in many points. The young Akhmatova came from the classical Russian and European traditions. Pasternak, in contrast, was to start his career in close proximity to the poets of the avantgarde, who threw the classics «from the ship of modernity»[338]. He was particularly taken with Maiakovsky, though avoided the «in-your-face» irreverence of a Maiakovsky.
Early on, Akhmatova’s themes were private life and love relationships. She was the first Russian woman to develop the large following of a poetic celebrity and to make a distinctive woman’s voice really audible a wide audience. No longer merely the male poet’s muse, now the beloved knows her own mind, speaks for herself, and responds with wit and passion to the male other. Pasternak focuses less directly on human relationships than on embracing and transfiguring the objects of everyday life. Ecstasy at the ordinary things of life illuminates Pasternak’s verse. Weather, rain, sun, window frames, or a train schedule — each of these things can become an active, energetic being, enlivening both natural and built environments.
Both Akhmatova and Pasternak as mature poets would agree with a view of lyrical art as the creation of the «miraculous»: the inspired transfiguration of the ordinary things of this world through a singular voice and poetic persona that allow the reader or listener to perceive in a fresh way. The goal of poetry for both of them is to transform the quotidian and to see and let others see the miracles of the everyday. Although from her earliest poetry on Akhmatova’s poetic idiom was imbued with references to Orthodox life, Pasternak would begin to immerse himself in the Christian tradition only at the end of the 1920s. Then, I will argue, he would actively compete with Akhmatova for the status of the moral voice of his epoch, building his authority in part on an appropriation of crucial Christian themes absorbed both from from Akhmatova, as well as other poets of the Russian renaissance.
The use of biblical themes and archetypes by both poets would eventually contribute to the state’s relegating both poets to the status of «inner exile», surviving through literary translation, though still writing poetry «for the drawer» (not for publication), and at great risk to their lives[339]. Despite political repression, both would employ forbidden biblical archetypes to infuse their own poetic voices with subtle but powerful authority in an effort to withstand tyranny and to create literary monuments that would outlast the tyrants themselves. Akhmatova developed this strategy quite a bit earlier than Pasternak. And Pasternak adopted it, partly in response to Akhmatova
The typical interpretive argument about Pasternak’s engagement with the Orthodox heritage and Scripture stresses the strong influence of another of the four great poets of this generation, Marina Tsvetaeva Though after 1921 Tsvetaeva lived in exile in Europe, Pasternak carried on what can euphemistically be called a creatively passionate relationship with her in letters and poems throughout the mid — 1920s. Tsvetaeva’s cycle of three very sensuous poems devoted to Mary Magdalene, written in 1923, show a Christ resurrected through Magdalene’s love. These poems made a deep and well-demonstrated impression upon Pasternak[340].
The goal of this essay is to show that the much longer-lived but more subtle creative rivalry between Pasternak and Akhmatova was vitally important for the development of Pasternak’s art, as well sustaining the legacy of the Russian religious renaissance during Stalin’s terror. Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s poetic conversation converges in two of the poets’ greatest works, both written in deepest secret, Akhmatova’s cycle, «Requiem», composed in the late 1930s, and Pasternak’s Nobel-prize-winning novel, «Doctor Zhivago», written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, another period of gathering persecution. This story proceeds in three episodes: 1) Akhmatova’s bold poetic «opening the Bible» in the years of a young and virulently anti-religious Soviet society and Pasternak’s overt dismissal of this gesture; 2) Akhmatova’s fearless witness to Stalin’s terror, which Pasternak seemingly ignores; and finally 3) Akhmatova’s late-life quarrel with one of Pasternak’s most famous religious poems[341].
Akhmatova reached full poetic maturity in the awful years of the Russian Civil War, especially at the end, when her estranged husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was shot August 1921 as a White counterrevolutionary. In one of her greatest books, «Anno Domini МСМXXI» (first published 1922), Akhmatova adopts the role of the poetic chronicler of her age. The title of this fifth volume of poetry bears a Latin calendar date with numbers written in Roman numerals, linked deliberately to the birth of Christ and acknowledging the dominant nomenclature of the West-em calendar and Western history. One of its finest poems, «Lamentation [Prichitanie]», paraphrases lines from Psalm 29:2, «Bow down to the Lord / In His Holy Court». Here Akhmatova bids farewell to the objects of Russian religious culture, the icons and bells, as well as its figures, the holy fool, the bishops, and Russian saints. The only figure remaining will be the crucial Orthodox Christian archetype of the Mother of God:
Спит юродивый на паперти.
На него глядит звезда.
И, крылом задетый ангельским,
Колокол заговорил
Не набатным, грозным голосом,
А прощаясь навсегда.
In contrast to Mayakovsky’s irreverent, aggressive Christ, Akhmatova describes the Russian saints emerging from their icon covers and returning to their village homes:
И выходят из обители,
Ризы древние отдав.
Чудотворцы и святители,
Опираясь на клюки.
Серафим — в леса Саровские
Стадо сельское пасти,
Анна — в Кашин, уж не княжити,
Лен колючий теребить.
The figure of the Mother of God offers a transition to Akhmatova’s ensuing biblical poems that bring alive three Old Testament women characters: «The Mother of God sees them off, / Wraps her son in a scarf, / An old beggar’s one / Dropped by the Lord’s porch»[342]. In «Lamentation» we see that Akhmatova is already moving from her earlier conscribed role as «poet of the private chamber» into the public sphere[343]. This milestone is best captured in «Lot’s Wife», written 1922–1924, in which Akhmatova foregrounds the wife. Lot’s wife is pictured following her husband and an angel away from Sodom, when she starts to feel anxious:
But uneasiness shadowed his wife and spoke to her:
Но громко жене говорила тревога:
Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть
На красные башни родного Содома,
На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла,
На окна пустые высокого дома,
Где милому мужу детей родила.
The poet then speaks up for this minor, almost non-existent, Old Testament figure:
Кто женщину эту оплакивать будет?
Не меньшей ли мнится она из утрат?
Лишь сердце мое никогда не забудет
Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд[344].
«Lot’s Wife» is often read as an allegory for Akhmatova’s sorrow at the loss of her vanished world of St. Petersburg, in which, as she would put it in Requiem, she was the «merry sinner». More importantly, Akhmatova infuses the single famous line from Genesis 19:26 («But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt») with the pain of losing a beloved and happy home. The poem’s real strength comes from Akhmatova’s complex reading of the lesson of Luke 17:32–33, which derives from the story of Lot’s wife: «Remember Lot’s wife. Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it». As a poet sympathetic to the suffering of Lot’s wife, Akhmatova is at once saving and losing her own life. On one hand, she refuses to «save» herself by leaving Russia — in contrast to Lot and his wife, who did leave Sodom — to live a more secure life abroad. On the other, she insists on mourning the loss of her cultural home in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and preserving it in memory in a poem that is now a classic of Russian poetry. It is worth pointing out parenthetically that after 1917 until the 1950s Akhmatova had no actual home of her own but camped out with various friends, spouses, and lovers[345]. In thus «losing» her life, Akhmatova did preserve it in the annals of great poetry.
To convey the impression these poems made on the people who heard them at a time, in which Scripture was forced inexorably into oblivion, we recall the words of the great memoirist and friend to both Akhmatova and Pasternak, Lidiya Chukovskaya The Bible, she wrote in her memoirs, was «dead to me — but Akhmatova’s „Biblical Verses“: „Lot’s Wife“… resurrect the Bible [Bibliiu voskreshaiut]»[346]. In contrast, in 1924, when the poems appeared, the not very approving Formalist critic, Iurii Tynianov wrote that in these poems «the Bible, which used to lie on her table, an accessory to the room, has become the source of her imagery»[347]. In his view, Akhmatova’s poetry thereby became tendentious and flat.
Publishing these poems was a bold move on Akhmatova’s part, a gesture of non-acceptance to a regime that increasingly demanded unerring fealty. It was partly this open animation of biblical figures that made Akhmatova suspect in the eyes of the Bolshevik authorities, an act for which she would be condemned to public silence for nearly two decades. After a 1924 resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party not to arrest Akhmatova but also not to publish her, Akhmatova «threw herself into reading, or to be more exact, into the study of the Bible, the ancients, Dante, Shakespeare, French and English poets of the 19th century, and contemporary European and American literature»[348]. Out of this long silence and serious study would come an altered Akhmatova, no longer the «nun who crosses herself as she kisses her beloved» but the moral voice of her people and witness to the horrors of her time[349]. Hers became «people’s poetry» without ever becoming officially accepted, and certainly had much greater truth value because it was never officially accepted[350].
Pasternak’s journey to the status of national poet passed by another route — first embracing the revolution, until he began to reflect on the misfortune sown by the new regime. He shot to fame in 1922 with the appearance of his first book of poems, «My Sister Life». Iurii Tynianov, who had disliked Akhmatova’s biblical poems, hailed Pasternak for giving Russians a new «literary thing»; in these poems, Tynianov wrote, a «downpour starts to be verse» and the «thing comes alive»[351]. Although Pasternak’s would later become a powerful dissenting voice, in part through engaging the perspective offered by the modern Orthodoxy of the Russian religious renaissance and the new biblical themes of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, now he was a voice of ecstasy, celebrating the chaotic forces of life.
The great memoirist, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, saw Pasternak’s poetry as a «type of revelation» filled with the «великая радость узнавания»[352]. Later in life Pasternak would characterize poetry as a form of miracle working. As he wrote in the «Doctor Zhivago» poem, «August» (1953), poetry «captured in words, the image of things», an act that was «both making and miracle-making»[353]. Pasternak’s «miracle» vocabulary intersects with Akhmatova’s, who in her poem, «Disaster» («Все расхищено, предано, продано», 1921), and well before, sought miracles and celebrated miracle workers.
There is no textual or biographical evidence that Orthodox culture, or indeed any religious culture, was important to Pasternak before 1929. «Сестра моя — жизнь», written well before the biblical poems of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, uses at most a few peripheral religious images, for «Что в мае, когда поездов расписанье / Камышинской веткой читаешь в купе, / Оно грандиозней святого писанья»[354]. Only in 1929 did Pasternak show any deeper interest in sacred text, now in a poem titled «To Anna Akhmatova». At the end of the poem he both cites and resists Akhmatova’s identity with Lot’s wife:
Таким я вижу облик ваш и взгляд.
Он мне внушен не тем столбом из соли,
Которым вы пять лет тому назад
Испуг оглядки к рифме прикололи,
Но, исходив от ваших первых книг,
Где крепли прозы пристальной? крупицы,
Он и во всех, как искры проводник,
Событья былью заставляет биться[355].
In this poem Pasternak does not agree with Akhmatova as fitting the figure of Lot’s wife, who turns to salt, looking back nostalgically at her beloved home. He rather makes Akhmatova a bit like himself, a poet of the everyday prose of life, transformed and enlivened. To this poem, which she did not like but gave permission to publish, Akhmatova responded with a photo of herself with the inscription: «To Boris Pasternak, a miraculous poet and the most alive person in the USSR. Anna Akhmatova»[356]. It is worth pointing out here that Akhmatova in this inscription also creates Pasternak somewhat in her own image. Words connected with «miracle», for example, «miraculous» or «miracle worker», are much more part of the vocabulary of her early work than that of the early Pasternak[357].
Further corroboration of the year 1929 as the year of Pasternak’s «opening the Bible» and of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova as two probable sources comes in his early poetic-philosophical autobiography, «Safe Passage», also written in 1929. For the first time he accorded a measure of truth value to the Bible: «Я понял, что, к примеру, Библия есть не столько книга с твердым текстом, сколько записная тетрадь человечества, и что таково все вековечное. Что оно жизненно не тогда, когда оно обязательно, а когда оно восприимчиво ко всем уподоблениям, которыми на него озираются исходящие века»[358]. Now, for the first time. Scripture gains inner meaning and significance in Pasternak’s writing. Though he claims this insight came to him in 1912 as a student visiting Venice and its collections of religious art, we must ask whether this thought did not really come to him much later and more forcefully, in the early 1920s through Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene cycle and Akhmatova’s biblical verse. The evidence would be in Pasternak’s poetry and its response, not to Venetian art, but to the two poets and their archetypes, Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene as lover offering salvific love and Akhmatova’s Lot’s wife and Mary Mother of God.
These somewhat modest literary interactions mark the first groundbreaking of Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s creative rivalry. In the next stage the stakes will be much higher as the poets assert themselves as the witnesses of a horrific age and the voices of a wronged people. It would be in the deeply hidden literary underground of the 1930s that the courageous Akhmatova again invoked now absolutely forbidden Scripture on the occasion of her son’s arrest in 1935 and the onset of Stalin’s sustained persecutions of the Great Terror. In these years a poem was written once on paper, memorized by trusted people and archived in memory. The paper was then burned and the poem written down again much later, when it was safe to do so.
In her stunning cycle, «Requiem» (1935–1940), Akhmatova bears witness to the evisceration of her beloved city, Leningrad, the terrible suffering of its best people, and the time when «безвинная корчилась Русь Под кровавыми сапогами И под шинами черных марусь»[359]. Religious imagery creates deep historical and mythical resonance as Akhmatova immortalizes the relationship between mother and son. The cycle invokes various cultural scenarios, but none more than Russian Orthodox spirituality. The first of the ten central poems, «Уводили тебя на рассвете», speaks of Akhmatova’s son kissing the icon as he leaves: «На губах твоих холод иконки»[360]. By the fourth poem, we learn that the prison, to which she and thousands of other women go in hope of hearing news and delivering packages, is called «Kresty», or «Crosses», already setting the stage for a crucifixion story (even though, happily, her son did live and was eventually released). In the sixth poem she speaks of the Leningrad white nights discussing her son’s awaited death and a «lofty cross», obviously elevating him to the position of a Christ figure.
The tenth and final poem of the main body of «Requiem», «Crucifixion», is the climax of the cycle. Here Akhmatova’s voice expresses a woman, a mother, who has no power but to weep, witness, and remember. The title, «Crucifixion», speaks to Christ’s death but is really more about the experience of Mary, now the Mother of God. As Akhmatova pictures Christ before the Crucifixion, in him divine nature is about to be revealed: «Хор ангелов великий час восславил, И небеса расплавились в огне»[361]. То his Father Christ cries, «„Why hast Thou forsaken me!“» (Matt 27:46), while to his mother, in Akhmatova’s significant distortion of Scripture, he says, «Oh, do not weep for Me…» (Luke 23:28). One suggests a challenge to a greater (paternal) power, while the other suggests possibly bravery in the face of (maternal) lamenting love. The actual citation comes from the passage in Luke 23:28, in which, having been sentenced to death, Jesus exhorts a group of lamenting women to weep not for him but for themselves and their world gone wrong. Although the biblical passage is not about Mary, Akhmatova makes it so, while also implying that this world, the world of Stalin’s making, is a Russia gone terribly wrong.
The second poem of «Crucifixion» focuses on three people close to Jesus — one is Magdalene, who «beat her breast and sobbed», acting out her passion; the second is the disciple; and, in Akhmatova’s rendition, the third is the Mother of God, who stands alone: «А туда, где молча Мать стояла, Так никто взглянуть и не посмел»[362]. Again, Akhmatova significantly distorts Scripture in order to enhance the figure of Mary. In John 19:27 Jesus exhorts his disciple to view his (Jesus’s) mother as if Mary were the disciple’s own mother. The disciple takes Mary into his house henceforth. But Akhmatova empowers the Mother of God by setting her apart and alone, seemingly unloved and ignored, whose mourning is unbearable for other people to countenance, but thereby all the more unforgettable[363]. Unavoidably, in the associative, coded language of poetry, Akhmatova’s Mother of God is clearly vying here with Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene of 1923, who resonates in the demonstrably dramatic figure of Akhmatova’s Magdalene.
In the final poem of the cycle’s epilogue Akhmatova solidifies her own affinity for the Mother of God through a particularly Russian image of Mary as protector of all believers, who covers them with her mantle. With this image she also reenforces herself as a national poet, whose voice will protect people who no longer have a voice or a self:
Для них соткала я широкий покров
Из бедных, у них же подслушанных слов.
О них вспоминаю всегда и везде,
О них не забуду и в новой беде[364].
«Requiem» is indeed meant to be that mantle of words to preserve the memory of the Great Terror, which in turn can protect Russians from ever suffering this awful fate again.
In this final poem Akhmatova rises above the poetic rivalry with Tsvetaeva, placing the «Requiem» cycle in an ancient tradition of monument poems that dates back to Horace and in Russia starts in the 18th century and moves forward through Pushkin. Here too Akhmatova establishes herself as the moral voice of her nation by suggesting that the monument be placed by the door of Kresty Prison, or in the logic of myth, by the «Cross», to honor Russia’s mothers in their effort to withstand the injustice of the Stalinist state:
А если когда-нибудь в этой стране
Воздвигнуть задумают памятник мне,
Согласье на это даю торжество,
Но только с условьем — не ставить его
Ни около моря, где я родилась <…>
А здесь, где стояла я триста часов
И где для меня не открыли засов[365].
Akhmatova dramatizes the image of the sorrowing mother:
И пусть с неподвижных и бронзовых век
Как слезы струится подтаявший снег,
И голубь тюремный пусть гулит вдали,
И тихо идут по Неве корабли[366].
The weeping mother in the end is the final judge of the terror and the wasted existence of the Stalin years.
With «Requiem» Pasternak’s rivalry with Akhmatova gains in intensity. In 1939 Akhmatova read to Pasternak some of the poems from «Requiem», to which Pasternak allegedly responded, «Now even dying wouldn’t be terrifying»[367]. As a rule, Pasternak was known for not paying much attention to other people’s poetry, and Akhmatova was often irritated that he seemed so ignorant of her work[368]. In fact, such turns out not to have been the case. Pasternak paid her the highest compliment, again in the secret code of poetic language, competing with her in what he considered to be his most serious work, «Doctor Zhivago».
Pasternak started working in earnest on his novel in 1946, the year after World War II ended. The significance of the novel for its author is the topic of letter of October 13, 1946: «This is my first real work. In it I want to give an historical image of Russia of the last 45 years… this thing will be an expression of my views on art, the Gospel, a person’s life in history and many other things… The atmosphere of the thing is my Christianity, in its breadth a bit different from Quakers or Tolstoyanism, coming from aspects of the Gospel other than its moral ones»[369]. What he meant by the «other than moral» aspects of the Gospel was its life-affirming aspects, its passion and its faith in resurrection.
For first time in his career, Pasternak is realizing the concept of the Bible theorized in his 1929 autobiography as the «notebook of humanity», the living, ever relevant rethinking and re-adaptation of sacred text. Here for the first time he draws on biblical archetypes that resonate with historical, philosophical, and mythical layers of meaning.
«Doctor Zhivago» has been called a «montage» of biblical and liturgical texts both visual and verbal, including the name of Zhivago from Luke 24:5, which means «of the living»[370]. There are a great many links to Orthodox ritual, starting with the structuring of time in the novel through the Orthodox calendar and ending with long discussions of Orthodox belief in transfiguration through imitating the life of Christ and through human participation in transfiguration of the world to a divine condition, known as Apokatastasis[371]. The main point, however, is that this unique lyrical-philosophical novel narrates the poet’s creative process resulting in an unparalleled cycle of poems that make up the work’s final chapter and which end with nine of the finest religious poems in Russian literary history.
Pasternak’s image of Christ emerges in the novel’s and Yury Zhivago’s own philosophical meditations about history and the historical development of the idea of personhood, which hearken back to the Orthodox philosophies that emerged during the Russian renaissance of the pre-revolutionary decades[372]. This figure particularly emphasizes the idea of resurrection. As Yury recovers from typhus in the winter of 1918, he starts to compose a poem in his head, in which he hears a voice of new life urging him «to wake up». This line is linked in Yury’s consciousness with both «ад, и распад, и разложение, и смерть», on one hand, and «весна, и Магдалина, и жизнь», on the other, much as she was in Tsvetaeva’s poems[373].
The image of Magdalene emerges periperally, as in Yury’s sick deliriums, only later to become the powerful center of Pasternak’s idea of resurrection. Much later, the heroine, Lara Guichard, herself a Magdalene figure, adopts a philosophical view of Magdalene as the embodiment of female personhood, becoming morally conscious through moral failure and self-overcoming.
Many critics have discussed the central figures of Christ and Magdalene as they develop in «Doctor Zhivago». Seemingly missing in the critical commentary are the archetypes associated with Akhmatova Although the wife (of Lot) and mother (Theotokos), so important to Akhmatova’s poetic identity, would seem to have been ignored here, as is often the case in the world of artistic creativity, a kind of acknowledgment of this rival appears where it is least expected, in the byways and side pages of «Doctor Zhivago». We know from Pasternak’s 1929 poem to Akhmatova that, even in resisting this image, he associated her with Lot’s wife. In his novel Pasternak does secretly nod to Akhmatova, while openly ignoring her. The same figure of Lot’s wife is mentioned on the pages dealing with the strange, magical days in the summer of 1917, on the western periphery of the Russian empire when World War I dissolves and revolution breaks out «против воли, как слишком долго задержанный вздох»[374]. Now Yury Zhivago attends public meetings where everyone has a voice, and all sorts of things, even the most outlandish opinions are aired. One speaker heralds ordinary people speaking up as the modern-day equivalent of the story of Balaam’s ass, who has seen an angel in the roadway and refuses to move forward. Having incurred the abusive wrath of her owner, the donkey challenges him, asking him why he is beating her (Numbers 22:22–34). The speaker argues that nothing good will come from not listening to these new voices and claims that Balaam’s master ended badly by being «В соляной столб обратился»[375]. Clearly the speaker, a woman, is confusing the story of Balaam’s ass with the story of Lot’s wife. She is laughed off the podium, just as Pasternak is doing symboliclly to Akhmatova In poetic code, Pasternak is making a signal reference to Akhmatova and, in a sense, putting her in a position of irrelevance, just as he adopts the very position she was also claiming, as the poetic witness to Russia’s horrific history. At the same time, he is also making fun of the poetic strategy of finding biblical analogies for Russia’s revolutionary events, something he himself will do often as the novel progresses.
Textual evidence suggests that «Doctor Zhivago» might well be viewed as a response to Akhmatova’s treatment of the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Although it is certainly not by chance that Yury’s mother’s name is Maria, mothers in «Doctor Zhivago» are diametrically the opposite to Akhmatova’s images. The mother theme receives highly fraught treatment in Pasternak’s novel, where mothers are often not devoted to their children, and if they are, quickly become background characters. Mothers die or disappear or abandon their children in this novel. The novel starts with the funeral of Yury’s natural mother, Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago, whom Yury remembers adoringly and prayerfully even though she often abandonned him as she took cures in Europe for her failing health. Another mother figure is his adoptive mother, Anna Krueger-Gromeko, who dies early on.
Zhivago himself has difficulty in dealing with his first wife Tonia as a mother, seeing her as an object rather than a human being. He imagines her after giving birth as a mythical «barque that crossed the sea of death to the continent of life with a cargo of new souls», lying at mooring with «strained rigging and planking»[376]. Yury’s second wife Lara has one daughter with her first husband Pasha and another with Yury, whom she abandons in the thickets of the Civil War. Yury has a third wife Marina, with whom he has two children, all of whom he ignores and who fall into the background. Finally, the Mary of the Zhivago poem, «Рождественская звезда», is not the stem, stoic mother enduring her son’s crucifixion, around which Akhmatova builds «Requiem», but the young virginal Mary of the birth.
Much more powerful than the mother figure is the Magdalene theme of the lover and fallen woman, surrounding Lara’s adolescent years and reflected in discourses about Magdalene and in the two Zhivago poems devoted to Magdalene. Indeed, Lara, who is described as an intercessor, or «zastupnitsa», in the Yuriatin part of the novel combines both Magdalene and Mary Theotokos in her capacious life experience and generous character[377].
Despite an implicit resistance to the images that form Akhmatova’s fundamental poetic identity, Pasternak shows that Akhmatova was very much on his mind in the final poem of «Doctor Zhivago», «Гефсиманский сад». Attached to a handwritten copy of the final poem, written in 1950, in which the poet announces himself as the judge of his age, was a dedication to none other than «Анне Андреевне [Ахматовой] [sic]»[378]. Not only does this dedication show that Akhmatova was on Pasternak’s mind, but when we examine the text of this final poem of «Doctor Zhivago», we also confirm that it responds specifically though obliquely to the final monument poem of «Requiem», in which Akhmatova creates a monument to herself and all the mothers who bore witness to the horrors of the Stalinist tyranny. Pasternak is competing precisely with Akhmatova, even as he is leaving his own mark as the witness and judge of his age.
The proof can be found in the parallel ship and river images at the end of each poem. Akhmatova’s epilogue ends with: «And may the melting snow stream like tears / From my motionless lids of bronze, // And a prison dove coos in the distance, / And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on». In the final lines of «Garden of Gethsemane» Pasternak raises the stakes, answering Akhmatova’s Mary by speaking as the Orthodox Christ Pantocrator.
Я в гроб сойду и в третий день восстану,
И, как сплавляют по реке плоты,
Ко мне на суд, как баржи каравана,
Столетья поплывут из темноты[379].
The ships on the river that form an ironically peaceful background to Akhmatova’s memorial to maternal suffering, now become a crucial image of human history, filled with evil deeds, part of the drama of final judgment. Pasternak has erected his Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler and Judge of All, in clear juxtaposition to Akhmatova’s Mother of God and the bronze memorial, who stand resolutely by the site of death (whether the biblical Crucifixion or at Stalin’s «Crosses» Prison) and never allows us to forget. One rather grandiosely claims authority as the divine Orthodox judge, while the other is merely human and the intercessor and protector of people, who judges effectively by always keeping alive the memory of injustice, so that people should never have to suffer that murderous fate again.
The final act of the Akhmatova-Pasternak drama played out in the 1950s, when Pasternak had finished his novel, and Akhmatova criticized it for what she saw as an inappropriately self-absorbed image of the public poet. Akhmatova found Pasternak the man, as well as his image of Christ in «Doctor Zhivago» overly self-centered. She corrected him both in person and through her poetry, in a poem from 1959, entitled «The Reader». Nonetheless, she would find authentic spirituality in other, much more private Pasternak poetry.
After World War II Akhmatova was endlessly annoyed by Pasternak’s ignoring her poetry and had gradually become a stem critic of her erstwhile ally. Although by 1956 there was «no continued friendship» between the two monumental poets, Akhmatova and Pasternak had always trusted each other with their poetry[380]. Pasternak read the beginning of «Doctor Zhivago» to Akhmatova in 1947. By late 1957, when it was completely finished, Akhmatova had read «Doctor Zhivago» to the end. Irritated by the novel, according to Chukovskaya, she found «completely unprofessional pages», which she sarcastically attributed to Pasternak’s late-life lover, Olga Ivinskaya She reportedly was tempted to «grab a pencil and cross out page after page»[381]. Ignoring the novel’s religious-philosophical discourse, she claimed somewhat disingenuously, in my view, that the best passages «in this novel are landscapes… I responsibly affirm, there is nothing like them in Russian literature. Not in Turgenev, not in Tolstoi, nowhere. They are ingenious»[382].
Indeed, Pasternak’s ubiquitous references to the Gospel in «Doctor Zhivago» and his poetic identification with the Christ figure in the Doctor Zhivago poetry appear to have been a major source of irritation to Akhmatova A 1947 poem, «То B. Pasternak», written just as Pasternak was starting to share pieces of the novel, she renewed the biblical theme informing their rivalry, relating Moscow at this time after the renewed post-war attacks on literature in 1946, to Gethsemane and the moments before the Crucifixion. Akhmatova talks about the world falling deaf and quiet, following the treachery and anticipating impending death:
Так вот она, последняя! И ярость
Стихает. Все равно что мир оглох.
Могучая евангельская старость
И тот горчайший гефсиманский вздох[383].
This poem raises the theme of Gethsemane that would be central to the first of the Zhivago poems and one of Pasternak’s signature poems, «Hamlet», written in 1949.
Toward the end of the 1950s Akhmatova wrote a poetic response to «Hamlet», titled «The Reader» [ «Chitatel’», 1959]. Increasingly, she felt that as one of the leading poets of Russia, Pasternak was too focused on himself. In April 1959 she commented to Chukovskaia that «[Pasternak] is a wonderful person and a divine poet. But the same thing that happened to Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky happened to him: toward the end of his life he put himself above art»[384]. At an infamous dinner in Peredelkino August 21, 1959, the last time the two poets met, Pasternak refused to sit next to Akhmatova and made fun of her when she recited her new poems[385]. Akhmatova, in turn, struck back by declaiming «The Reader». «Hamlet» conveys the poet as actor playing Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, in a way that also links the Christ story to Shakespeare’s «Hamlet» (which Pasternak had been translating):
На меня наставлен сумрак ночи
Тысячью биноклей на оси.
Если только можно, Авва Отче,
Чашу эту мимо пронеси[386].
In her poem, Akhmatova depicts Pasternak as a self-centered poet who is decidedly not a Christ figure[387].
He должен быть очень несчастным
И, главное, скрытным. О нет! —
Чтобы быть современнику ясным,
Весь настежь распахнут поэт.
И рампа торчит под ногами,
Все мертвенно, пусто, светло,
Лайм-лайта холодное пламя
Его заклеймило чело.
А каждый читатель как тайна,
Как в землю закопанный клад,
Пусть самый последний, случайный,
Всю жизнь промолчавший подряд[388].
Here Akhmatova reproaches Pasternak’s foregrounding of himself in his poem, «Hamlet», rather than the reader and the subject matter. For her, writing poetry is much less a performance on the part of the poet than it is a gesture of reaching out for contact with another person. It is, indeed, a form of dialogue.
Despite the tense and bitter final meeting Akhmatova was quick to remember another poem, in which, in her view, Pasternak was both at his height as a poet and achieved authentic treatment of the divine. She found in «In the Hospital» («V bol’nitse», 1957), a truly inward, genuine I-Thou conversation with God in the moments before the poet’s death. The poem ends with this prayer:
«О господи, как совершенны
Дела твои, — думал больной, —
Постели, и люди, и стены,
Ночь смерти и город ночной.
Я принял снотворного дозу
И плачу, платок теребя.
О боже, волнения слезы
Мешают мне видеть тебя.
Мне сладко при свете неярком,
Чуть падающем на кровать.
Себя и свой жребий подарком
Бесценным твоим сознавать.
Кончаясь в больничной постели,
Я чувствую рук твоих жар.
Ты держишь меня, как изделье,
И прячешь, как перстень, в футляр»[389].
This poem is suffused with a vivifying sense of gratitude. Interestingly, when Pasternak, the poet who wanted to believe so strongly in resurrection, thought that he was on his death bed in 1957, the themes of resurrection and new life that suffuse «Doctor Zhivago» are no longer part of the discourse. Rather he is glad of his life, fearful of death, and yet able to feel at peace at the end of his life.
In conclusion, what was the miracle in the rubble of the Russian revolution that Akhmatova and Pasternak helped to create? And was it despite or because of their biblically based poetic quarrel? To start with, in the very way that they used language and composed their art they brought dead objets, images, and stories back to life — in short, they made miracles. «Pasternak, like Akhmatova», as Chukovskaia put it somewhat crudely, «makes miracles out of garbage»[390]. And Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s art helped to assure the survival of the rich religious and philosophical renaissance of an earlier age, which accorded each person both personal voice and moral choice. Through their courage and perhaps even because of their rivalry and their sometime subtle and sometimes completely unsubtle criticisms of each other’s biblical interventions, both poets kept alive the Orthodox tradition and the Bible as «the notebook of humanity». And that is indeed a miracle.
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Edith W. Clowes