Akhmatova lived in terrible times, during which, according to Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, she behaved with heroism. 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 Russian literature as being - one continuous indictment of Russian reality. The worship of her memory in the Soviet Union today, undeclared but widespread, has, so far as I know, no parallel. Her 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 the Russian history of our time.
My meetings and conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova; my realisation of the conditions, scarcely describable, under which they lived and worked, and of 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.
BORIS PASTERNAK
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak is the greatest Russian writer of our day. No one, not even his bitterest political or personal critics, has dared to deny that he is a lyrical poet of genius whose verse has achieved immortality in his own lifetime, and whose unique position in Russian literature the verdict of posterity is unlikely to alter. The publication abroad of his novel Doctor Zhivago has brought him world-wide fame such as no Russian writer since Gorky has enjoyed. Like Gorky (with whom he otherwise has little in common) he accepted the Revolution. Unlike Gorky and other gifted writers of the Revolution - Aleksey Tolstoy, Ehrenburg, Bunin, Kuprin - he never became an emigre. He remained in his own country and shared the sufferings of his nation to the full.
He never ceased writing: when the great persecutions of art and literature began under Stalin in the 1940s his works were virtually suppressed, and he was allowed to publish very little. Nevertheless the mere existence among them of a man of magnificent and undisputed genius continued to have a profound moral effect upon literate Russians and upon a good many of those who knew of his achievement only by hearsay but looked on him as a secular saint and martyr who remained faithful to his beliefs and his art against appalling pressure, which broke many other writers.
His position today is extraordinary: like Tolstoy towards the end of his life he is a world-famous writer disapproved of by the government of his country, but regarded even by his critics with a peculiar admiration not unmixed with awe, which genius sometimes inspires. He is a man wholly absorbed in his poetry: his writing and his way of life serves his ideal with a most single- hearted purity and devotion. Not even the most captious critics have ever maintained against him that he has made his art serve any ulterior ends, personal or political, or any end but that of pure artistic creation. Everyone who has ever met him knows how inconceivable it is that he should ever take part in a movement or campaign or deviation towards the right or towards the left in any political or literary alignment or intrigue. He is a solitary, innocent, independent, wholly dedicated figure. His integrity and innocence have been known to move even the most hardened and cynical bureaucrats, upon whose favour his survival has inevitably depended.
Soviet critics have for many years accused him of being esoteric, sophisticated, over-elaborate, remote from contemporary Soviet reality. What they mean, I think, is that his poetry has been neither propagandist nor decorative. But if what is meant is that his writing is concerned with a private world, or that he speaks in a private language, or is in any sense turned in upon himself, deliberately insulated from the world in which he lives, the charge is wholly groundless. From his earliest years, both as a poet and as a playwright, Pasternak has written out of his direct experience, personal or social or indeed political, in the central tradition of all great Russian writing. And if his poetry is not transparently autobiographical, as is that, for example, of his contemporary, the poetess Akhmatova, that is because it is in the nature of his art to transmute and not to record. It has been said that all Russian writing is a personal confession, an aveu: Pasternak may be a Westerner in the sense that he does not address direct sermons to the reader as Gogol or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or even Turgenev often do. Whatever a writer has to say must be turned into his art and not be attached to it as an extra artistic appendage or lay sermon outside the world created by the artist. In this respect he follows Chekhov, who transmutes anything, without residue, into the story itself. But his writing, like that of Chekhov, and of all his great predecessors, including the great Symbolist poets of whom he is a younger contemporary, is penetrated by the sense of the responsibility of the artist.
The artist is not a priest or a purveyor of beautiful objects but speaks the truth in public, founded directly upon his own immediate experience: in the face of this truth he is merely more impressionable, more responsive, a more penetrating and articulate critic and exponent than ordinary men. In this sense his art and his conception of it is far closer to the classical 'social' doctrine of the artist as the most heightened expression of his time and milieu, the classical doctrine of Belinsky and Herzen, than are the later aesthetically 'pure' critics and poets. He looked upon this attitude - which Marxism absorbed - as too close to vulgar utilitarianism. In this sense Pasternak is not at all close to the purists and aesthetes of St Petersburg. He was born in Moscow and has lived the greater part of his life there, and the influences by which he is moulded, the imaginative and humane impressionism of his father's paintings, his family friendship with Tolstoy, which deeply coloured his childhood and early youth, the metaphysical attitudes of Skryabin, from whom he took lessons in musical composition at a time when he thought that he wished to write music, the social and religious doctrines of Andrey Bely, and the revolutionary futurism of his great friend Mayakovsky, the laureate of the Lenin era of Bolshevism, militated violently against disinterested aestheticism of this type.
Pasternak has never abandoned this direction, he has never retreated into any private citadel or sought to escape from reality in any sense of the words. During his most experimental period, when like the other young revolutionary poets he wrote in a broken, violently distorted, episodic manner, of which there are plenty of analogues in the West, this was a means and nothing more than a means of expressing and reconstructing the real world of action, social upheaval and politics in which he fully lived. The fact that Doctor Zhivago has taken the Western world by storm is due in part to the fact that its readers are as a rule not acquainted with the author's earlier work, to which it is vastly superior but with which it has obvious affinity. The earlier biographical fragment Safe Conduct and the stories written in the 1920s, on which the author is said now to look with little favour, create worlds of experience, they are not mere exercises in craft or virtuoso pieces. The gift that Pasternak possesses beyond all other writers of his generation is that of conveying the organic quality, the pulsation of life within any object in the universe that he creates. No artist has ever exemplified more vividly the Renaissance theory of the artist as creator, as a rival to nature herself. Stones, trees, earth, water are endowed with a life of their own in an almost mystical vision which fills his poetry from its earliest beginnings. This vision gives its own independent vitality to the human characters who populate his pages, to the buildings which they inhabit, the streets they walk, the three-dimensional social and political situations in which they find themselves. This supreme genius for infusing life into impersonal events - revolutions, wars, the rooms in which human beings speak or sleep or think - is at the very opposite pole to realism and naturalism, still remoter from photographic fidelity or journalism.