Pasternak's Patient Spirit

...These letters move in and out of that world they allude to, casting upon it the strange long light of this profound and patient spirit, who could write to Nina after a severe heart attack: " 'Lord,' I whispered, 'I thank you for having laid on the paints so thickly and for having made life and death the same as your language—majestic and musical, for having made me a creative artist, for having made creative work your school, and for having prepared me all my life for this night...

...At first I was deprived of sleep because of my admiration for the work of the young people who day and night were producing miracles of gradual transformation of our familiar courtyard into something between German Essen and Greek Tartarus...

...One is reminded of Keats' phrase, "thinking into the human heart," and Keats' genius for friendship, the affectionate and open candor of his amazing letters...

...Yet he enables us to see the world about him clearly...

...This seems particularly true of the letters that Boris Pasternak wrote over a period of 28 years, from 1931-59 (Letters to Georgian Friends, translated and with an introduction by David Magar-shack, Harcourt, Brace & World, 190 pp., $4.75...

...Or escorting the poetess Anna Akhmatova home one rainy evening: "We walked arm in arm...

...in an early letter to the Tabidzes...

...Yet on another occasion he calls himself a thick-skinned rhinoceros...

...he does that and no more...

...He suffers an acute heart attack and is anguished at being unable to save the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva from the destitution and grief that drove her to hang herself...

...About this Pasternak wrote to Titian Tabidze that year: "I am not the only one who appreciates you and believes in you...

...For by 1930 rapp (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) was frowning upon him as it had on Maya-kovsky...

...Pasternak frequently apologizes for being carried away and saying more than he should...

...And only in his last letter to a director of the publishing house that had issued a volume of his poems and translations does he say: "Though I am forgotten to the point of complete obscurity, I did not think I had been forgotten so completely that my book would not go through at least 10 editions, which would have covered your expenses and the costs of publication...

...Although such glints and asides abound, the principle theme of the book lies elsewhere...

...to become attached somehow not like a man, but stupidly is the only thing that, though it may give no pleasure to anyone, I know and can do...

...If his books were not quite banned, they did not sell in a country where poetry was and is widely read and bought...

...however, the rest are only too willing to follow them...

...I realize, of course, that all this does not depend on you, for people in high office keep interfering with the future of literature...

...it was not until 1955 that his death was officially confirmed...

...Pasternak survived beyond the age of 25 and kept his love alive until the end despite the coldest and blackest of times from the Purges of 1936-37 through the War and the freezings and thawings thereafter...

...the life of the Georgian people, "full of mysticism and the messianic symbolism of folk legends which as in Catholic Poland, turns every man into a poet...

...he wrote: "To become attached to places and to certain times of the day, to trees, to people, to the history of souls...

...Only late in his letters and quickly in passing does he refer to the ban on his books and the "oblivion" he expects to inherit...

...He does not speak of the War directly, but we learn that he has left for the front as a war correspondent, that he and his wife and children are bivouacking at four different addresses because their apartment had been wrecked and half of it taken over by an anti-aircraft company...

...Harsh things have bound me to you: grief and pride...

...But these rniraoles palled on me when my back staircase was blocked up, the stairs leading to the attic caved in and the back of my flat was turned into the only practicable highway for the rest of my neighbors who had found themselves in a much worse situation than I." Pasternak is no less witty describing a trip from Tiflis to Moscow, during which his train was detained by a snowstorm for nine hours, then stopped for a whole night by a derailment: "Later we had been dropped out of the time-table, as we fully deserved: semaphores fell flat before us at the signal boxes and in the open country...

...For years Pasternak and Tabidze's friends hoped beyond hope that he was alive somewhere in Siberia...

...Pasternak's letters to Nina Tabidze over this 17-year period of waiting, of hoping, of believing and not believing that somewhere Tabidze was alive are the heart of this book: his love for her that is part of his love for Tabidze, his concern, his encouragings, his reassurings...

...Like Chekhov he placed great trust in the future...

...But a year later when the Purges were in full swing Tabidze was arrested and executed...

...If he alludes to the "obstructions caused by the events of our times," or "to the present aggravated struggle for existence and the ambiguity of my present position...

...Equally loved by Pasternak as a man and as a poet was Paolo Yashvili, who invited him to Tiflis...

...On hearing the news Paolo Yashvili shot himself in the office of the Union of Georgian Writers, and the knowledge of Tabidze's death died with him...

...Pasternak was to spend his hours translating their poems, along with those of many other Georgian poets, although he did not know the Georgian language and had to work from interlinear translations...

...It was a way to live...

...As in his poetry, so in his letters he is the opposite of all that is cold and impersonal, trivial, wingless...

...The reticent and reserved Pasternak found in Tabidze his very counterpart...

...She sends him tea, pounds of grapes, pomegranate juice, wine...

...They are not sounding boards for theories and doctrines, nor are they written with one eye on posterity, sparkling with epigrams and purple-patched...

...Foremost among the threads running through this collection is Georgia, Pasternak's second motherland...

...But Keats was a very young man, on the brink of the world, alive and burning up...

...We see someone writing without a mask, out of impulse, expressing his thoughts and feelings without affectation or reserve...

...You can't imagine the trouble it cost me to get rid of them," he adds...

...The power of that region entered, he writes, like a sea into his soul: "those dark bulks of overhanging mountains [that] towered at the end of all the street vistas of Tiflis...

...And we learn something all along the way about how it was in Russia during those infamously closed-off '30s: "The two-storeyed house in which I live was about to collapse as a result of the building of a tunnel for the Moscow Underground Railway...

...To N. G. Vachnadze, a Georgian poet, he wrote: "Once more you were saved by goodness and the long discovered spiritual values which probably lie at the foundation of taste: love of people and gratitude to the past for its brilliance, next to a concern for repaying it with the same kind of beauty and warmth...

...We enter odd corridors, strange attics, we are led down those marvelous streets of Tiflis, we meet the terrible portents, we hear of the sudden disappearances, the abrupt deaths, the arrests and denunciations...

...About his many translations, not only of the Georgian poets but of Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Shelley, and Verlaine, he said: "They are bridges to the future, roads to the future, which I live for...

...In these letters the public events of Pasternak's life are inferred from the private ones...

...It is primarily the quality of this affection and devotion to both poets that make the letters so remarkable...

...These are letters to poets and friends Pasternak met when he first visited Georgia in 1931, above all the poet Titian Tabidze and his wife Nina...

...Largely addressed to a few close friends, they are not formal and elaborate as are Rilke's—substitutes for poems or preparations for poems...

...When the book received the Nobel Prize he was expelled from the Union...

...he pours out in letter after letter his thoughts, his remembrances, his deep affection: "There are no people around me with whom I feel so near and simple as with you...

...At the climax, when the shower of water was particularly heavy and my praise of Seryozha particularly high, I squeezed her arm tightly as I pulled her from under a waterfall and she said, 'But I am not Seryozha Spassky!' That was delightful...

...his confessions...

...Intermingled with the charms and powers of that part of the world are the poets he met and loved (incidentally, members of a post-Symbolist group called "The Company of the Blue Drinking Horns...

...Believe in revolution as a whole, believe in the future, the new promptings of your heart, the spectacle of life, and not the construction put on things by the Union of Soviet Writers, which will be changed all of a sudden before you have had time to sneeze—believe in the Age and not in the week of the formalist...

...Don't believe in solutions...

...They did...

...He fell on translating not merely by chance...

...How broad and deep are the lines he draws, how large his spirit, what a curious metaphysic about place and time and love he can create for the reader...

...By 1936 there were further official obstructions—those famous "formalism debates...

...As I was telling her something about Spassky [a Georgian poet], water came pouring down on us from the gutters of some houses...

...Pasternak was a man rooted in connectedness...

...In short, they are neither epistles nor exercises, but more like intimate, tender speech...

...With his moody, elusive, rapt and devotional temperament Pasternak presides over these letters...

...When Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of Russia and published in Italy Pasternak was villified by members of the Soviet Union of Writers...

...How many passages can be cited that express this tenderness, this imaginative appreciation for the gifts and natures of his friends, this generosity and richly complex humaneness...