Россия и Запад

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 яростьСтихает. Все равно что мир оглох.

Могучая евангельская старостьИ 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 несчастнымИ, главное, скрытным. О нет! —

Чтобы быть современнику ясным,Весь настежь распахнут поэт.И рампа торчит под ногами,Все мертвенно, пусто, светло,Лайм-лайта холодное пламяЕго 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: