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In other respects, however, her memoirs illuminate Pasternak's last years of private miseries and public persecution until his death of cancer in 1960. Historically, the most important piece of information she discloses is that Pasternak was not the author of two famous 1958 letters to Nikita Khrushchev and to Pravda, in which the writer pleaded not to be exiled from Russia and asserted that he had not been coerced into renouncing the Nobel Prize. Both letters were concocted by Ivinskaya. In the case of the letter to Pravda, she "worked" with a Central Committee official: "Like a pair of professional counterfeiters. We took isolated phrases written or said by Boris and pieced them together in such a way that white was turned into black." Confused and distraught, Pasternak signed. Ivinskaya, who profoundly regrets her part in the letters, had panicked, believing that Pasternak might be jailed or murdered if he did not give in. During the last two years of his life, Pasternak was consumed with shame over his concession.
In other respects, Pasternak acted with exemplary, even foolhardy courage, as Ivinskaya makes plain. During the Great Terror of the '30s, he had refused to sign an endorsement of the death sentence meted out to Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other officers. In her memoirs Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that Pasternak was the only person who dared visit her when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in a concentration camp. Pasternak bravely directed that the royalties for his translations of Shakespeare's tragedies be spent to help prisoners in the Gulag. When prison regulations eased after Stalin's death, a flood of letters arrived from strangers in the camps, thanking him for the succor of his poetry. Ivinskaya has provided what might be his epitaph, in the first lines of a Pasternak poem that remains unpublished in Russia:
My soul, you are in mourning
For all those close to me,
Turned into a burial vault
For all my martyred friends.
-Patricia Blake