(2 of 2)
Wandering Ghosts. In the modest dacha at Peredelkino, craggy, buffeted Boris Pasternak, 68, asked foreign reporters and visitors not to visit or call him any more. He had spent years as an "internal emigre," and he knew the rules of the game. He had defied those rules by sending his manuscript to a Communist publisher in Italy, who rejected Moscow's (and Pasternak's) attempts to call it back. He was obviously pleased by its international reception, because Doctor Zhivago has not been published in Russia. Now he could listen to Moscow radio's unbridled denunciations, urging him to leave Russia, promising that "no obstacles would be put in his way."
The Choice was a bitter one: he could stay as a "stateless person," of whom thousands wander Russia like ghosts, or he could leave his roots and his homeland for the West. It was a choice Boris Pasternak had made once before, in 1923, when his father, Painter Leonid Pasternak, had fled the Soviet Union, taking his family with him. After two years in Berlin, Boris Pasternak returned to Moscow, telling friends: "I simply cannot create outside Russia."
Though of Jewish origin, Boris Pasternak long ago became a zealous follower of the Greek Orthodox Church, and shared its deep, mystical identity with Russia and its stress on suffering and martyrdom. At week's end he made his answer in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev—who has, officially, not said a word about the Pasternak case. Wrote Pasternak: "I am bound to Russia by birth, life and work. I cannot imagine my fate apart from Russia and outside her. Whatever my mistakes and errors have been, I could not imagine that I would find myself in the center of a political campaign such as has been blown up around my name in the West . . . To go beyond the frontiers of my motherland is to me equal to death, and I am therefore asking that this extreme measure should not be taken. With my hand on my heart, I have done something for Soviet literature, and I may still be useful to it."
Whatever Nikita Khrushchev decides, the affair Pasternak would go down in history as a major cultural blunder, undoing much of the good will built up by gifted fiddlers and agile folk dancers. A system presumably so adept at propaganda can make a fool of itself when its pride is touched.
*As a reward for translating a collection of Georgian poems into Russian.