In the bitterness of recent years, when he was reviled by his stony-faced government and forbidden under pain of exile to accept the Nobel Prize awarded him for his poems and for Doctor Zhivago, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak once wrote: "How hard this life, and long my way of stone." Last week, the indomitable man who succeeded in creating some of modern literature's most eloquent testaments to the unconquerable human spirit came to the end of his stony path.
Twenty-Five Breaths. Not long before his final illness, Pasternak worriedly told an old friend he thought he had lung cancer. He begged that his suspicion be kept from his wife, Zinaida, so as not to upset her. Yet when he was fatally stricken, the Soviet doctors diagnosed Pasternak's illness as a heart attack and only later discovered it was the result of cancer spreading to the heart muscles. By then, cancer had colonized both lungs and was advancing from his stomach through the digestive tract.
The government that had so long scorned Boris Pasternak, now gave grudgingly of its best to save him. An oxygen tent was rushed to rambling, weatherbeaten Dacha No. 6 in Peredelkino, 15 miles from Moscow. Professor Nikolai Petrov, a cancer specialist from the Kremlin clinic, strove desperately to win a few more hours from eternity with another blood transfusion. Pasternak asked wearily: "Is it necessary?"
As the hollow needle was inserted in a vein of his wasted arm, Boris murmured to his wife: "Dosvidanya [goodbye]." Moments later, blood gushed from his mouth. "Why am I hemorrhaging?" he asked. Trying to sound reassuring, Zinaida answered, "It is because you have pneumonia." The end came fast. With the last flickers of consciousness, Boris Pasternak managed to wave to Zinaida. She leaned over him, counted 25 gasping breaths, and then came the stillness of death.
The Missing Mourners. Of all the thousands of Soviet newspapers and periodicals, only two literary gazettes carried short notices of the death of Russia's greatest contemporary writer. And next day, as 1,500 mourners gathered at Peredelkino, there was present no official of the Communist Party, the Soviet government, or the Writers' Union, which had expelled Pasternak for the crime of writing as his heart moved him.
But others did come, bringing flowers. They arrived from Moscow by taxi and private car; they came by footpath through the woods or across the open fields from the suburban railroad station. A slow procession wound through the house to view the body: students, workers, peasants, elderly men and women of Pasternak's own generation. There were even some writers who braved official displeasure: Novelist Konstantin Paustovsky, Children's Author Kornei Chukovsky and, through his wife, Ilya Ehrenburg. Sviatoslav Richter, Russia's finest pianist, played slow dirges and the Chopin melodies that Pasternak had loved.