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Yellow Earth. At 4 in the afternoon, six young pallbearers lifted the open coffin with white linen slings and carried it the half-mile to the village churchyard where Russia's endless war is fought even in death—some graves bear tombstones with crosses; others are surmounted by Communism's red stars. Panting and perspiring, the pallbearers deposited the coffin on the mound of freshly dug yellowish earth beside the open grave, within sight of the blue onion domes of the Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration. Several weeping women bent over to kiss the lifeless countenance. It was time for the funeral oration.
The man who stepped forward was Kornei Chukovsky, 78, in his time the friend of Anton Chekov and Maxim Gorky. After recalling his long friendship with Pasternak, Chukovsky gingerly approached the crucial question: Pasternak's quarrel with the Communist Party. It resulted, said Chukovsky, from Pasternak's sharing Leo Tolstoy's pacifism and his refusal to "condone the resistance to evil by violence." In this Pasternak erred, stated Chukovsky. Then, having made the necessary obeisance to the Kremlin, he went on strongly to praise his old friend as a "splendid fighter," a perfect model of how an artist "should defend his views without fear of falling out with his contemporaries or other disapproval, so long as he is convinced that his word is right, so long as he is convinced that his cause is sacred!" In ringing tones, whose echoes would surely resound in Nikita Khrushchev's office, Chukovsky concluded: "Farewell, dear Boris Leonidovich, thank you from all of us. We owe you a large and unpaid debt." So did the world, for the sum total of Pasternak's writing is a cry of joy at the wonder of life and of God who created it, and a deep conviction of man's resurrection as promised by Jesus Christ.
A Poet's Grave. As Chukovsky stepped down from the mound, several young men pushed through the crowd. One proclaimed: "Over the poet's open grave his verses should resound," and began a recitation. Another said something about an "unpublished book," and there were uneasy glances and scattered cries of "For shame!" The coffin was sealed and lowered into the grave and a symbolic pinch of dirt thrown in.
But it would take more than a covering of dirt to extinguish the memory of Boris Pasternak in the Russian land he loved so much that "every line of her had gone to the very bottom of his soul."