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Further corroboration of the year 1929 as the year of Pasternak’s «opening the Bible» and of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova as two probable sources comes in his early poetic-philosophical autobiography, «Safe Passage», also written in 1929. For the first time he accorded a measure of truth value to the Bible: «Я понял, что, к примеру, Библия есть не столько книга с твердым текстом, сколько записная тетрадь человечества, и что таково все вековечное. Что оно жизненно не тогда, когда оно обязательно, а когда оно восприимчиво ко всем уподоблениям, которыми на него озираются исходящие века» [358] . Now, for the first time. Scripture gains inner meaning and significance in Pasternak’s writing. Though he claims this insight came to him in 1912 as a student visiting Venice and its collections of religious art, we must ask whether this thought did not really come to him much later and more forcefully, in the early 1920s through Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene cycle and Akhmatova’s biblical verse. The evidence would be in Pasternak’s poetry and its response, not to Venetian art, but to the two poets and their archetypes, Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene as lover offering salvific love and Akhmatova’s Lot’s wife and Mary Mother of God.
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Pasternak B. SS5. Vol. 4. P. 208.
These somewhat modest literary interactions mark the first groundbreaking of Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s creative rivalry. In the next stage the stakes will be much higher as the poets assert themselves as the witnesses of a horrific age and the voices of a wronged people. It would be in the deeply hidden literary underground of the 1930s that the courageous Akhmatova again invoked now absolutely forbidden Scripture on the occasion of her son’s arrest in 1935 and the onset of Stalin’s sustained persecutions of the Great Terror. In these years a poem was written once on paper, memorized by trusted people and archived in memory. The paper was then burned and the poem written down again much later, when it was safe to do so.
In her stunning cycle,
359
Ахматова А. Сочинения. T. 1. C. 189.
360
Ахматова А. Сочинения. Т. 1. С. 189.
The tenth and final poem of the main body of «Requiem», «Crucifixion», is the climax of the cycle. Here Akhmatova’s voice expresses a woman, a mother, who has no power but to weep, witness, and remember. The title, «Crucifixion», speaks to Christ’s death but is really more about the experience of Mary, now the Mother of God. As Akhmatova pictures Christ before the Crucifixion, in him divine nature is about to be revealed: «Хор ангелов великий час восславил, И небеса расплавились в огне» [361] . То his Father Christ cries, «„Why hast Thou forsaken me!“» (Matt 27:46), while to his mother, in Akhmatova’s significant distortion of Scripture, he says, «Oh, do not weep for Me…» (Luke 23:28). One suggests a challenge to a greater (paternal) power, while the other suggests possibly bravery in the face of (maternal) lamenting love. The actual citation comes from the passage in Luke 23:28, in which, having been sentenced to death, Jesus exhorts a group of lamenting women to weep not for him but for themselves and their world gone wrong. Although the biblical passage is not about Mary, Akhmatova makes it so, while also implying that this world, the world of Stalin’s making, is a Russia gone terribly wrong.
361
Там же. С. 193.
The second poem of «Crucifixion» focuses on three people close to Jesus — one is Magdalene, who «beat her breast and sobbed», acting out her passion; the second is the disciple; and, in Akhmatova’s rendition, the third is the Mother of God, who stands alone: «А туда, где молча Мать стояла, Так никто взглянуть и не посмел» [362] . Again, Akhmatova significantly distorts Scripture in order to enhance the figure of Mary. In John 19:27 Jesus exhorts his disciple to view his (Jesus’s) mother as if Mary were the disciple’s own mother. The disciple takes Mary into his house henceforth. But Akhmatova empowers the Mother of God by setting her apart and alone, seemingly unloved and ignored, whose mourning is unbearable for other people to countenance, but thereby all the more unforgettable [363] . Unavoidably, in the associative, coded language of poetry, Akhmatova’s Mother of God is clearly vying here with Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene of 1923, who resonates in the demonstrably dramatic figure of Akhmatova’s Magdalene.
362
Там же.
363
Amanda Haight’s comment about this Mary is apt: «There is nothing gentle or comforting about this Mary. She is the other half of Christ: the woman who bore Him and who understands that the Crucifixion is the greatest moment in history» (Haight, 100). Akhmatova is «looking at the world through her [Mary’s] eyes» (100).
In the final poem of the cycle’s epilogue Akhmatova solidifies her own affinity for the Mother of God through a particularly Russian image of Mary as protector of all believers, who covers them with her mantle. With this image she also reenforces herself as a national poet, whose voice will protect people who no longer have a voice or a self:
Для них соткала я широкий покров Из бедных, у них же подслушанных слов. О них вспоминаю всегда и везде, О них не забуду и в новой беде [364] .364
Ахматова А. Сочинения. T. 1. C. 194.
«Requiem» is indeed meant to be that mantle of words to preserve the memory of the Great Terror, which in turn can protect Russians from ever suffering this awful fate again.
In this final poem Akhmatova rises above the poetic rivalry with Tsvetaeva, placing the «Requiem» cycle in an ancient tradition of monument poems that dates back to Horace and in Russia starts in the 18th century and moves forward through Pushkin. Here too Akhmatova establishes herself as the moral voice of her nation by suggesting that the monument be placed by the door of Kresty Prison, or in the logic of myth, by the «Cross», to honor Russia’s mothers in their effort to withstand the injustice of the Stalinist state:
А если когда-нибудь в этой стране Воздвигнуть задумают памятник мне, Согласье на это даю торжество, Но только с условьем — не ставить его Ни около моря, где я родилась <…> А здесь, где стояла я триста часов И где для меня не открыли засов [365] .Akhmatova dramatizes the image of the sorrowing mother:
И пусть с неподвижных и бронзовых век Как слезы струится подтаявший снег, И голубь тюремный пусть гулит вдали, И тихо идут по Неве корабли [366] .365
Там же. С. 194–195.
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Ахматова А. Сочинения. Т. 1. С. 195.
The weeping mother in the end is the final judge of the terror and the wasted existence of the Stalin years.
With «Requiem» Pasternak’s rivalry with Akhmatova gains in intensity. In 1939 Akhmatova read to Pasternak some of the poems from «Requiem», to which Pasternak allegedly responded, «Now even dying wouldn’t be terrifying» [367] . As a rule, Pasternak was known for not paying much attention to other people’s poetry, and Akhmatova was often irritated that he seemed so ignorant of her work [368] . In fact, such turns out not to have been the case. Pasternak paid her the highest compliment, again in the secret code of poetic language, competing with her in what he considered to be his most serious work, «Doctor Zhivago».
367
Chukovskaia L. The Akhmatova Journals. Vol. 1. P. 45.
368
Мандельштам H. Об Ахматовой. С. 197.
Pasternak started working in earnest on his novel in 1946, the year after World War II ended. The significance of the novel for its author is the topic of letter of October 13, 1946: «This is my first real work. In it I want to give an historical image of Russia of the last 45 years… this thing will be an expression of my views on art, the Gospel, a person’s life in history and many other things… The atmosphere of the thing is my Christianity, in its breadth a bit different from Quakers or Tolstoyanism, coming from aspects of the Gospel other than its moral ones» [369] . What he meant by the «other than moral» aspects of the Gospel was its life-affirming aspects, its passion and its faith in resurrection.
369
Pasternak В. SS5. Vol. 3. Р. 655.
For first time in his career, Pasternak is realizing the concept of the Bible theorized in his 1929 autobiography as the «notebook of humanity», the living, ever relevant rethinking and re-adaptation of sacred text. Here for the first time he draws on biblical archetypes that resonate with historical, philosophical, and mythical layers of meaning.
«Doctor Zhivago» has been called a «montage» of biblical and liturgical texts both visual and verbal, including the name of Zhivago from Luke 24:5, which means «of the living» [370] . There are a great many links to Orthodox ritual, starting with the structuring of time in the novel through the Orthodox calendar and ending with long discussions of Orthodox belief in transfiguration through imitating the life of Christ and through human participation in transfiguration of the world to a divine condition, known as Apokatastasis [371] . The main point, however, is that this unique lyrical-philosophical novel narrates the poet’s creative process resulting in an unparalleled cycle of poems that make up the work’s final chapter and which end with nine of the finest religious poems in Russian literary history.
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Boertnes J. Христианская тема в романе Пастернака «Доктор Живаго» // Евангельский текст в русской литературе 18–20 веков: цитата, реминисценция, мотив, сюжет, жанр / Под ред. В. Н. Захарова. Петрозаводск: Изд. Петрозаводского ун-та, 1994. С. 368.
371
Boertnes J. Христианская тема в романе Пастернака «Доктор Живаго». С. 367.