The Magical Chorus

many years, but after Tvardovsky read it to Khrushchev at his dacha at Pitsunda on the Black Sea (and the author recalled that Khrushchev “sometimes laughed out loud, peasant-style”),³¹ the Soviet leader gave personal permission for publication. In 1958, Khrushchev made Tvardovsky head of the important literary journal Novy Mir, which under his direction gradually turned into the most liberal publication in the land.

But over the course of his years in power (1953–1964), Khrushchev never did learn how to handle the artistic intelligentsia. Even Stalin, much better read than Khrushchev and a better psychologist, took years to start understanding how to talk to the creative elite and still died in doubt: which worked better—carrot or stick?

Certainly Stalin was ruthless toward his own people and other nations. He did not spare his intelligentsia as a class, but his attitude toward the cultural elite was outwardly friendlier than that of Lenin, which is sometimes explained by the fact that Stalin, a less educated man than Lenin, felt more respect for people of culture. According to reminiscences, Stalin (despite later ideas of him to the contrary) almost never shouted at cultural figures, and when he was angry, he actually lowered his voice. Simonov, who had heard many stories of how cruel and coarse Stalin could be, say, with military men, stressed that the ruler “was never once boorish” to writers.³²

Having dethroned Stalin politically, Khrushchev liked to state, right up to the moment he was deposed, that in culture he remained a Stalinist (even though that was not quite true). So why did Khrushchev not emulate Stalin’s outward caution and respect for the cultural elite? Because he had decided that the best way to rein in people in the arts was to threaten them publicly, humiliating them and shouting at them? Apparently, Khrushchev tried to hide his lack of confidence, and this led to his continual showing off and constant reminder that he—and he alone —was the leader of the Communist Party and the state, and therefore entitled to be the top expert in all fields, including culture.

The list of spectacular failures that were rooted in Khrushchev’s inferiority complex is long—from his attempt to make corn the monoculture, which caused him to be a laughingstock all over the country, to his provocative placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba that put the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. In culture, one of Khrushchev’s greatest disasters came in the wake of the Nobel Prize for Literature for Boris Pasternak in 1958.

Chapter Eleven

As discussed, the Nobel Prize in Literature became an idee fixe of the Soviet leadership in 1933, when the prize went to the emigre Bunin instead of Maxim Gorky, Stalin’s close friend. Bunin’s prize made such an impression on Stalin that he considered inviting the hard-line anti-Soviet writer to come back to the Soviet Union permanently. He sent Simonov to Paris in the summer of 1946 to feel out seventy-five-year-old Bunin about the possibility. With his characteristic independence and unpredictability, Bunin made a harsh anti-Soviet speech soon afterward, and the question of the laureate’s return to Moscow was taken off the agenda.

When they learned in 1946 that Pasternak was a nominee for the prize, the Soviet leadership became agitated. The news from Stockholm could have been worse. For example, the emigre philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev appeared on the list of candidates both before and after the war. The Nobel going for a second time to an emigre would have seemed like a catastrophe in Moscow.

Still, the Soviet favorite was Sholokhov, not Pasternak. Literaturnaya Gazeta hastened to print the premature news of Sholokhov’s nomination in 1946. In the absence of Gorky and Alexei Tolstoy, who died in 1945, Sholokhov was Stalin’s number one Soviet writer.

On the contrary, Pasternak, often a hermetic, elliptical, baroque poet, was at the time an inconvenient candidate, even though back in the 1920s, he wrote well-received long narrative poems about the revolution, Nineteen Five and Lieutenant Schmidt. Pasternak was also among the first to sing the praises of Lenin and Stalin in verse, and the poems were actually very good. That is why the Bolshevik Bukharin, in his speech at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, praised Pasternak as “one of the most remarkable masters of verse of our times, stringing onto his creativity not only an entire line of lyrical pearls but also a series of profoundly sincere revolutionary works.”¹

At the same congress, which was supervised by Stalin, Pasternak was seated at the presidium in the Hall of Columns next to Gorky, and he was selected for an important symbolic gesture—to receive in the name of all Soviet writers a gift from the workers’ delegation—a large portrait of Stalin. At the time Stalin even considered making Pasternak one of the leaders of the Writers’ Union. Debates continue to this day whether or not Pasternak had actually met Stalin, and if so, how many times. A voluminous secondary literature resulted from Stalin’s famous telephone call to Pasternak in response to his efforts in defense of the poet Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934.² Stalin met Pasternak’s concerns halfway that time (even though in the end it did not save Mandelstam). Pasternak also intervened on behalf of other prisoners: his letter to Stalin helped secure the release in 1935 of Akhmatova’s husband, Punin, and her son, Lev Gumilev.

In 2000, the transcript was published of Pasternak’s talk at a discussion after Pravda’s denunciations of “formalism” in 1936, with notes in Stalin’s hand; the many passages Stalin underlined suggest that the poet’s unusually independent statements (in particular, Pasternak said, to general laughter and applause: “If it is absolutely necessary to shout in newspaper articles, can they at least shout in different voices? That will make things more understandable, because when they shout in one voice, nothing is clear. Perhaps, it is possible not to shout at all—that would be quite wonderful”)³ may have influenced Stalin’s reluctant decision to end the pogrom of the “formalists,” including Shostakovich.

Bearing in mind that Pasternak’s overly complex poetry and early prose were hardly to Stalin’s literary tastes, which were primarily (although not exclusively, lest we forget the Futurist Mayakovsky) for the Russian classics, these were quite significant signs of attention from the ruler, all the more surprising in view of Pasternak’s moodiness and seeming “lack of discipline.” One would think that Stalin, who valued total obedience and predictability, would have found Pasternak rather irritating. Obviously, that was not the case.

Akhmatova observed with irony-tinged admiration that Pasternak “is endowed with a kind of eternal childhood.” For all his preference for discipline, perhaps Stalin was also attracted by Pasternak’s “infantile” behavior, since his exotic appearance—dusky Bedouin face, burning eyes, impulsive movements— corresponded to the traditional image of a poet. Imitating his idols, Scriabin and Blok, Pasternak consciously cultivated the image of an artist “not of this world”(even though he was a very practical person who knew not only how to get his fees, but also how to mound potatoes in his garden) and probably sensed which buttons to push in his relationship with Stalin.

This is evident in Pasternak’s letter to Stalin written in late 1935, soon after the ruler disappointed his expectations and proclaimed that the “best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era” was Mayakovsky, not Pasternak. Paradoxically, Pasternak thanked Stalin for the verdict: “In recent times, under the influence of the West, I have been made too much of, given exaggerated significance (I even grew ill as a result): they began to suppose I had a serious artistic power. Now, after you have put Mayakovsky in first place, this suspicion is removed from me and with a light heart I can live and work as before, in modest quiet, with the unexpected and mysterious moments without which I would not love life.”⁴

This epistolary move was quite bold (what if Stalin suspected he was being meek out of pride and punished him?), but in this case the poet calculated correctly, and the ruler appreciated his modesty. That Stalin approved of the letter is evident from his written notation to put it in his personal archive, where only what he considered the most valuable and historically important papers were kept.