1.
When Boris Pasternak published his memoir of poetic influence, Safe Conduct, the critics in Soviet Russia got excited. His affinity with Rainer Maria Rilke's immaterialism and transcendence were taken as implicit critiques of Marxist materialism (as interpreted by the RCP).
Pasternak was accused of subjective idealism, a form of counter-revolutionary activity. The book was published in censored form in 1931, and later removed from libraries, and reprints were forbidden.
The manuscript, itself, ends with a letter to Rilke that he never mailed or sent. Written after Rilke’s death, the letter speaks to Rilke in the present (as Marina Tsvetaeva did in her New Year’s elegy to Rilke), and it is unique in its repudiation of temporality. A confessional epistolary form reserved for the dead.
2.
I am interested in how Pasternak speaks of women in relation to light — and how this relation to light leads him to aesthetic statements which elide ethics.
3.
“I have just finished writing Safe Conduct, dedicated to your memory,” Pasternak begins his appended letter to Rilke’s posthumous spirit. And then he explains his silence:
I feared that, content with corresponding with you, I would never reach you in person. And I had to see you. Until that time came I would not write to you. When I put myself in your place, (imagining your wonder at my silence), I comforted myself with the knowledge Tsvetaeva was writing to you, and while I could not be a substitute for Tsvetaeva, she could be a substitute for me.
At that time I had a family. Sinfully I embarked on a venture for which I had none of the requirements; I drew another life into it with me and she and I conceived a third life.
Pasternak then goes on to describe two women: artist Evgeniya Lurye, whom Pasternak married in 1922, and the mother of his son, Evgenii; and Zinaida Neuhaus, the wife of the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, with whom Pasternak had fallen in love.
In the letter, Pasternak offers both women to Rilke, beginning with Evgeniya (whom he called Zhenya), his wife at the time of publication:
A smile gave roundness to the young artist's chin and poured its light upon her eyes and cheeks. When she smiled she would narrow her eyes as against the sun, but not with an intense gaze, rather with a hazy narrowing like that of people who are frail or nearsighted. As the light of her smile rose to the beautiful broad brow causing the whole image to waver between round and oval, one was reminded of the Italian Renaissance. Irradiated by the smile, she was very much like the portrait of a woman by blank. At such moments one could not tear one size from her face. Since her beauty depended upon such illumination she could be attractive only when she was happy.
4.
Curious to know which portrait Pasternak evoked in his description, so I browsed a gallery of paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494), a Florentine artist who worked mainly in fresco (though several of his famous works were executed in tempera).
Pasternak focuses on the luminosity of his paintings, so it’s interesting that Ghirlandaio was among the first to abandon the use of gilding in his pictures, choosing to represent objects made of gold with paint rather than gold leafing.
5.
So Zhenya needs light to be beautiful, on Pasternak’s view. And then he compares this “only pretty when happy” wife to Zinaida Neuhaus:
Some may say that all faces are like this. Not so. I know others. I know a face that is as striking and moving in grief as in joy and becomes only more lovely in circumstances that would make another's beauty fade.
Whether this woman is mounting the heights or plunging into the depths, her frightening fascination remains the same; she has much less need of anything earthly than the earth has need of her, for she is femininity itself, a rough-hewn, indestructible monolith of pride extracted whole from the quarry of creativity. Since a woman's character and disposition are revealed most truly in her appearance, the second woman, whose life, honor, and passions, and inner essence are perceived independently of lighting, has less reason to fear life's vicissitudes than the first one.
In 1934, Boris and Zinaida divorced their spouses to marry each other. Neuhas was crushed.
6.
It’s not clear to me that Zinaida had “less reason to fear life’s vicissitudes than Zhenya, since Pasternak would win the Nobel Prize for a book that he wrote about a love affair with another woman — and Zinaida was expected to play mother, wife, hostess, and proud matriarch through the entire show.
Boris reading congratulatory telegrams about the Nobel Prize, with his wife Zinaida (looking very wary on the right) and Nina Tabidze, 1958.
7.
Returning now to Pasternak’s letters to the living, particularly one he wrote to his first wife, Zhenya —the irradiated smile— on July 29th, 1926 while she was in Germany for a month with their son. Here, Pasternak was trying to explain what breaking off his correspondence with Tsvetaeva meant to him, but I think we also see, in an interesting sense, the way he had chosen Zhenya’s suffering in advance. The way he painted it without gilding the golden objects.
I'm not trying to test your feelings by jealousy. I am at present absolutely alone. Marina asked me not to write to her anymore after I told her about you and what I feel for you. This upsets you, too. It is indeed absurd. It seems I told her I love you above all else on Earth. I don't know how it came about. But don't attach any significance to it, good or bad. People join our names together before we ourselves know where we are. People love us with the same sort of love before we become aware that we breathe the same air. That cannot be helped, cannot be changed.
I cannot see you separately from the forces constituting my fate. And I don't have two lives and two fates. I cannot sacrifice these forces and I cannot, for your sake, change my fate........ But it would be inhuman even to think of allowing you, unarmed by a great idea or a great feeling, which is to say not one of the forces constituting my fate, to enter this circle, these lists. Through no fault of mine you are doomed to a perpetual suffering. I do not want you, a person of great courage and strong will, to fight an unequal battle. You do not deserve defeat.
Boris in his coffin, with his widow Zinaida and son Leonid, 1960. (Source)
8.
Pasternak’s poem, “Fresh Paint” as translated by C. M. Bowra and Miss Deutsch.
I should have seen the sign: “Fresh paint,”
But useless to advise
The careless soul, and memory’s stained
With cheeks, calves, hands, lips, eyes.
More than all failure, all success,
I loved you, for your skill
In whitening the yellowed world
As white cosmetics will.
Listen, my dark, my friend: by God,
All will grow white somehow,
Whiter than madness or lamp shades
Or bandage on a brow.