Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva: An Epistolary Novel Without a Happy Ending

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The relationship between Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak is one of the most tragic pages of Russian poetry. And the correspondence of two great poets is much more than the letters of two people who are passionate about each other. In their youth, their fates seemed to go parallel, and during rare intersections they did not touch the young poets.

Soul mates

They had a lot in common. Both Marina and Boris were Muscovites and were almost the same age. Their fathers were professors, and their mothers were talented pianists, and both were students of Anton Rubinstein. Both Tsvetaeva and Pasternak recalled their first chance meetings as something fleeting and insignificant. The first step towards communication was made by Pasternak in 1922, who, having read Tsvetaeva's Versta, was delighted.

He wrote to her about this in Prague, where she was living at that moment with her husband, Sergei Efron, who had fled from the revolution and the Red Terror. Tsvetaeva, who always felt lonely, felt a kindred spirit and answered. This is how the friendship and true love of two great people began. Their correspondence lasted until 1935, and for all these years they never met. Although, fate, as if teasing, almost gave them a meeting several times - but at the last moment she changed her mind.

Brother in the fifth season …

And their epistolary romance either came to naught, or flared up with renewed passionate power. Boris Pasternak was married, Marina was married. It is known that Tsvetaeva wanted to name her son, who was born in 1925, in honor of Pasternak. But she, as she herself wrote, did not dare to introduce her love to the family; the boy was named George at the request of Sergei Efron, Marina's husband. Pasternak's wife, Evgenia Vladimirovna, was certainly jealous of her husband for Tsvetaeva. But both women were awaited by an event that reconciled them in this delicate situation: in 1930 Pasternak left his wife for the beautiful Zinaida Neuhaus.

The hurt Marina then told one of her friends that if she and Pasternak managed to meet, then Zinaida Nikolaevna would not have had a chance. But, most likely, it was only her illusion. Boris Leonidovich greatly appreciated comfort, and the new wife was not only very beautiful, but also homely, she surrounded her husband with care, did everything so that nothing would interfere with his creation. Boris owes much of his great success in those years to his wife.

Beyond poverty

Marina, like many talented people, was unadapted to everyday life, she toiled from disorder and could not get out of the poverty that haunted her all the years of being in immigration. In the 1930s, according to Tsvetaeva's recollections, her family lived beyond the edge of poverty, since the poet's husband could not work due to illness, and Marina and her eldest daughter Ariadna had to drag life on their shoulders. The poet made a living with her creations and translations, and her daughter sewed hats.

All this time Tsvetaeva desperately dreamed of meeting her "brother in the fifth season of the year, sixth sense and fourth dimension." Pesternak, however, at this time lived in prosperity and even wealth, he was treated kindly by the authorities and bathed in universal reverence and adoration. In his life there was no longer a place for Marina, he was passionately carried away by his new wife and family, and at the same time, he did not forget to support the abandoned first wife and their son. And yet, the meeting between Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak took place.

The last "non-meeting"

In June 1935, in Paris, at the International Anti-Fascist Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, to which Pasternak arrived as a member of the Soviet delegation of writers. The audience applauded him while standing, and Tsvetaeva was modestly present there as an ordinary spectator. However, this meeting became, according to Marina, “no meeting”. When these two talented people were next to each other, it suddenly became clear to both of them that there was nothing to talk about. Lateness is always dramatic. This meeting between Tsvetaeva and Pasternak was precisely untimely - it took place at the wrong time, and, in fact, no one of them needed anymore.

How would their fates have developed if the date had happened earlier? We are not allowed to know this. History does not tolerate subjunctive moods. Tsvetaeva's life eventually reached a dead end, from which she decided to get out through the noose, committing suicide in August 1941. Then the time came when the darling of fate Pasternak fell out of favor with her. At the end of his life, he learned all the hardships that broke Marina - disgrace, persecution from the authorities, persecution of colleagues, loss of friends. He died in 1960 of lung cancer. However, these two great men left behind a unique poetic legacy, as well as letters filled with love, life and hope.

Few today remember about the genius artist Leonid Pasternak, who remained in the shadow of the world famous son … And his fate and work are very interesting.