The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How Doctor Zhivago came calling for me
Six decades after first seeing an illegal proof of his uncle’s novel, Nicolas Pasternak Slater decided to translate it
Sixty years ago, I was standing on the quayside at Tilbury docks, one of 20-odd British students on our way to spend a year at a Soviet university. The Cold War had barely warmed up, and ours was the first student exchange group to have this chance. I was thrilled to be meeting my Russian family in Moscow – particularly my uncle, Boris Pasternak, who a couple of years earlier had suddenly become world famous for his controversial novel Doctor Zhivago, and had been awarded the Nobel Prize. “Is Nicky really coming?” the family had written excitedly, and my mother had stuffed my trunk with essentials, some for me (my Russian grandfather’s wolfskin overcoat, plenty of loo roll) and some for them (coffee, soap, toiletries – she couldn’t be sure what was in short supply in Moscow).
But when the official arrived to hand out our visas, mine was not among them. I had been banned from entering the Soviet Union, and the reason was obvious: our whole family was being punished for Boris’s defiance. He had found a way to smuggle his novel out of Russia illegally, and then had refused to renounce his Nobel Prize. With mingled regret and relief, I picked up my heavy trunk and caught the train back to Oxford.
That was the nearest I came to meeting Boris. He had once written to my mother: “You have wonderful children, and one day we and our families will all meet together, I’m sure of it.” And so we did, almost 20 years later. Sadly, by then Boris had died.
I had known about my uncle since my early childhood, because my mother (his sister) and my grandfather, the painter Leonid Pasternak, had told us all about their Russian family. We felt as close to them as to our Oxford cousins. But we couldn’t communicate with them, shut away behind the Iron Curtain. Telephoning was unthinkable, letters never got through, and only a very occasional telegram broke the silence, on important occasions such as a birth or death.
We spoke Russian at home in Oxford, since my English doctor father was away during the war and then my parents separated. Soon after that, my mother arranged for the name Pasternak to be added to our names by deed poll. I was rather proud of my exotic double surname.
Just after the end of the war, a returning diplomat brought a smuggled letter from Boris to my family. I remember my mother’s incredulous excitement, and her breathless telephone call to her sister to announce it. Those rare letters – there were just three in 11 years – were thrilling events. In this one, Boris wrote that he was starting to write a novel about the Revolution and its aftermath. “I should like,” he wrote, “to relate the main events, particularly in our country, in a prose… far simpler and more open than I have used so far. I have started on this, but it’s all so remote from what’s wanted from us here that it’s difficult…” In her reply, my mother also enclosed a letter to Boris from me, in the best Russian I could manage.
Another letter from him got through three years later, by which time the first half of Doctor Zhivago was written. Boris had never been popular with the Soviet authorities. His intensely personal writing, his utter indifference to Party directives about what should and shouldn’t be written, his apolitical lyrical poems, had many times jeopardised his freedom, and even his life. On one occasion he seems to have been saved by the fact that Stalin liked his poetry. And now he wrote: “Publishing [the novel] is absolutely out of the question, whether in the original or in translation. Both the spirit of the work itself, and my situation here, mean that it can’t appear in public.” There was also a message for me: “What a wonderful letter Nicky wrote me! Lyonia [his son] is delighted and is preparing to reply, but I think he’s dreaming of the time when he’ll be able to reply in English.”
hen came a gap of eight years when no letters got through at all. Finally, in 1956, when Stalin had died and chinks were appearing in the Iron Curtain, a letter from Boris arrived safely by ordinary post, full of incredulous joy at being able to communicate normally at last. And at the same time – another smuggled package, containing two fat volumes of bound typescript. Doctor Zhivago had arrived in England, brought over via diplomatic bag by our family friend, the philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin.
The typed pages were very hard to read. The typist had had to make six or more carbon copies at once, and this was one of the faintest. Other copies had already been smuggled to Italy, Poland and France, where they were being used to prepare translations; and our own copy soon disappeared from our house for the same reason. I barely had time to read the first chapter. Translated at great speed, the novel came out in English the following year, and was an instant bestseller. (I remember my mother’s irritation at newspaper articles and reviews that lumped together Doctor Zhivago with another new and controversial Russian novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.)
When Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958, it unleashed a storm of vilification in the Soviet Union. For the Communist authorities, the novel was anathema. The tale of a man who grows up in preRevolutionary Russia, living through the First World War, the Revolution and the Civil War, marrying and raising a son, then falling in love for a second time – it extolled the value of the individual over “society”, relating chaotic historical events from a personal viewpoint without a Marxist slant, and worst of all, it was imbued with a Christian ethic.
In response, the authorities organised mass meetings at which workers, writers, or ordinary citizens (none of whom had ever seen the novel, and most of whom had never heard of Pasternak) were ordered to condemn him unanimously as a sordid traitor, and to demand his arrest, imprisonment or exile. Letters from family members in Moscow told of their fear and distress, and also of their disagreements – Boris, encouraged by his lover Olga Ivinskaya, was now determined that his novel should appear all over the world and reach as many people as possible, while his wife Zina and his brother Alexander begged him to keep his head down.
By 1959, when I was still an undergraduate reading Russian at Oxford, Doctor Zhivago had appeared in the West in the original Russian as well. My Russian tutor at the time was Max Hayward, one of the English translators of the novel, and he and
Our rare letters from Uncle Boris – just three in 11 years – were thrilling events
I had long discussions about it. What he did not tell me – though he must have known – was that the Russian text had been acquired by the CIA, which had a strong interest in getting it printed in the West, and smuggled to the Soviet Union by returning travellers, to score a propaganda victory over the Soviet authorities who were still trying their hardest to prevent that. (The complex story of how and where the Russian text got printed, and which typescript was microfilmed for the purpose, is not yet fully known. It may even have been my mother’s volumes that were copied.)
In Oxford, my mother Lydia and her sister Josephine had to cope with newspaper reports of fresh threats and denunciations, and with English and foreign reporters desperate for a story from the horse’s mouth. It was an anguished time for the sisters, torn between delight at the novel’s success, and dread of saying anything that might be quoted in Moscow and somehow harm their brother. For the most part, they avoided answering the telephone; instead, they would get my youngest sister Ann to take the calls and say “no comment”. At the age of 12, she really could have no comment to make.
Five years after Boris’s death, the film of Doctor Zhivago appeared, with Omar Sharif playing the title role and Julie Christie as Lara. My mother and I attended the premiere. It’s a spectacular production, and the love affair between Zhivago and
Lara is unforgettable. But we both felt that the historical side was trivialised; and of course the character of Zhivago as a thinker and a poet, with considered views on the Revolution, human dignity, art and religion, is skated over. As a “translation” of the novel, it’s a very one-sided one. Its success annoyed the Soviet authorities even more; but Boris was now beyond their reach.
With the passing of time, the name Doctor Zhivago in many people’s minds has come to mean the film rather than the book. That’s a shame – no film could have done justice to the book’s variety, the astounding natural descriptions, or the fascinating glimpses of private life in those fast-moving years of the early 20th century. All written by a man who never forgot he was a poet, even when writing prose. His text is rich, forceful and musical, in a way that neither of the two English translations in existence quite capture, so I resolved to translate it myself.
The original English translation, by Max Hayward with Manya Harari, was done under great pressure in 1957, when the novel was hot news and translations into Italian, French and English had to be rushed out. The story runs smoothly and fluently, but the original Russian is treated quite cavalierly. In many places, Hayward adds something of his own, or discards whole ideas, sometimes whole sentences, from the original text.
Hayward liked a brisk, snappy pace, whereas Pasternak can often write long, involved and contemplative sentences. For instance, there’s a passage where Lara runs into the street carrying a revolver, looking for her seducer. She’s in such an emotional turmoil that she barely knows where she is or what she’s doing. In my new translation, it reads: “Not until she emerged into the street for the second time did Lara take a proper look around her. It was winter. This was the town. It was evening.” The abrupt sentences echo her dazed perceptions. Hayward, in his version, wastes the effect: “Only now, when she came out for the second time, did she take a look round her at the town and the winter night.”
In 2010 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky published a second translation, which – in reaction to the 1957 version
On one occasion, he seems to have been saved by the fact that Stalin liked his poetry
– sticks extremely close to the Russian, faithfully matching the vocabulary and sentence structure. That may give a feel of what the Russian language is like, but it’s so different from normal English, so stilted, that it doesn’t read at all easily. For instance, when Zhivago is having a heart-to-heart talk with Lara, and mentions the name of Komarovsky – the man who seduced her in her teens – he asks her why she’s blushing. In Pevear and Volokhonsky, she replies: “From the sound of ‘Komarovsky’ on your lips.
From the unwontedness and the unexpectedness.” That’s a cumbersome mouthful for a girl blurting out a spontaneous answer. In my version, she says: “It’s the sound of Komarovsky’s name when you say it. I’m not used to hearing that – it was unexpected.”
Boris wrote to my mother that
‘Of course,’ Pasternak said, ‘it is the tone that matters’
The Folio Society edition of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, in a new translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater with illustrations by Leonid Pasternak, is exclusively available from foliosociety.com
Materials. I’d bought the novels for my mum, and read them again, and discussed them with her. Yet the idea of adapting them for the screen – three huge books filled with glory – was terrifying. They are great literature. In fact, they are a masterpiece. It wasn’t enough to have read them. I knew I needed to do a PhD in them.
That meant writing papers on Dust, understanding the metals involved in subtle knives, trying to grasp the incredible science behind His Dark Materials. It meant, with my script editor Xandria Horton, plotting journeys, making maps, defining the way that certain characters get from A to B.
And here’s where our secret weapon came in. If you’re adapting Dickens all you have are the clues he’s left us. You read his biography, you try to get the sense of who Scrooge was in his life, and why Dickens wrote him the way he did. You make suppositions. You become an amateur detective. But when the author is alive you have the source available. We were able to pick up Pullman and shake out all the clues inside him.
For instance, we had scoured the books for details about Lord Asriel’s journey, and we spent a good few hours questioning Pullman, Newsnight-style, on who had trapped Asriel, what he’d seen, where he’d been, and how and why his science had evolved through it. It was exhilarating, finding out hidden truths about one of the great characters in fiction from his creator.
Even so, the scripting process wasn’t easy. These books are incredibly dense, and we had to decide how to guide our viewers through the ridiculous amount of information they need to navigate the plot’s waters. Every script is a tussle between the two poles of plot and character: you try to push through the necessary exposition, but leave enough space to soak the viewers in the world and its characters. With His Dark Materials, there is a lot to explain – and an incredible box of characters to spend time with.
Episode one took 46 drafts and more than two years of work. At first we were explaining too little, and then explaining too much. Certain things got solidified and others got thrown away. By the time we got to a draft that worked, I think we’d talked through every scene at least 100 times.
What felt most valuable rose to
His Dark Materials starts tomorrow on BBC One at 8pm