Death of a Man

In the bitterness of recent years, when he was reviled by his stony-faced government and forbidden under pain of exile to accept the Nobel Prize awarded him for his poems and for Doctor Zhivago, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak once wrote: "How hard this life, and long my way of stone." Last week, the indomitable man who succeeded in creating some of modern literature's most eloquent testaments to the unconquerable human spirit came to the end of his stony path.

Twenty-Five Breaths. Not long before his final illness, Pasternak worriedly told an old friend he thought he had lung cancer. He begged that his suspicion be kept from his wife, Zinaida, so as not to upset her. Yet when he was fatally stricken, the Soviet doctors diagnosed Pasternak's illness as a heart attack and only later discovered it was the result of cancer spreading to the heart muscles. By then, cancer had colonized both lungs and was advancing from his stomach through the digestive tract.

The government that had so long scorned Boris Pasternak, now gave grudgingly of its best to save him. An oxygen tent was rushed to rambling, weatherbeaten Dacha No. 6 in Peredelkino, 15 miles from Moscow. Professor Nikolai Petrov, a cancer specialist from the Kremlin clinic, strove desperately to win a few more hours from eternity with another blood transfusion. Pasternak asked wearily: "Is it necessary?"

As the hollow needle was inserted in a vein of his wasted arm, Boris murmured to his wife: "Dosvidanya [goodbye]." Moments later, blood gushed from his mouth. "Why am I hemorrhaging?" he asked. Trying to sound reassuring, Zinaida answered, "It is because you have pneumonia." The end came fast. With the last flickers of consciousness, Boris Pasternak managed to wave to Zinaida. She leaned over him, counted 25 gasping breaths, and then came the stillness of death.

The Missing Mourners. Of all the thousands of Soviet newspapers and periodicals, only two literary gazettes carried short notices of the death of Russia's greatest contemporary writer. And next day, as 1,500 mourners gathered at Peredelkino, there was present no official of the Communist Party, the Soviet government, or the Writers' Union, which had expelled Pasternak for the crime of writing as his heart moved him.

But others did come, bringing flowers. They arrived from Moscow by taxi and private car; they came by footpath through the woods or across the open fields from the suburban railroad station. A slow procession wound through the house to view the body: students, workers, peasants, elderly men and women of Pasternak's own generation. There were even some writers who braved official displeasure: Novelist Konstantin Paustovsky, Children's Author Kornei Chukovsky and, through his wife, Ilya Ehrenburg. Sviatoslav Richter, Russia's finest pianist, played slow dirges and the Chopin melodies that Pasternak had loved.

Yellow Earth. At 4 in the afternoon, six young pallbearers lifted the open coffin with white linen slings and carried it the half-mile to the village churchyard where Russia's endless war is fought even in death--some graves bear tombstones with crosses; others are surmounted by Communism's red stars. Panting and perspiring, the pallbearers deposited the coffin on the mound of freshly dug yellowish earth beside the open grave, within sight of the blue onion domes of the Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration. Several weeping women bent over to kiss the lifeless countenance. It was time for the funeral oration.

The man who stepped forward was Kornei Chukovsky, 78, in his time the friend of Anton Chekov and Maxim Gorky. After recalling his long friendship with Pasternak, Chukovsky gingerly approached the crucial question: Pasternak's quarrel with the Communist Party. It resulted, said Chukovsky, from Pasternak's sharing Leo Tolstoy's pacifism and his refusal to "condone the resistance to evil by violence." In this Pasternak erred, stated Chukovsky. Then, having made the necessary obeisance to the Kremlin, he went on strongly to praise his old friend as a "splendid fighter," a perfect model of how an artist "should defend his views without fear of falling out with his contemporaries or other disapproval, so long as he is convinced that his word is right, so long as he is convinced that his cause is sacred!" In ringing tones, whose echoes would surely resound in Nikita Khrushchev's office, Chukovsky concluded: "Farewell, dear Boris Leonidovich, thank you from all of us. We owe you a large and unpaid debt." So did the world, for the sum total of Pasternak's writing is a cry of joy at the wonder of life and of God who created it, and a deep conviction of man's resurrection as promised by Jesus Christ.

A Poet's Grave. As Chukovsky stepped down from the mound, several young men pushed through the crowd. One proclaimed: "Over the poet's open grave his verses should resound," and began a recitation. Another said something about an "unpublished book," and there were uneasy glances and scattered cries of "For shame!" The coffin was sealed and lowered into the grave and a symbolic pinch of dirt thrown in.

But it would take more than a covering of dirt to extinguish the memory of Boris Pasternak in the Russian land he loved so much that "every line of her had gone to the very bottom of his soul."

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