“Do not touch this cloud-dweller,” it’s rumored to have been written on Boris Pasternak’s dossier. He was never arrested by the Russian Community Party, although his lover Olga Ivanskaya was arrested in 1949, and imprisoned in a labor camp for four years. Olga Ivanskaya is thought to be a model for the heroine, Lara, in Doctor Zhivago, which I’ve never read. I have read Pasternak’s poems and some of his letters. I read Anna Akhmatova before I read Boris Pasternak. I found her on a friend’s bookshelf in my early twenties. This friend was a painter and we worked in a record store together. I pretended to know who Akhmatova was. I was a little flustered that afternoon—I arrived to find my friend in the bathtub, and in the bathtub he remained for the majority of our visit. He’d invited me over for tea, I believe. I was single; he was a close friend’s ex. Or rather, I had become friends with both parties and then they broke up—awkward. His apartment was spare and white like a canvas, visually quiet. The two of us talked while he luxuriated in the bath, but about what? In her poem “Boris Pasternak,” Anna Akhmatova describes Pasternak’s “silence” as: “it means he is tiptoeing over pine needles, / So as not to startle the light sleep of space.” Pasternak, in his poem “To Anna Akhmatova,” writes: “I think I can call on words / that will last: you are there,” and “you can’t leave town though it’s spring,” and “From your first verses where grains / of clear speech hardened, to the last…” It was a strange thing to find my friend in the bath, with so much to say, while all the names and titles on the spines of his books were speaking to me too.
-Morgan English