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established a gypsy-bond with the exbohemian, Stalin Prize winner,
but had touched on a performance of pride .
In 1948, too, he went to a poetry recital at which Boris Paster–
nak was supposed to appear. It was the coldest weather of the cold
war. The reading took place in what was then the largest auditorium
in Moscow, in the Polytechnic Museum.
It
was billed as "An Eve–
ning of Poetry on the Theme: 'Down with the Warmongers!' For a
Lasting Peace and People's Democracy ." Pasternak had recently
been attacked in the press. There was some fear that Pasternak had
agreed to attend such a clearly propagandistic occasion to make
amends and show himself "a true Soviet poet." The hall was crowded,
and there was an unusual sense of excitement in the audience. In
Max's account:
About twenty poets trooped out onto the stage and sat down
dutifully on chairs facing the audience. In front of them was a
table, and a rostrum with a microphone. But Pasternak was not
among them. One chair at the back of the stage remained empty.
The tense expectancy in the hall gave way to what was quite
evidently a mixture of disappointment and relief-after all, what
would
he
have been doing in this company? It seemed probable
that he had been excluded at the last moment, or had simply
decided against it himself.
As the standard propaganda-evening of declamatory reading pro–
ceeded, however, Pasternak slipped quietly in and sat down in the
chair in the back row. One could hear a certain strain enter into the
recitations. Then Pasternak's turn came. With a kind of invincible
puckish innocence he apologized for having no poems on the theme
of the evening, but offered to read some poems published years be–
fore. After each poem, there was tremendous applause. People be–
gan to shout out requests for particular poems:
At one moment he forgot a line and was immediately prompted
from various parts of the hall. . .. Somebody shouted,
"Shestdesiat'shestoi davai!"
(Give us the sixty-sixth!) - this was a re–
quest for Pasternak's version of Shakespeare's sonnet. ...
Tactfully, Pasternak refrained from reciting the lines which
III
English read:
