The Return Of Dr Zhivago

As a boy, Nicolas Pasternak Slater was forbidden from meeting his uncle Boris Pasternak. Now he’s translated the author’s masterpiece

When I was a child in Oxford during the Second World War, with a Russian mother and no father around, at home our family spoke Russian. We were always being reminded that we were different: apparently there was something important and splendid about our Russian side.

My Russian grandfather, Leonid Pasternak, who lived his last years with us, had been a famous artist in Russia, and out in that mysterious country on the edge of the world were uncles and aunts who knew about us, though we could never communicate because of the war. One of them, said my mother, was her brother Boris, my uncle Borya, a famous poet.

At the end of the war, there came a long letter from these Russians, smuggled out of Moscow by Isaiah Berlin, a family friend. A letter from ‘out there’ – it could almost have been from outer space. Uncle Borya wrote that he was planning to write a book – ‘to relate the main events, particularly in our country, in prose that will be far simpler and more open than I have used so far’.

His next letter came three years later, again smuggled out in the teeth of Stalin’s post-war terror. My sister and I had written to him, in our uncertain Russian, some time before, and now, as well as sending more news about his novel, he wrote, ‘What wonderful letters Nicky and Rosochka wrote me!’ Sadly, that was my only personal contact with my uncle Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). No more letters came for eight years. Corresponding across the Iron Curtain, or even having relatives abroad, had become mortally dangerous for Soviet citizens, and we all had to keep our anxieties to ourselves.