The present discussion treats Akhmatova and Pasternak in tandem because, as I will argue, it was their poetic rivalry that helped to keep religious themes and, to a degree, the Orthodox high culture of the Russian Renaissance alive in the deadly 1920s and 1930s, when Orthodox institutions and believers were severely persecuted. Moreover, this rivalry worked creatively toward more than each rival’s diminishing of the other. Poets make their distinctive voices heard, and they develop their own signature style through creative and sometimes rivalrous dialogue with contemporary poets. This dialogue — hidden in the depths of their poems and invisible to most readers — might directly address the poetic rival or it might just mention obliquely a specific image strongly identified with that poet. The conversation between Akhmatova and Pasternak has been relatively little studied in the literary commentary, in contrast to more obvious, years-long creative dialogues between, for example, the two great Moscow poets, Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, on one hand, or the two great Petersburg poets, Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, on the other.

What is the gist of this poetic conversation between Akhmatova and Pasternak? Although Pasternak is supposed to have proposed to Akhmatova — even a number of times — their relationship was relatively distant[333]. Each a principal figure in one of Russia’s two capital cities, Akhmatova and Pasternak became trusted allies who helped to protect one another. They were co-survivors of a hellish time. Respected and admired poetic colleagues, neither was a genuine poetic soulmate of the other. At the end of their lives they became quite fierce competitors vying for poetic laurels and poetic legacy. What is important about this relationship in the context of the Cunningham Lecture is that it had everything to do with the survival of Orthodox high culture under the Stalin regime.

A brief review of the two poets’ biographies shows several parallels in the quite different trajectories of their careers. They were bоки within months of each other, Akhmatova — in June, 1889 and Pasternak in February, 1890. Both were allegedly Orthodox Christians. Akhmatova was baptized in the Orthodox Church and, even after the revolution, was broadly acknowledged to be «the last and only poet of Orthodoxy»[334]. Even in the 1920s, when it was risky to do so, Akhmatova occasionally went to church. And when Stalin died in early March of 1953, Akhmatova made a personal pilgrimage in spring 1953 to Russia’s holiest shrine at Sergiev Posad[335].

Pasternak’s situation was more complicated. He was born into the family of one of Russia’s leading pre-revolutionary painters, Leonid Pasternak, and one of its most talented young pianists, Rosalia Kaufmann. Jewish, from the Pale of Settlement, they resisted the normal path of forced conversion to Orthodox Christianity as a condition for living in the capital cities[336]. They kept their distance from all religion. Nevertheless, Pasternak claimed in a letter from 1959 that he was baptized early on by his nurse, though recent biographies on Pasternak have found no evidence to corroborate that claim[337]. Though familiar with Scripture and the Orthodox liturgy, Pasternak certainly developed a strong interest in Christianity only later.

Although the poets occasionally converge in a style marked by a tendency to write in fresh, conversational language about everyday subjects, their poetic projects diverge in many points. The young Akhmatova came from the classical Russian and European traditions. Pasternak, in contrast, was to start his career in close proximity to the poets of the avantgarde, who threw the classics «from the ship of modernity»[338]. He was particularly taken with Maiakovsky, though avoided the «in-your-face» irreverence of a Maiakovsky.

Early on, Akhmatova’s themes were private life and love relationships. She was the first Russian woman to develop the large following of a poetic celebrity and to make a distinctive woman’s voice really audible a wide audience. No longer merely the male poet’s muse, now the beloved knows her own mind, speaks for herself, and responds with wit and passion to the male other. Pasternak focuses less directly on human relationships than on embracing and transfiguring the objects of everyday life. Ecstasy at the ordinary things of life illuminates Pasternak’s verse. Weather, rain, sun, window frames, or a train schedule — each of these things can become an active, energetic being, enlivening both natural and built environments.

Both Akhmatova and Pasternak as mature poets would agree with a view of lyrical art as the creation of the «miraculous»: the inspired transfiguration of the ordinary things of this world through a singular voice and poetic persona that allow the reader or listener to perceive in a fresh way. The goal of poetry for both of them is to transform the quotidian and to see and let others see the miracles of the everyday. Although from her earliest poetry on Akhmatova’s poetic idiom was imbued with references to Orthodox life, Pasternak would begin to immerse himself in the Christian tradition only at the end of the 1920s. Then, I will argue, he would actively compete with Akhmatova for the status of the moral voice of his epoch, building his authority in part on an appropriation of crucial Christian themes absorbed both from from Akhmatova, as well as other poets of the Russian renaissance.

The use of biblical themes and archetypes by both poets would eventually contribute to the state’s relegating both poets to the status of «inner exile», surviving through literary translation, though still writing poetry «for the drawer» (not for publication), and at great risk to their lives[339]. Despite political repression, both would employ forbidden biblical archetypes to infuse their own poetic voices with subtle but powerful authority in an effort to withstand tyranny and to create literary monuments that would outlast the tyrants themselves. Akhmatova developed this strategy quite a bit earlier than Pasternak. And Pasternak adopted it, partly in response to Akhmatova

The typical interpretive argument about Pasternak’s engagement with the Orthodox heritage and Scripture stresses the strong influence of another of the four great poets of this generation, Marina Tsvetaeva Though after 1921 Tsvetaeva lived in exile in Europe, Pasternak carried on what can euphemistically be called a creatively passionate relationship with her in letters and poems throughout the mid — 1920s. Tsvetaeva’s cycle of three very sensuous poems devoted to Mary Magdalene, written in 1923, show a Christ resurrected through Magdalene’s love. These poems made a deep and well-demonstrated impression upon Pasternak[340].

The goal of this essay is to show that the much longer-lived but more subtle creative rivalry between Pasternak and Akhmatova was vitally important for the development of Pasternak’s art, as well sustaining the legacy of the Russian religious renaissance during Stalin’s terror. Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s poetic conversation converges in two of the poets’ greatest works, both written in deepest secret, Akhmatova’s cycle, «Requiem», composed in the late 1930s, and Pasternak’s Nobel-prize-winning novel, «Doctor Zhivago», written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, another period of gathering persecution. This story proceeds in three episodes: 1) Akhmatova’s bold poetic «opening the Bible» in the years of a young and virulently anti-religious Soviet society and Pasternak’s overt dismissal of this gesture; 2) Akhmatova’s fearless witness to Stalin’s terror, which Pasternak seemingly ignores; and finally 3) Akhmatova’s late-life quarrel with one of Pasternak’s most famous religious poems[341].