The great memoirist, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, saw Pasternak’s poetry as a «type of revelation» filled with the «великая радость узнавания»[352]. Later in life Pasternak would characterize poetry as a form of miracle working. As he wrote in the «Doctor Zhivago» poem, «August» (1953), poetry «captured in words, the image of things», an act that was «both making and miracle-making»[353]. Pasternak’s «miracle» vocabulary intersects with Akhmatova’s, who in her poem, «Disaster» («Все расхищено, предано, продано», 1921), and well before, sought miracles and celebrated miracle workers.

There is no textual or biographical evidence that Orthodox culture, or indeed any religious culture, was important to Pasternak before 1929. «Сестра моя — жизнь», written well before the biblical poems of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, uses at most a few peripheral religious images, for «Что в мае, когда поездов расписанье / Камышинской веткой читаешь в купе, / Оно грандиозней святого писанья»[354]. Only in 1929 did Pasternak show any deeper interest in sacred text, now in a poem titled «To Anna Akhmatova». At the end of the poem he both cites and resists Akhmatova’s identity with Lot’s wife:

In this poem Pasternak does not agree with Akhmatova as fitting the figure of Lot’s wife, who turns to salt, looking back nostalgically at her beloved home. He rather makes Akhmatova a bit like himself, a poet of the everyday prose of life, transformed and enlivened. To this poem, which she did not like but gave permission to publish, Akhmatova responded with a photo of herself with the inscription: «To Boris Pasternak, a miraculous poet and the most alive person in the USSR. Anna Akhmatova»[356]. It is worth pointing out here that Akhmatova in this inscription also creates Pasternak somewhat in her own image. Words connected with «miracle», for example, «miraculous» or «miracle worker», are much more part of the vocabulary of her early work than that of the early Pasternak[357].

Further corroboration of the year 1929 as the year of Pasternak’s «opening the Bible» and of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova as two probable sources comes in his early poetic-philosophical autobiography, «Safe Passage», also written in 1929. For the first time he accorded a measure of truth value to the Bible: «Я понял, что, к примеру, Библия есть не столько книга с твердым текстом, сколько записная тетрадь человечества, и что таково все вековечное. Что оно жизненно не тогда, когда оно обязательно, а когда оно восприимчиво ко всем уподоблениям, которыми на него озираются исходящие века»[358]. Now, for the first time. Scripture gains inner meaning and significance in Pasternak’s writing. Though he claims this insight came to him in 1912 as a student visiting Venice and its collections of religious art, we must ask whether this thought did not really come to him much later and more forcefully, in the early 1920s through Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene cycle and Akhmatova’s biblical verse. The evidence would be in Pasternak’s poetry and its response, not to Venetian art, but to the two poets and their archetypes, Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene as lover offering salvific love and Akhmatova’s Lot’s wife and Mary Mother of God.

These somewhat modest literary interactions mark the first groundbreaking of Akhmatova’s and Pasternak’s creative rivalry. In the next stage the stakes will be much higher as the poets assert themselves as the witnesses of a horrific age and the voices of a wronged people. It would be in the deeply hidden literary underground of the 1930s that the courageous Akhmatova again invoked now absolutely forbidden Scripture on the occasion of her son’s arrest in 1935 and the onset of Stalin’s sustained persecutions of the Great Terror. In these years a poem was written once on paper, memorized by trusted people and archived in memory. The paper was then burned and the poem written down again much later, when it was safe to do so.

In her stunning cycle, «Requiem» (1935–1940), Akhmatova bears witness to the evisceration of her beloved city, Leningrad, the terrible suffering of its best people, and the time when «безвинная корчилась Русь Под кровавыми сапогами И под шинами черных марусь»[359]. Religious imagery creates deep historical and mythical resonance as Akhmatova immortalizes the relationship between mother and son. The cycle invokes various cultural scenarios, but none more than Russian Orthodox spirituality. The first of the ten central poems, «Уводили тебя на рассвете», speaks of Akhmatova’s son kissing the icon as he leaves: «На губах твоих холод иконки»[360]. By the fourth poem, we learn that the prison, to which she and thousands of other women go in hope of hearing news and delivering packages, is called «Kresty», or «Crosses», already setting the stage for a crucifixion story (even though, happily, her son did live and was eventually released). In the sixth poem she speaks of the Leningrad white nights discussing her son’s awaited death and a «lofty cross», obviously elevating him to the position of a Christ figure.

The tenth and final poem of the main body of «Requiem», «Crucifixion», is the climax of the cycle. Here Akhmatova’s voice expresses a woman, a mother, who has no power but to weep, witness, and remember. The title, «Crucifixion», speaks to Christ’s death but is really more about the experience of Mary, now the Mother of God. As Akhmatova pictures Christ before the Crucifixion, in him divine nature is about to be revealed: «Хор ангелов великий час восславил, И небеса расплавились в огне»[361]. То his Father Christ cries, «„Why hast Thou forsaken me!“» (Matt 27:46), while to his mother, in Akhmatova’s significant distortion of Scripture, he says, «Oh, do not weep for Me…» (Luke 23:28). One suggests a challenge to a greater (paternal) power, while the other suggests possibly bravery in the face of (maternal) lamenting love. The actual citation comes from the passage in Luke 23:28, in which, having been sentenced to death, Jesus exhorts a group of lamenting women to weep not for him but for themselves and their world gone wrong. Although the biblical passage is not about Mary, Akhmatova makes it so, while also implying that this world, the world of Stalin’s making, is a Russia gone terribly wrong.

The second poem of «Crucifixion» focuses on three people close to Jesus — one is Magdalene, who «beat her breast and sobbed», acting out her passion; the second is the disciple; and, in Akhmatova’s rendition, the third is the Mother of God, who stands alone: «А туда, где молча Мать стояла, Так никто взглянуть и не посмел»[362]. Again, Akhmatova significantly distorts Scripture in order to enhance the figure of Mary. In John 19:27 Jesus exhorts his disciple to view his (Jesus’s) mother as if Mary were the disciple’s own mother. The disciple takes Mary into his house henceforth. But Akhmatova empowers the Mother of God by setting her apart and alone, seemingly unloved and ignored, whose mourning is unbearable for other people to countenance, but thereby all the more unforgettable[363]. Unavoidably, in the associative, coded language of poetry, Akhmatova’s Mother of God is clearly vying here with Tsvetaeva’s Magdalene of 1923, who resonates in the demonstrably dramatic figure of Akhmatova’s Magdalene.