Textual evidence suggests that «Doctor Zhivago» might well be viewed as a response to Akhmatova’s treatment of the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Although it is certainly not by chance that Yury’s mother’s name is Maria, mothers in «Doctor Zhivago» are diametrically the opposite to Akhmatova’s images. The mother theme receives highly fraught treatment in Pasternak’s novel, where mothers are often not devoted to their children, and if they are, quickly become background characters. Mothers die or disappear or abandon their children in this novel. The novel starts with the funeral of Yury’s natural mother, Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago, whom Yury remembers adoringly and prayerfully even though she often abandonned him as she took cures in Europe for her failing health. Another mother figure is his adoptive mother, Anna Krueger-Gromeko, who dies early on.

Zhivago himself has difficulty in dealing with his first wife Tonia as a mother, seeing her as an object rather than a human being. He imagines her after giving birth as a mythical «barque that crossed the sea of death to the continent of life with a cargo of new souls», lying at mooring with «strained rigging and planking»[376]. Yury’s second wife Lara has one daughter with her first husband Pasha and another with Yury, whom she abandons in the thickets of the Civil War. Yury has a third wife Marina, with whom he has two children, all of whom he ignores and who fall into the background. Finally, the Mary of the Zhivago poem, «Рождественская звезда», is not the stem, stoic mother enduring her son’s crucifixion, around which Akhmatova builds «Requiem», but the young virginal Mary of the birth.

Much more powerful than the mother figure is the Magdalene theme of the lover and fallen woman, surrounding Lara’s adolescent years and reflected in discourses about Magdalene and in the two Zhivago poems devoted to Magdalene. Indeed, Lara, who is described as an intercessor, or «zastupnitsa», in the Yuriatin part of the novel combines both Magdalene and Mary Theotokos in her capacious life experience and generous character[377].

Despite an implicit resistance to the images that form Akhmatova’s fundamental poetic identity, Pasternak shows that Akhmatova was very much on his mind in the final poem of «Doctor Zhivago», «Гефсиманский сад». Attached to a handwritten copy of the final poem, written in 1950, in which the poet announces himself as the judge of his age, was a dedication to none other than «Анне Андреевне [Ахматовой] [sic]»[378]. Not only does this dedication show that Akhmatova was on Pasternak’s mind, but when we examine the text of this final poem of «Doctor Zhivago», we also confirm that it responds specifically though obliquely to the final monument poem of «Requiem», in which Akhmatova creates a monument to herself and all the mothers who bore witness to the horrors of the Stalinist tyranny. Pasternak is competing precisely with Akhmatova, even as he is leaving his own mark as the witness and judge of his age.

The proof can be found in the parallel ship and river images at the end of each poem. Akhmatova’s epilogue ends with: «And may the melting snow stream like tears / From my motionless lids of bronze, // And a prison dove coos in the distance, / And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on». In the final lines of «Garden of Gethsemane» Pasternak raises the stakes, answering Akhmatova’s Mary by speaking as the Orthodox Christ Pantocrator.

The ships on the river that form an ironically peaceful background to Akhmatova’s memorial to maternal suffering, now become a crucial image of human history, filled with evil deeds, part of the drama of final judgment. Pasternak has erected his Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler and Judge of All, in clear juxtaposition to Akhmatova’s Mother of God and the bronze memorial, who stand resolutely by the site of death (whether the biblical Crucifixion or at Stalin’s «Crosses» Prison) and never allows us to forget. One rather grandiosely claims authority as the divine Orthodox judge, while the other is merely human and the intercessor and protector of people, who judges effectively by always keeping alive the memory of injustice, so that people should never have to suffer that murderous fate again.

The final act of the Akhmatova-Pasternak drama played out in the 1950s, when Pasternak had finished his novel, and Akhmatova criticized it for what she saw as an inappropriately self-absorbed image of the public poet. Akhmatova found Pasternak the man, as well as his image of Christ in «Doctor Zhivago» overly self-centered. She corrected him both in person and through her poetry, in a poem from 1959, entitled «The Reader». Nonetheless, she would find authentic spirituality in other, much more private Pasternak poetry.

After World War II Akhmatova was endlessly annoyed by Pasternak’s ignoring her poetry and had gradually become a stem critic of her erstwhile ally. Although by 1956 there was «no continued friendship» between the two monumental poets, Akhmatova and Pasternak had always trusted each other with their poetry[380]. Pasternak read the beginning of «Doctor Zhivago» to Akhmatova in 1947. By late 1957, when it was completely finished, Akhmatova had read «Doctor Zhivago» to the end. Irritated by the novel, according to Chukovskaya, she found «completely unprofessional pages», which she sarcastically attributed to Pasternak’s late-life lover, Olga Ivinskaya She reportedly was tempted to «grab a pencil and cross out page after page»[381]. Ignoring the novel’s religious-philosophical discourse, she claimed somewhat disingenuously, in my view, that the best passages «in this novel are landscapes… I responsibly affirm, there is nothing like them in Russian literature. Not in Turgenev, not in Tolstoi, nowhere. They are ingenious»[382].

Indeed, Pasternak’s ubiquitous references to the Gospel in «Doctor Zhivago» and his poetic identification with the Christ figure in the Doctor Zhivago poetry appear to have been a major source of irritation to Akhmatova A 1947 poem, «То B. Pasternak», written just as Pasternak was starting to share pieces of the novel, she renewed the biblical theme informing their rivalry, relating Moscow at this time after the renewed post-war attacks on literature in 1946, to Gethsemane and the moments before the Crucifixion. Akhmatova talks about the world falling deaf and quiet, following the treachery and anticipating impending death:

This poem raises the theme of Gethsemane that would be central to the first of the Zhivago poems and one of Pasternak’s signature poems, «Hamlet», written in 1949.

Toward the end of the 1950s Akhmatova wrote a poetic response to «Hamlet», titled «The Reader» [ «Chitatel’», 1959]. Increasingly, she felt that as one of the leading poets of Russia, Pasternak was too focused on himself. In April 1959 she commented to Chukovskaia that «[Pasternak] is a wonderful person and a divine poet. But the same thing that happened to Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky happened to him: toward the end of his life he put himself above art»[384]. At an infamous dinner in Peredelkino August 21, 1959, the last time the two poets met, Pasternak refused to sit next to Akhmatova and made fun of her when she recited her new poems[385]. Akhmatova, in turn, struck back by declaiming «The Reader». «Hamlet» conveys the poet as actor playing Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, in a way that also links the Christ story to Shakespeare’s «Hamlet» (which Pasternak had been translating):