ABSTRACT
Pushkin's appeal had borne little fruit, but Pasternak now invokes it in an attempt to influence Stalin. But it was Stalin's habit to monitor events in detail, and the bizarre gesture is unlikely to have escaped his keen eye. Pasternak then went round Moscow frantically explaining to anyone who would listen that it was not he who had reported the matter to the authorities. It provided Akhmatova and Mandelstam with a living at times when they could not publish original work, and the same was to be true of Pasternak himself at certain periods of his later life. A glimpse of Pasternak at the height of the Yezhovshchina is given in the diary of the playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov. Akhmatova has provided a more vivid account of Pasternak’s professional and domestic activities of the period, though Zinaida Pasternak did her best to prevent the two poets from meeting.
