Pasternak, Josephine (1900–1993)

Russian-born British philosopher, poet, and intellectual, and sister of novelist Boris Pasternak. Name variations: Anna Ney or Anna Nei; Josephina Pasternak; Josephine Leonidovna Pasternak; Zhosefina Pasternak; Zozefina Pasternak; Zhozefina Leonidovna Pasternak. Born Zhosefina Leonidovna Pasternak in Moscow, Russia, on February 19, 1900; died in Oxford, England, on February 16, 1993; daughter of Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (1862–1945) and Rosalia (Rozalia) Isidorovna Kaufman Pasternak (1867–1939); sister of Aleksandr Pasternak (1893–1982), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), and Lydia Leonidovna Pasternak-Slater (1902–1989); married Fyodor Pasternak.

Long overshadowed by the fame of both her father Leonid Pasternak and brother Boris Pasternak, Josephine Pasternak is finally reaping some of the respect her life and work deserves. The Pasternak family, a highly assimilated Russian-Jewish clan, was unusually gifted. Notes Ronald Hingley, three of the Pasternaks were "superlatively endowed" with talents within, or at least bordering on, genius. The family consisted of "three suns or stars, and three minor bodies, related to them," wrote Josephine. "The minor bodies were: Aleksandr, Lydia and myself. The suns were: father, mother and Boris." Her father Leonid was one of Russia's best-known Impressionist painters. Her mother Rosalia Pasternak was a brilliant pianist whose career was placed on hold when her children were born; later, her musical ambitions would be largely frustrated by war, revolution, and poor health.

Josephine Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1900. By the time she was 11, her brother Boris, 10 years her senior, was reading his poetry to her for critiques. A child of unusual sensibility, she dwelled in a home filled with music, art, and some of Russia's most original thinkers, who came to visit her father's studio. It was Josephine who entertained Albert Einstein when he sat for his portrait. Boris would remember Josephine as a little girl whose concern for the downtrodden extended even to the steps of their dacha, which she kissed out of sympathy for their suffering when people walked on them. With her thoughtful, melancholy face and dark plaits of hair, young Josephine served as a model for her father, whose sketches of her are among his finest. In a 1934 letter to Leonid, Boris would write: "I think your best subjects were Tolstoy and Josephine. How you drew them! Your drawings of Josephine were such that she grew up according to them, followed them in her life."

Living in a Russia that found itself in the grips of a devastating world war, a revolution, and then a merciless period of civil war created ever greater difficulties for the Pasternaks. In St. Petersburg, Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in an almost bloodless takeover, but in Moscow, where the Pasternaks lived, the situation was considerably different. Here, bloody street fighting would take place before the Bolsheviks triumphed. Both Josephine and her younger sister were trapped with a cousin by the gun battles, and they were profoundly relieved to hear that the rest of their family was safe. Later, the Pasternaks discovered a dozen bullets embedded in the inside walls of their flat, and the outer plaster of the building was permanently pockmarked. Life in Moscow became increasingly difficult over the next several years. Although Leonid sympathized with the aims of the revolution, both he and Rosalia suffered from impaired health. Urgently needing proper medical care, Leonid and Rosalia, along with their daughters Josephine and Lydia, emigrated to Germany in June 1921.

There, the Pasternaks maintained close ties with Boris, who had remained in revolutionary Russia, which began calling itself the Soviet Union in December 1922. In 1924, Josephine married Fyodor Pasternak, her second cousin; the couple lived in Munich, where Fyodor prospered as a banker. Josephine's interest in philosophy intensified and in 1931 she was awarded a doctorate in philosophy by the University of Munich. Throughout these years, she wrote, publishing a small but growing number of poetry under the pseudonym Anna Ney. Many of her poems from the 1930s are powerful commentaries on the times. "The Murder of Dollfuss" concerns the Austrian leader who was murdered in a botched Nazi coup in 1934. "Chamberlain at Munich" declares that "the world will burn up in shame." Still another is a memorial to a German-Jewish woman in Munich who took her life by poison during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.

In 1938, Josephine's first volume of collected poems, Koordinaty (Coordinates), was published. That same year, she and her husband, along with her aged parents, fled Nazi Germany for the safety and academic serenity of Oxford, England. In August 1939, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, Rosalia succumbed to the heart disease that had long impaired her health. Having survived the war, Leonid died in May 1945, only weeks after the end of hostilities in Europe. Josephine would later note: "When Mother died it was as if harmony had abandoned the world. When father died it seemed as if truth had left it."

After 1945, Josephine remained at Oxford, where her sister Lydia also lived. Widely known and loved there, Josephine was described as "a deeply self-abnegating, nervous and charming woman of great beauty and intellectual spirit." Devoted to advancing her father's artistic legacy and reputation, she edited and published his memoirs, which appeared in a full edition in Moscow in 1975 as well as in abridged form in England in 1982. She also organized exhibitions of his work in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Assisted by Lydia, in 1958 Josephine worked in cooperation with Oxford's Ashmolean Museum to create the Leonid Pasternak Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, the first major retrospective of the great Russian artist's work in the West. Despite advancing years, she also managed to work on a substantial philosophical manuscript, an informal study in epistemology entitled Indefinability, which would appear in print in 1999, six years after her death.

As Josephine Pasternak grew older and physically more frail, she lived her life more and more in her writing. Often during these years, as in her 1958–64 correspondence with the venerable theater director Gordon Craig, she never personally met her correspondent. In 1981, she saw her second and last collection of verse, Pamyati Pedro (Memories of Pedro), appear in print. Most of the poems in the collection, which was published by the Russian-language YMCA Press in Paris, were written between 1934 and 1939. Major reviews in The Times Literary Supplement of London and World Literature Today were enthusiastic. The former spoke of "poems [that] belong to a living tradition, and … can be read with respect," whereas the latter ended by noting, "These poems reach into our conscience; they instruct us and transform us." The two opening pieces of Pamyati Pedro were dedicated to the dog Pedro, "whose suffering, when he is given away of necessity by his master, comes to typify that of all tormented beings."

As one of the last survivors of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, Josephine Pasternak embodied a rich, marvelous tradition. Destined to be less well known than her brilliant parents and older brother Boris, she nevertheless left behind considerable achievements when her long life ended. She had lived most of her years in a world of exile that in the final analysis always remained an alien environment for her. But as her tender obituary in The Times of London noted, after her death on February 16, 1993 (only three days short of her 93rd birthday), she would be remembered by her friends and family as "a woman of unfailing kindness and refinement, a gifted mimic and a raconteuse of genius. Her life was dominated by the ever-present past. On her deathbed she was abrim with memories of her childhood 90 years before: her nyanya pounding mustard, answering Josephine's perpetual 'What's that?' with wry peasant wit: 'Russian honey.' Her first kiss was bestowed by a drunken beggar, under her nyanya's horrified

eyes, after Josephine had given him her only lucky kopek for pity's sake. She remembered, too, a transcendental experience in a Russian meadow—long grass, silver birches, a scrap of paper in the sunlight, many years ago."

sources:

Dyck, J.W. "Boris Pasternak: The Caprice of Beauty," in Canadian Slavonic Papers-Revue Canadienne des Slavistes. Vol. 16, no. 4. Winter 1974, pp. 612–626.

Fleishman, Lazar. Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Gifford, Henry. "Times of Dislocation," in TLS: The Times [London] Literary Supplement. No. 4082, June 26, 1981, p. 736.

Hingley, Ronald. Pasternak: A Biography. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

"Josephine Pasternak," in The Times [London]. February 18, 1993, p. 19.

Lamont, Rosette C. "Verse," in World Literature Today. Vol. 56, no. 2. Spring 1982, pp. 361–362.

Levi, Peter. Boris Pasternak. London: Hutchinson, 1990.

Ney, Anna. "Anti-Semitism," in Jenny Hartley, ed. Hearts Undefeated: Women's Writing of the Second World War. London: Virago, 1995, pp. 243–244.

——. Koordinaty: Stikhi (Coordinates: Verses). Reprint of 1938 ed. Berlin: Petropolis, [1979?].

Pasternak, Josephine. Indefinability: An Essay in the Philosophy of Cognition. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1999.

——. "Patior," in The London Magazine. Vol. 4, no. 6. September 1964, pp. 42–57.

——. Pamyati Pedro (Memories of Pedro). Paris: YMCA Press, 1981.

Pasternak, Leonid. Zapisi raznykh let (Notes from Various Years). Ed. by Zhosefina Leonidovna Pasternak. Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, 1975.

Pasternak, Leonid Osipovich. The Memoirs of Leonid Pasternak. London: Quartet, 1982.

Salys, Rimgaila. "'Ever EGC': Gordon Craig's Letters to Josephine Pasternak," in Elementa: Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics. Vol. 3, no. 3, 1997, pp. 225–269.

——. Leonid Pasternak, the Russian Years, 1875–1921: A Critical Study and Catalogue. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

——. "A Tale of Two Artists: Valentin Serov and Leonid Pasternak," in Oxford Slavonic Papers. Vol. 26, 1993, pp. 75–86.

Zaltsberg, Ernst. "In the Shadows: Rosalia Pasternak, 1867–1939," in East European Jewish Affairs. Vol. 28, no. 1. Summer 1998, pp. 29–36.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia