Monday 29 January. Things have changed. We are at the Russian Embassy to see Andrei Nekrasov's execrable biopic about Pasternak. A huge video projector squats while Sergei Shilov, the Ambassador's personal assistant, presents my wife with 12 red roses, garni, and says a few words of introduction. He will not presume, he says, to speak of the work of Boris Pasternak because, well, there are in the audience the nieces of Pasternak, who are intelligent, well, very intelligent, and also, well, very beautiful and far more able than he is to speak about Pasternak's work. Shilov's English has that mixture of hesitation and surge normally associated with high-wire artists. At the end of every successfully negotiated sentence, he smiles like a performer being judged - radiant with nerves.

LRB 22 March 1990 | PDF Download