Lara: The Untold Love Story that Inspired Doctor Zhivago - review

A love that survived the gulag. By Katie Law
Passionate friends: Olga Ivinskaya with Boris Pasternak just before his death in 1960
Katie Law @jkatielaw18 August 2016

Who could ever forget Julie Christie as Lara in David Lean’s 1965 film adaption of Boris Pasternak’s epic romantic weepie, Doctor Zhivago? Or, for that matter, Omar Sharif as the handsome, brooding doctor, torn between his wife — dull, dutiful Tonya — and his mistress Lara, passionate and full of life? The real-life story that inspired it is every bit as vivid, as Anna Pasternak, a great grand-niece of the writer, discovered while researching the life of Olga Ivinskaya, who became Boris Pasternak’s mistress for the last 15 years of his life.

It’s a gripping if sad chapter in history and she tells it well. Pasternak was already a famous poet and translator of Shakespeare when he first met Olga at the offices of the literary journal Novy Mir in 1946, where she was an editor. He was 56, she was 34. He was married to his second wife, Zinaida Neuhaus, who had left her husband, one of Pasternak’s best friends, pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, for him. Olga had also been married — and widowed — twice, and already had two children.

Pasternak, whose “elongated face was often likened to an Arab’s horse’s — hardly flattering — partly because he had long yellowish teeth” and Olga soon became lovers but Pasternak felt so guilty about his second marriage that he refused to leave Zinaida. Nor could he give Olga up, so he vacillated between the two women, just as Doctor Zhivago was to vacillate between Tonya and Lara, in a state of perpetual torment.

When Zinaida discovered her husband’s affair — Pasternak had left a love letter from Olga out on his desk, the author thinks on purpose — Olga attempted suicide and was sent to an asylum. After she returned, Pasternak dispatched Zinaida to tell Olga the affair must finish. But it didn’t.

Soon after, Olga was arrested by the secret police and sentenced to five years in a gulag in Potma. This was as close as the authorities dared come to attacking Pasternak himself, who while known as an opponent of the regime had Stalin’s protection, thanks to having translated into Russian some of Stalin’s favourite Georgian poetry a decade earlier. Stalin is reputed to have said of Pasternak, “Leave him in peace, he’s a cloud dweller,” which was later stamped on Pasternak’s KGB file.

While Olga toiled in the labour camp — suffering a miscarriage early on — Pasternak was writing the second half of Doctor Zhivago. By the time she was released nearly four years later, Pasternak, who had had a heart attack, had moved out of Moscow to his dacha at Peredelkino, where Zinaida could keep a watchful eye over him.

Olga left Moscow too and set up home nearby. So began a “big house, little house” arrangement, with Pasternak able to visit Olga several times a day.

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In 1955 he finished Doctor Zhivago and the following May agreed for it to be smuggled to Italy and published by Feltrinelli, as the Soviet authorities refused to publish it uncensored. Pasternak told the courier, as he handed over the original 433-page manuscript, “You are hereby invited to take part in my own execution.”

The subsequent facts — the novel’s publication and the worldwide response to it, the announcement that Pasternak was to be awarded the Nobel Prize, his acceptance and later his enforced repudiation of the prize — are of course all “history”. But what of Olga after Pasternak’s death in 1960? She and her daughter Irina were sent to another gulag, eventually released, and Olga lived the rest of her life in Moscow, dying at the age of 83. Anna Pasternak not only challenges the accepted family view that Olga played little part in Pasternak’s life and literary achievements, she also lays bare “his self-absorbed soliloquies, his false modesty, his vanity” and “his addiction to high drama”. Yet in the end, like Olga, she forgives him everything.

£13.60, Amazon, Buy it now

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