Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago. Anna Pasternak

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      It is almost impossible, by today’s standards of celebrity, to comprehend the level of fame that Boris Pasternak engendered in Russia from the 1920s onwards. Pasternak may be most famous in the West for writing the Nobel Prize-winning love story Doctor Zhivago, yet in Russia he is primarily recognised, and still hugely feted, as a poet. Born in 1890, his reputation escalated during his early thirties; soon he was filling large auditoriums with young students, revolutionaries and artists who gathered to hear recitals of his poems. If he paused for effect or for a momentary memory lapse, the entire crowd continued to roar the next line of his verse in unison back at him, just as they do at pop concerts today.

      ‘There was in Russia a very real contact between the poet, and the public, greater than anywhere else in Europe,’ Boris’s sister, Lydia, wrote of this time; ‘certainly far greater than is ever imaginable in England. Books of poetry were published in enormous editions and were sold out within a few days of publication. Posters were stuck up all over the town announcing poets’ gatherings and everyone interested in poetry (and who in Russia did not belong to this category?) flocked to the lecture room or forum to hear his favourite poet.’ The writer had immense influence in Russian society. In a time of unrest, with an absence of credible politicians, the public looked to its writers. The influence of literary journals was prodigious; they were powerful vehicles for political debate. Boris Pasternak was not only a popular poet hailed for his courage and sincerity. He was revered by a nation for his fearless voice.

      From his early years Pasternak longed to write a great novel. He told his father, Leonid, in 1934: ‘Nothing I have written so far is of any significance. Hurriedly I am trying to transform myself into a writer of a Dickensian kind, and later – if I have enough strength to do it – into a poet in the manner of Pushkin. Do not imagine that I dream of comparing myself with them! I am naming them simply to give you an idea of my inner change.’ Pasternak dismissed his poetry as too easy to write. He had enjoyed unexpected, precocious success with his first published volume of poetry, Above the Barriers, in 1917. This became one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Critics praised the book’s biographical and historical material, marvelling at the contrasting lyrical and epic qualities. A. Manfred, writing in Kniga I revolyutsiya, observed a new ‘expressive clarity’ and of the author’s prospects of ‘growing into the revolution’. Pasternak’s second collection of twenty-two poems, My Sister, Life, published in 1922, received unprecedented literary acclaim. The exultant mood of the collection delighted readers as it conveyed the elation and optimism of the summer of 1917. Pasternak wrote that the February Revolution had happened ‘as if by mistake’ and everyone suddenly felt free. This was Boris’s ‘most celebrated book of poems’, observed his sister Lydia. ‘The more sophisticated younger generation of literary Russians went wild over the book.’ They considered that he wrote the finest love poetry, in thrall to his intimate imagery. After reading My Sister, Life, the poet Osip Mandelstam declared: ‘To read Pasternak’s verse is to clear your throat, to fortify your breathing, to fill your lungs: surely such poetry could provide a cure for tuberculosis. No poetry is more healthful at the present moment! It is koumiss [mare’s milk] after evaporated milk.’

      ‘My brother’s poems are without exception strictly rhythmical and written mostly in classical metre,’ Lydia wrote later. ‘Pasternak, like Mayakovsky, the most revolutionary of Russian poets, has never in his life written a single line of unrhythmic poetry, and this is not because of pedantic adherence to obsolete classical rules, but because instinctive feeling for rhythm and harmony were inborn qualities of his genius, and he simply could not write differently.’ In a poem written shortly after My Sister, Life was published, Boris bids farewell to poetry: ‘I will say so long to verse, my mania – I have an appointment with you in a novel.’ Still though, he glorified prose-writing as being too difficult. Yet the two modes of writing actually shared an intrinsic relationship in his work, regardless of the genre. In his autobiography Safe Conduct, published in 1931, a mannered account of his early life, travels and personal relationships, he wrote: ‘We drag everyday things into prose for the sake of poetry. We draw prose into poetry for the sake of music. This, then, I called art, in the widest sense of the word.’

It was in 1935 that Pasternak first spoke of his intent to fulfil his artistic potential by writing an epic Russian novel. And it was to my grandmother, his younger sister, Josephine Pasternak*, that he first confided his ideas at their last meeting at Friedrichstrasse station in Berlin. Boris told Josephine that the seeds of a book were germinating in his mind; an iconic, enduring love story set in the period between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War.

      Doctor Zhivago is based on Boris’s relationship with the love of his life, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya, who was to become the muse for Lara, the novel’s spirited heroine. Central to the novel is the passionate love affair shared by Yury Zhivago, a doctor and poet (a nod to the writer Anton Chekhov, who was also a doctor) and Lara Guichard, the heroine, who becomes a nurse. Their love is tormented as Yury, like Boris, is married. Yury’s diligent wife, Tonya, is based on Boris’s second wife, Zinaida Neigaus. Yury Zhivago is a semi-autobiographical hero; this is the book of a survivor.

      Doctor Zhivago has sold in its millions yet the true love story behind it has never been fully explored before. The role of Olga Ivinskaya in Boris’s life has been consistently repressed both by the Pasternak family and Boris’s biographers. Olga has regularly been belittled and dismissed as an ‘adventurous’, ‘a temptress’, a woman on the make, a bit part in the history of the man and his book. When Pasternak started writing the novel, he had not yet met Olga. Lara’s teenage trauma of being seduced by the much older Victor Komarovsky is a direct echo of Zinaida’s experiences with her sexually predatory cousin. However, as soon as Boris met and fell in love with Olga, his Lara changed and flowered to completely embody her.

      Historically both Olga and her daughter, Irina, have received a bad rap from my family. The Pasternaks have always been keen to play down the role of Olga in Boris’s life and literary achievements. They held Boris in such high esteem that for him to have had two wives – Evgenia and Zinaida – and a public mistress was indigestible to their staunch moral code. By accepting Olga’s place in Boris’s life and affections, they would have had to further acknowledge his moral fallibility.

      Shortly before she died, Josephine Pasternak told me furiously: ‘It is a mistaken idea that this … acquaintance ever appeared in Zhivago.’ In fact, her feelings for ‘that seductress’ were so strong that she refused to ever sully her lips with her name. She was in denial, blinded by her reverence for her brother. Even though in Boris’s last letter to her, written on 22 August 1958, he tells his sister that he hopes to travel in Russia ‘with Olga’, underlining the importance of his mistress in his life, Josephine would not acknowledge her existence. Evgeny Pasternak, Boris’s son by his first wife, was more pragmatic. He may not have liked Olga, displaying little warmth towards her, yet he was more accepting of the situation. ‘It was lucky СКАЧАТЬ