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

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      Novy Mir, meaning ‘New World’, the leading Soviet literary monthly where Olga Ivinskaya worked, was set up in 1925. Literary journals such as Novy Mir, the official organ of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, enjoyed huge influence in the Stalinist period and had a readership of tens of millions. They were vehicles for political ideas in a country where debate was harshly censored, and the contributors held enormous sway in Russian society. The offices in Pushkin Square were situated in a grand former ballroom, painted a rich dark red with gilded cornices, where Pushkin once danced. The magazine’s editor, the poet and author Konstantin Simonov, a flamboyant figure with a silvery mane of hair who sported chunky signet rings and the latest style of American loose-fitting suits, was keen to attract ‘living classics’ to the journal, and counted Pavel Antokolsky, Nicolai Chukovski and Boris Pasternak among its contributors. Olga was in charge of the section for new authors.

      On an icy October day in 1946, just as a fine snow was beginning to swirl outside the windows, Olga was about to go for lunch with her friend Natasha Bianchi, the magazine’s production manager. As she pulled on her squirrel fur coat, her colleague Zinaida Piddubnaya interrupted: ‘Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce one of your most ardent admirers,’ gesturing to Olga.

      Olga was stunned when ‘this God’ appeared before her and ‘stood there on the carpet and smiled at me’. Boldly, she held out her hand for him to kiss. Boris bent over her hand and asked what books of his she had. Astounded and ecstatic to be face-to-face with her idol, Olga replied that she only had one. He looked surprised. ‘Oh, I’ll get you some others,’ he said, ‘though I’ve given almost all my copies away …’ Boris explained that he was mainly doing translation work and hardly writing any poems at all due to the repressive strictures of the day. He told her that he was still translating Shakespeare plays.

      Throughout his writing career, Pasternak earned the bulk of his income through commissioned translation work. Proficient in several languages, including French, German and English, he was deeply interested in the intricacies and dilemmas of translating. Gifted in interpreting, and conveying a colloquial essence, he was to become Russia’s premiere translator of Shakespeare, and would be nominated for the Nobel Prize six times for his accomplishments in this area. In 1943 the British embassy had written to him with compliments and gratitude for his efforts translating the Bard. The work provided several years of steady income. He told a friend in 1945: ‘Shakespeare, the old man of Chistopol, is feeding me as before.’

      ‘I’ve started on a novel,’ he told Olga at Novy Mir, ‘though I’m not yet sure what kind of thing it will turn out to be. I want to go back to the old Moscow – which you don’t remember – and talk about art, and put down some thoughts.’ At this stage, the novel’s draft title was ‘Boys and Girls’. He paused, before adding a little awkwardly: ‘how interesting that I still have admirers …’. Even at the age of fifty-six, more than twenty years Olga’s senior, Pasternak was considered handsome in a strong, striking way, despite the fact that his elongated face was often likened to an Arab horse’s – hardly flattering – partly because he had long yellowish teeth. It seems slightly disingenuous that Boris should have questioned that he had admirers – a faux modesty – when he knew perfectly well that he had a hypnotic effect on people, and that men and women everywhere were in awe of him. The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, to whom Pasternak would become a mentor figure, was captivated by the poet’s dazzling presence the first time he met him, that same year, 1946:

      Boris Leonidovich started talking, going straight to the point. His cheekbones would twitch, like the triangular shaped cases of wings pressed tight shut, prior to opening. I worshipped him. There was a magnetic quality about him, great strength and celestial otherworldliness. When he spoke, he would jerk his chin, thrusting it up, as if trying to break free of his collar and body. His short nose hooked right from the bridge, then went straight, making one think of the butt of a gun in miniature. The lips of a sphinx. Grey hair, cropped short. But, overshadowing everything else, was the pulsating wave of magnetism that flowed from him.

      All through his life women pursued Boris Pasternak. Yet he was no quasi-Don Juanesque character; quite the opposite. He revered women, feeling an innate empathy for them because he saw that for women, as for poets, things could often become complex and entangled in their emotional and sentimental lives. His fateful meeting with Olga at Novy Mir was to become the greatest entanglement, enmeshing his emotional and creative lives.

      After exchanging a few words with Zinaida Piddubnaya, he kissed both women’s hands and left. Olga stood there, speechless. It was one of those life-changing moments when she felt the axis of her world tilt. ‘I was simply shaken by the sense of fate when my “god” looked at me with his penetrating eyes. The way he looked at me was so imperious, it was so much a man’s appraising gaze that there could be no mistake about it; here he was, the one person I needed more than any other, the very one who was in actual fact already part of me. A thing like this is stunning, a miracle.’

      In Doctor Zhivago the reader is introduced to Lara in chapter two, ‘A Girl from a Different World’. Yury Zhivago’s first impressions of Lara are based on Boris’s early meetings with Olga: ‘“She has no coquetry,” he thought. “She does not wish to please or to look beautiful. She despises all that side of a woman’s life, it’s as though she were punishing herself for being lovely. But this proud hostility to herself makes her more attractive than ever.”’

      There was an instant attraction between Boris and Olga, recalled Irina: ‘Boris was sensitive to my mother’s kind of beauty. It was a tired beauty. It wasn’t the beauty of a brilliant victor, it was almost the beauty of a defeated victim. It was the beauty of suffering. When Boris looked into my mother’s beautiful eyes, he could probably see many, many things in them.’

      The following day, Pasternak sent Olga a parcel. Five slim volumes of his poems and translations appeared on her desk at the offices at Novy Mir. His tenacious pursuit of her had begun.

      Olga had first set eyes on him fourteen years earlier, when, as a student at the Moscow Faculty of Literature, she went to one of Pasternak’s poetry recitals. She was hurrying through the corridor to get to her seat at Herzen House, Moscow, anxious to hear the ‘poet hero’ recite his famous poem ‘Marburg’, which chronicled his first experience of love and rejection. Suddenly, as the bell rang to announce the performance, the nervous black-haired poet rushed past her. He had an electric energy, she thought, which made him seem ‘dishevelled and on fire’. When he finished his recital, the excitable crowd surged forwards to surround him. Olga watched as a handkerchief belonging to him was torn to shreds and even the remaining crumbs of tobacco from his cigarette butts were snatched up by fans as meaningful keepsakes.

      Over a decade later, in 1946, when Olga was thirty-four, she was given a ticket to an evening in the library of the Historical Museum where Pasternak was to read from his Shakespeare translations. The Russian writer had been first introduced to the works of the English playwright by his first love, Ida Davidovna Vysotskaya, when he was at Marburg University; Ida was the inspiration for his poem ‘Marburg’. The daughter of a wealthy Moscow merchant, she had been tutored by Boris as a young girl. Ida and her sister visited Cambridge in 1912, where she discovered Shakespeare and English poetry. She spent three days with Boris in Marburg later that summer, presenting her serious-minded friend with an edition of Shakespeare’s plays and indirectly giving birth to a fresh calling.

      On 5 November 1939, Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, which had been commissioned by the great theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, had been accepted for staging at the Moscow Art Theatre. This made Pasternak immeasurably proud, not least because the 1930s had been a decade filled with terror and frustration for him. Just as Pasternak had warmed to the task of writing his novel, external circumstances kept him from fulfilling his creative dream. At first, he was hampered by financial need, later by isolation, depression and fear. In 1933 СКАЧАТЬ