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

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СКАЧАТЬ was sixteen, had now come to me in person, living and real’.

      Their courtship moved at a furious pace. Not for one moment did Boris attempt to hide his attraction for the beguiling editor, nor fight his desire for her. He phoned her every day at her offices, where Olga, ‘dying of happiness’ yet fearing to meet or talk with the poet, always told Pasternak that she was busy. Undeterred, her suitor arrived at the offices every afternoon. He walked her home through the boulevards of Moscow to her apartment in Potapov Street, where she lived with her son and daughter, Mitia and Irina, and her mother and stepfather.

      As both Boris and Olga had family at home, most of their initial romance was spent walking the wide streets of Moscow, talking. They met at the memorials of great writers; their usual rendezvous was by the Pushkin statue in Pushkinskaya Square, at the crossing of Tverskoy Boulevard and Tverskaya Street. On one of their city walks, they passed a manhole cover with the name of the industrialist ‘Zhivago’ written on it. The translation of Zhivago is ‘life’ or ‘Doctor Lively’ and Boris was suitably inspired by the name. As he fell in love with Olga, finding his true Lara, he changed the working title of the novel, from Boys and Girls to Doctor Zhivago.

      In the new year, on 4 January 1947, Olga received her first note from Boris: ‘Once again I send you all best wishes from the bottom of my heart. Wish me godspeed (cast a spell over me in your thoughts!) with the revision of Hamlet and 1905, and a new start on my work. You are very marvellous, and I want you to be well. B.P. ’ Although Olga was pleased to have her first written communication from her esteemed admirer, she was a little disappointed by the tone of cool formality. The romantic in her, hoping for something warmer, worried that this was his way of warding her off. She need not have been concerned. For the obsessive writer wooing his young beauty, soon even daily contact with Olga was not enough.

      Because Olga had no telephone in her apartment, and as Boris wanted to speak to her in the evenings as well, she boldly gave him the number of her neighbours, the Volkovas, who lived below them on the same staircase and were the proud owners of a telephone – rare in Moscow at that time. Every evening Olga would hear a Morse code-like knocking on the hot-water pipes, a signal that Pasternak was on the telephone for her. She would knock back on the damp walls of her apartment, before rushing downstairs, eager just to hear the distinctive voice of the man she was falling in love with. ‘When she would come back a few moments later, her face would be somewhere else, like it was facing inwards,’ remembered Irina. ‘For a whole year, their meetings would take place in the midst of reproaches, knocks on walls, constant surveillance until one day, faced with the ineluctability of their passion, it was decided that our family would officially meet Pasternak.’

      The day before, Boris had called Olga at her office and told her that he had to see her as he had two important things to say to her. He asked her to meet him as soon as she could at the Pushkin statue. When Olga arrived, taking a quick break from work, Boris was already there, pacing up and down, agitated. He spoke in an awkward tone, quite unlike his usual voice of bellowing confidence. ‘Don’t look at me for a moment, while I tell you briefly what I want,’ he instructed Olga. ‘I want you to say “thou” to me because “you” is by now a lie.’

      In terms of their courtship, this was a significant step forwards, away from the formality of ‘you’, to the familiarity of ‘thou’.

      ‘I cannot call you “thou” Boris Leonidovich,’ Olga pleaded. ‘It’s just impossible for me. I am afraid still …’

      ‘No, no! You’ll get used to it,’ he commanded. ‘Very well, then, go on saying “you” to me for the time being but let me call you “thou”.’

      Flattered and concerned by this new intimacy, Olga returned to work, flustered. At about nine in the evening, she heard the familiar tapping on the pipes in her apartment. She raced downstairs to speak. ‘I didn’t get to the second thing I wanted to tell you,’ he said. ‘And you didn’t ask me what it was. Well, the first thing was that we should say “thou” to each other. The second thing was; I love you. I love you and this is my whole life now. I won’t come to your office tomorrow but to your house instead – I’ll wait for you to come down and we’ll walk round the town.’

      That night, Olga wrote out a ‘confession’ to Boris; a letter that filled a whole notebook. In it she detailed her past history, sparing no detail of her two marriages and the difficulties that she had already endured in her life. She told him that she was born in 1912 in a provincial town where her father had been a high school teacher. The family moved to Moscow in 1915. In 1933 she graduated from the Faculty of Literature of Moscow University. Both her previous marriages had ended in tragedy.

      Olga’s past was colourful and complex, a fact her detractors in Moscow literary circles leapt upon when gossip of her affair with Boris began to circulate. She told Boris every detail, writing in her confessional notebook about the deaths of both her previous husbands. She could not be accused of hiding anything from him. However, it is odd that even her daughter, Irina, was unsure whether Ivan Emelianov was her mother’s first or second husband. ‘Ivan [Vania] Emelianov is the man I got my name from,’ Irina wrote later. ‘He was my mum’s second husband (or maybe third) and posed as my father. When you look at his face in photographs, it is hard to believe that he was a mere farmer and that his mother, wrapped up in a black scarf, was illiterate. There was something classy about his family, some kind of elegance.’

      Ivan Emelianov hanged himself in 1939, when Irina was nine months old, apparently because he suspected Olga was having an affair with his rival and enemy, Alexander Vinogradov. According to Irina, her father was ‘a man from a different era, a good family man, a principled husband and difficult to live with. Their marriage was destined to fail.’ In family photographs her father was a ‘tall man with a sombre face and doleful expression but handsome’.

      Although Olga mourned Ivan’s death, Irina noted wryly that her sorrow did not last very long. The forty-day mourning period was barely over when a man in a long leather coat (Vinogradov) was seen standing outside the family home, waiting for her mother. Olga and Vinogradov soon married and had a son, Dimitri (known by the family as Mitia). From a large impoverished family ‘worn down by diseases and alcohol’, Vinogradov was ‘brilliant and strong-willed’. He embraced the new Soviet order, working his way up from being in charge of a poor farmer committee at the age of fourteen. He was quickly promoted to run a collective farm, then moved to Moscow, where he gained a managerial position on the editorial board of a magazine called Samolet. It was there that he had first met Olga, who was working as a secretary.

      Vinogradov died in 1942 from lung congestion, leaving Olga a widow for the second time. ‘I had already gone through more than enough horrors,’ she later wrote: ‘The suicide of Ira’s father, my first husband Ivan Vasilyevich Yemelyanov; the death of my second husband, Alexander Petrovich Vinogradov – who had died in my arms in hospital. I had had many passing affairs and disappointments in love.’ Olga concluded in her confessional letter to Boris: ‘If you have been a cause of tears [she was still addressing him as ‘you’ as opposed to ‘thou’] so have I! Judge for yourself the things I have to say in reply to “I love you” – which gives me more joy than anything that has ever happened to me.’

      The next morning, when she went down from her apartment to work, Boris was already waiting for her by an empty fountain in their courtyard. She gave him the notebook and eager to read it, he embraced her and left soon afterwards. Olga was hardly able to concentrate at work all day, jittery inside as to how he would react to the highly personal details she had chronicled. If on some level, her confessional was a bid to push him away, she failed miserably, underestimating Boris’s admiration for the plight of wronged womanhood.

      That night, Olga was summoned by a knock on the pipe at half past eleven. Her grumpy, long-suffering neighbour, clad in her nightgown, led Olga into her apartment to speak to СКАЧАТЬ