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

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      ‘Olia, I love you,’ Boris declared. ‘I try to spend my evenings alone now, and I think of you sitting in your office – where for some reason I always imagine there must be mice – and of the way you worry about your children. You have come tripping right into my life. This notebook will always be with me, but you must keep it for me – I dare not leave it at home in case it is found there.’

      During that call, Olga knew that they had crossed a boundary line and now nothing could stop them from being together, no matter how challenging the obstacles. There was little doubt that they had found each other. Boris needed the miracle of love at first sight as much as Olga did. They were both lonely, full of yearning for romance and in difficult, emotionally unsatisfying domestic situations.

      On 3 April 1947 Boris was invited to Olga’s apartment, on the top floor of a six-storey building, to meet her family. Irina, who was nine years old, was wearing a smart pink dress with matching ribbons. Used to the ‘misery that comes with war and post war time’ she felt uncomfortable trussed up. She also felt under considerable pressure, as the night before Olga had read and reread Pasternak’s poems to her, which she wanted her daughter to learn and recite to their esteemed visitor. Irina, who did not understand a word she was saying, became flustered: ‘Even words I knew like “garage” and “taxi depot” have an unusual meaning in those verses and it felt like I had never seen them before. I became so disarmed; I was incapable of pronouncing them. Mum was distraught, what could she do?’

      Olga had placed a bottle of cognac and a box of chocolates on the table before Boris. According to Irina, her mother had decided to go for the ‘minimalistic option’, concerned that the writer would judge their eating habits, which were ‘not really worthy of a man like him’. Boris sat at the oversized wax cloth that covered the table and, as always, kept his long black coat on and did not remove his well-worn astrakhan black cap. As conversation was a little awkward to begin with, Olga told him that Irina wrote verse too. Irina blushed, embarrassed, especially when Boris promised that he would look at her poetry at a later date.

      Irina, however, was smitten. There was ‘something remarkable about him. His booming voice interrupting with its famous “yes, yes, yes”. He had a magnetic, magic quality.’

      Although Irina felt nervous and intimidated in front of her mother’s ‘idol’, their first meeting was to have an equally indelible impact on the burgeoning novelist: ‘The day came when my children saw BL for the first time,’ Olga later wrote. ‘I remember how Irina, stretching out her thin little arm to hold on to the table, recited one of his poems to him. It was a difficult one, and Lord knows how and when she had managed to learn it.’ Afterwards, Boris wiped away a tear and kissed her: ‘What extraordinary eyes she has!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look at me, Ira. You could go straight into my novel!’

      She did go straight into the pages of his book. In Doctor Zhivago Pasternak describes Lara’s daughter Katenka: ‘A little girl of about eight came in, her hair done up in finely braided plaits. Her narrow eyes had a sly, mischievous look and went up at the corners when she laughed. She knew her mother had a visitor, she had heard his voice outside the door, but she thought it necessary to put on an air of surprise. She curtsied and looked at Yury with the fearless, unblinking stare of a lonely child who had started to think early in life.’

      From the moment that Boris entered Olga’s family’s life, he felt torn – torn between his love and loyalty to them, and to his wife Zinaida and their son Leonid. Just as years before he had previously been torn between Zinaida and his first wife, Evgenia, and their son, Evgeny. Almost a decade earlier, on 1 October 1937, Pasternak had written to his parents about the unsettled air of regret in his home: ‘A divided family, lacerated by suffering and constantly looking over our shoulders at that other family, the first ones.’

      Although Boris was tortured by guilt for the suffering he caused Zinaida (and to Evgenia before her), part of him seemed to enjoy – or at least need – the drama of anguish. Renouncing Olga was never something he seriously considered. Early into his affair with Olga he told his artist friend Liusia Popova that he had fallen in love. When asked about Zinaida, he replied: ‘What is life if not love? She [Olga] is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person. And now this golden sun has come into my life, it is so wonderful. So wonderful. I never thought I would still know such joy.’

      2

       Mother Land and Wonder Papa

      Pasternak inherited his prodigious work ethic from his father, Leonid, a post-impressionist painter, who exerted the greatest influence on his son’s creative life. All Leonid’s four children – Boris, Alexander, Josephine and Lydia – grew up acutely aware of their father’s ‘shining perennial example of artistry’ and felt discomfiture that Boris’s fame eclipsed their father’s.

      Before the Revolution, when the family lived together in Moscow, it was Leonid, not Boris, who was the better known. Leonid worked through one of the greatest periods of Russian cultural life. He painted and socialised with Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, the composer Alexander Scriabin and the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, who founded the St Petersburg Conservatory. The Russian painter Ilya Repin gained such respect for Leonid that he later sent him art students. There was definitely the feeling in the family that Leonid and his pianist wife, Rosalia, were overlooked. There was a silent shame, unspoken by all but Boris, that he had outshone them both.

      In 1934, when Boris was forty-four, he wrote to Leonid: ‘You were a real man, a Colossus, and before this image, large and wide as the world, I am a complete nonentity and in every respect still a boy as I was then.’ In November 1945, a few months after Leonid died, Boris told Josephine: ‘I wrote to father that he need not have been dismayed that his enormous services have not received even a hundredth of the recognition they deserve … that there is no justice in our lives, that he will ultimately triumph, having lived such a sincere, natural, interesting, itinerant and rich life.’

      Where Leonid undoubtedly triumphed was in his rich personal life. His marriage to Rosalia was blessed; the couple were genuinely devoted to each other. Leonid was a rare artist in that he was a truly contented man. He considered himself lucky both to pursue a profession he revered and to marry a woman he loved. Unlike many artists, he always had time for his children. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Boris. The writer always put his work before his family, while they would not have considered it appropriate to challenge this. ‘He was a genius,’ Evgeny said of his father, Boris, by way of explanation for the writer’s parenting shortfalls. ‘He was that rare thing – a free man. He was much ahead of his time and it was not easy for him to follow his dream. It is so sad if you have to sacrifice your genius for your family. We only went to him when strictly necessary. I was glad of his assistance but never asked for it. We didn’t bother him. He was a man of power and we knew and respected that.’

      None of Leonid’s children ever felt that they were secondary to his art or that anything could be more important in their father’s life. In fact they became his art. Contemporaries used to joke that ‘Pasternak’s children were the main breadwinners in the family’, as they were his favoured subjects. A master of rapid drawings, capturing characteristic movements and poses, his charcoal sketches of family life are considered some of his most powerful compositions. From these affectionate drawings alone, it is clear that Rosalia was a devoted mother. Her body is always portrayed leaning in towards her children; whether she is sitting with them at the piano or watching them study or draw, her quiet maternal presence is palpable.

      Leonid met Rosalia Isidorovna Kaufman in Odessa, where СКАЧАТЬ