The love affair that inspired Doctor Zhivago
Anna Pasternak tells story behind 1957 novel that Russia banned
In 1935, Boris Pasternak, then aged 45, first spoke of his intent to write an epic Russian novel. And it was to my grandmother, his younger sister Josephine (who married her Pasternak cousin, hence the continuation of the surname), that he confided that the seeds of a novel were germinating in his mind; an enduring love story set between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War.
Josephine was stunned. She told me: “I could not believe my ears. Was this the man as I had known him, unique, towering above platitudes and trivialities, intending to lend his inimitable prose to a subject petty and vulgar? Surely he would never write one of those sentimental stories?”
Doctor Zhivago would win Boris the Nobel Prize for literature after six previous nominations. It became an instant, international bestseller in 1957 when published in Italy, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the book, regarded as anti-revolutionary, was legitimately published in Boris’s adored Mother Russia.
Central to the novel is the passionate love affair shared by Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet, and Lara Guichard, the heroine, who becomes a nurse. It was during the research for my book, Lara, that I discovered that the inspiration for this character was Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya, a twicewidowed editor who met Boris in 1946 when she was 34, he was 56. Their affair lasted 14 years until Boris’s death in 1960. Her character was immortalized in 1965 by Julie Christie in David Lean’s film adaptation of the book.
I became interested in the story in 1990, when I asked my 90-yearold grandmother about her brother. I was haunted by the sense that so much was left unsaid about Olga’s love affair with Boris. Fifteen years later, after reading copious biographies of my great uncle, I knew that I wanted to write about Olga and Boris’s affair.
My research took me to Moscow, to meet Boris’s son, Evgeny, and to Peredelkino, the writers’ colony outside Moscow where Boris wrote his novel, to speak to his daughterin-law, Natasha. I travelled to Stanford University where Josephine bequeathed her archives and to Milan, to the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, where I touched the original Zhivago manuscript that had been smuggled out of Russia for the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who bought world rights. When it became clear that the Russians would never publish Zhivago, Boris risked death under Stalin by sanctioning publication abroad.
The role of Olga has been repressed by the Pasternak family and Boris’s biographers. Olga has been belittled and dismissed as an “adventurer” and “temptress.” Josephine, who refused to mention Olga’s name, tried to convince me that Lara was based on Boris’s second wife, Zinaida. It is true that when Boris started the novel, he had not 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 fell in love with Olga in 1946, his Lara changed and softened, to embody her completely.
My family downplayed the role of Olga because they held him in such high esteem: to have had two wives — Evgenia and Zinaida — and a public mistress, was indigestible to their strict moral code. They were loyal to Zinaida, to whom he remained married. Boris had two sons; one with Evgenia, and one with Zinaida.
It took me five years to persuade Olga’s daughter, Irina, to meet me. Irina is immortalized as Katenka, Lara’s daughter. She was eight when her mother met Boris and her teenage years were dominated by their affair.
Olga paid an enormous price for loving “her Boria.” Stalin, who had a special admiration for Pasternak, did not imprison the controversial writer for writing anti-Soviet slander. Instead, Stalin ordered that Olga be harassed and persecuted. She was twice sentenced to labour camps.
When Olga was released on Stalin’s death in 1953, she became Boris’s “right hand.” After he won the Nobel Prize and the Soviet authorities savaged him for writing about the revolution, expelling him from the Writers’ Union, Olga dissuaded him from committing suicide. Although Boris did not do the one thing that Olga wanted — leave his wife — he loved her wholeheartedly.