Cold comfort in a forbidden love
LARA: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago
ENGLISH actress Julie Christie bewitched a generation of cinema-goers with her depiction of the beautiful but tragic Lara Guichard in the film version of Boris Pasternak’s epic novel Doctor Zhivago.
Set in Russia between the revolution of 1905 and the civil war of 1917-22, Pasternak’s work centred on the love affair between Lara and Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet, but it was also a powerful indictment of the brutal Soviet system.
In the 60 years or so since the book was first published, there has been debate over who inspired the character of Lara, and Anna Pasternak, the writer’s great niece, makes a convincing case that it was Olga Ivinskaya, Boris’s lover from 1946 until his death.
It is an interpretation which has been “consistently repressed” by the Pasternak family because they refused to recognise a public mistress in addition to his two wives.
However Anna’s gripping and well-researched book seeks to establish Olga’s place in history, a position she richly deserves given the sacrifices she made.
Even the title of Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece is owed to a romantic walk in the early days of their courtship, according to Anna. They passed a manhole cover embossed with the name of the industrialist Zhivago and we have this incident to thank for the fact that one of the great works of 20th-century Russian literature was not called Boys And Girls.
Boris toiled over his magnum opus for more than 30 years but regularly gave public readings of his work in progress and it was one of these that alerted the authorities to its subversive nature. But Stalin was wary of making a martyr of one of Russia’s best-loved poets. So when he was told that the secret police planned to arrest Pasternak for counterrevolutionary activity, he reportedly said: “Leave him in peace, he’s a cloud dweller.”
But while the author was beyond their reach, his lover was not. On October 6, 1949, a dozen secret policemen burst into Olga’s apartment. “The authorities had hatched a plan that would strike right to the heart of the ‘cloud dweller’,” writes Anna. “They would send his mistress and muse to a prison camp and torture her.”
In the four years that followed Olga suffered unimaginable privations and by the time she was released in the wake of Stalin’s death, Boris was no nearer to finding a Russian publisher. Approached by an Italian publishing house, he impulsively handed over his manuscript.
Olga immediately understood how dangerous this could prove. An uncensored version would reveal any cuts made by a Soviet publisher. Boris forged ahead regardless and Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy in 1957 and in 23 other languages over the following two years.
Meanwhile the film rights were sold to MGM for $450,000, around $3.8 million today.
The Soviet establishment’s wrath was terrible to behold. Boris was reviled in the press, shunned by his peers and forced to renounce the Nobel Prize. Devastated, he proposed a suicide pact but Olga persuaded him to think again.
Exhausted by years of persecution and ravaged by lung cancer, Boris passed away on May 30, 1960. Two days later he was buried in the presence of 3,000 mourners.
Olga was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to seven years in a labour camp, of which she served three. She went on to live to the age of 83 but the return of democracy could not give her closure.
When Olga wrote to President Boris Yeltsin pleading for the return of Boris’s love letters that had been taken by the KGB, “her request was not fulfilled”.