My Doctor Zhivago hideaway
Charming cottage where author pieced together real-life love story that inspired literary classic
IT IS one of the most popular love stories ever told – the romance between Russian physician Yuri Zhivago and his lover Lara, so memorably played in the 1966 film by Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. And now details of the real-life story that inspired Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, on which the movie was based, can finally be revealed – thanks to Boris’s greatniece, Anna Pasternak.
She has spent the past decade researching the affair that Pasternak had with Russian poet and writer Olga Ivinskaya, which formed the basis for his work. Her book, Lara, will be published later this summer, and a six-part TV series on the real story behind Doctor Zhivago will follow.
Anna wrote Lara at White Cottage, a Grade II listed property just outside the Oxfordshire town of Henleyon-Thames.
But now Anna, 49, and her psychotherapist husband Andrew Wallas, 60, are selling the 18th Century hideaway and Anna will especially miss its study, where she did most of her writing. ‘It’s a quiet and peaceful place to work from,’ she says.
The cottage was built as part of the original Fawley Court estate, with gardens by Capability Brown. It was a summer house for Fawley Court, and the cottage has a former folly attached, which Anna thinks particularly adds to its charm.
‘I think follies are architecturally quirky and there is something eccentric about an English folly,’ she says. ‘People who want to go slightly against the grain love a folly because it is so different.
‘There will never be a white cottage like this with an attached former folly, and it’s typically English. The house is light and airy with beautiful views of the grounds and mature trees, and will always have a place in my heart. As the folly was Grade II listed, I couldn’t do any large-scale structural alterations, but with the help of my late mother, Audrey, who was an interior designer, we redecorated it in country-modern style.
‘The only reason we are moving is because we want a bigger family home,’ says Anna, who has a 12-yearold daughter, Daisy, from a previous relationship. Other features of White Cottage – on the market for £1.275mil- lion – include large sash windows, high ceilings and the cottage’s original cornice work.
Particularly decorative is the snug, a hexagonal room in the former folly with carved panels of flowers and ribbons created by a pupil of Grinling Gibbons, who was responsible for the ceilings at Hampton Court and Blenheim Palace.
‘Gibbons invented the trophy panel, a free-standing carved tableau somewhere between a painting and a sculpture, which his pupil copied beautifully above what was once the main entrance to the folly, with trademark garlands of daisy flowers,’ says Anna. There is also a spacious kitchen/dining room with an Aga, and the sitting room has a wood-burning stove and overlooks the garden. The master bedroom has a modern, en suite wet room and there are two further bedrooms and a bathroom.
The office/study – where Anna wrote Lara – is accessed externally and has a WC. It’s ideal for working from home, or for use as an occasional fourth bedroom.
The cottage has a third of an acre of gardens, with a large decking area and the remainder mainly laid to lawn with a number of mature trees. The driveway has space for two vehicles.
Of her book on her great-uncle’s love affair, Anna says: ‘It took me five years to persuade Irina, Olga’s daughter, to speak to me, because the Pasternak family didn’t approve of her mother.’
Anna, who has lived at White Cottage for 13 years, believes Olga is an unsung heroine because she was instrumental in Pasternak completing the novel, and then getting it published.
It was another tragic love affair that inspired one of Anna’s previous successes. In the 1990s she wrote Princess In Love, intimately chronicling the five-year affair between Princess Diana and James Hewitt.