The tragic beauty who stole the real Dr Zhivago’s heart
The name of one of the greatest and most controversial of all literary romances, and of the sumptuously epic film it inspired, was determined one winter’s day in 1946 by a simple manhole cover.
Until a walk through Moscow with his young lover Olga Ivinskaya, the celebrated poet Boris Pasternak had the prosaic title Boys And Girls in mind for the mighty novel he was writing about a tragic love affair in postrevolutionary Russia.
But then they passed the manhole cover and Pasternak noticed the company name stamped into it. In that instant, Boys And Girls became Doctor Zhivago. The tumultuous, doomed romance at the heart of the novel, however, was inspired by Olga. That, at least, is the belief of Pasternak’s great-niece, who has written this engrossing and moving book partly as a rebuke to her own family. They have always refused to accept Olga’s pivotal part in the life and work of their famous kinsman. Yet Anna Pasternak is certain that Olga was the model for the spirited Lara Guichard, with whom the novel’s hero, the doctor, Yury Zhivago, becomes infatuated.
Pasternak was 56 and married for the second time when he met Olga, 34, an editorial assistant at the literary magazine for which Pasternak wrote.
She was a bright twice-widowed mother-of-two, and pretty with it — if somewhat less striking than Julie Christie, who played the breathtakingly lovely Lara in David Lean’s classic 1965 film, opposite Omar Sharif as Zhivago.
Pasternak was instantly smitten when he walked into the magazine’s office on a cold October day in 1946, although not as spellbound as she was.
It is hard, in this day and age, to understand how a poet could enjoy the kind of status enjoyed now by movie stars and rock legends. Yet Pasternak gave readings in front of huge, fervent audiences, and if he so much as paused for effect, the crowd would roar the next line of his verse, much as they do at rock concerts today.
So when he turned up in her office and took an immediate, twinkly-eyed interest in her, she practically swooned. Never mind that he was married with two sons. The affair was soon in full swing, each besotted with the other.
But there were further obstacles, not least in the form of the ruthless Stalinist regime, which routinely persecuted writers and intellectuals. Fortunately, Stalin also was a fan of Pasternak’s work, and refused to have him arrested. For the secret police, however, Olga was fair game. Since Pasternak refused to divorce his second wife Zinaida, Olga did not enjoy the protection of his name. She was duly carted off to the Lubyanka, the terrifying prison that was only five storeys high but, as a mirthless Muscovite joke had it, was still the city’s tallest building because from it you could ‘see all the way to Siberia’. While there, she miscarried Boris’s child, and in 1950 she was sent to a labour camp, hundreds of miles away, for no crime except that of being Pasternak’s lover and perhaps complicit in the rumoured anti- revolutionary content of his unfinished novel.
her banishment broke Pasternak’s heart but gave his writing fresh impetus. he had begun Doctor Zhivago before he met Olga but their relationship, and her exile, was now his central inspiration. It fed the anguish Yury suffers during his separation from Lara, the intensity of their reunion, and the guilt he feels towards his steadfast wife (played in the film by Geraldine Chaplin).
Bizarrely, the rich melodrama of the novel was matched by the story of its publication. In 1956 the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published first in Italian, then, within two years, in 23 other languages.
In the Soviet Union it was denounced as a ‘perfidious calumny against our revolution, and against our entire way of life’, written by a ‘bourgeois individualist’. By the non- Communist world, however, it was proclaimed a masterpiece. Its Italian publisher sold the film rights to MGM for $450,000.
Pasternak, unable to leave his beloved Russia, got nothing — or at any rate, nothing except the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, which further enraged the Soviets. The KGB compelled him to renounce this honour.
PASTERNAK’S feelings about all this were not known in the West until a Daily Mail journalist, Anthony Brown, tracked him down and secured a rare interview. In February 1959 the Mail exclusively published Pasternak’s poem, The Nobel Prize, which revealed his personal agony. It concluded:
‘As the noose tightens around my neck,
At the hour when death is so near,
I should like my right hand near me,
To wipe away the tears.’
his ‘right hand’ was Olga, who went back to him, and remained by his side until he died in May 1960. She was then sent to another Siberian labour camp, serving half of her seven-year sentence, but lived until 1995, long enough to see Pasternak’s eldest son presented with the Nobel Prize his father had been forced to turn down.
There was one less happy ending, however. Shortly before her death, at 83, Olga wrote a letter to the Russian president Boris Yeltsin, pleading for the return of all the love letters that Pasternak had written to her, which had been confiscated by the KGB after he died.
It wasn’t much to ask, from a doughtily courageous woman who had endured unimaginable suffering and made terrible sacrifices for the man she loved, but her request was denied.