Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago

I leaned back in Boris’s chair in his study and considered how often he must have turned back from the undulating view to his page (he wrote in longhand), inspired, to create scenes of longing between Yury and Lara. When I was there the snow was gently falling outside, enhancing the stillness. The room is almost painful in its plainness. In one corner stands a small wrought-iron bed with a sketch of Tolstoy hanging above it and family drawings by Boris’s father, Leonid, to each side. With its drab grey patterned cover and the reddish brown cut-out square of carpet close by, the bed would not have been out of place in a monastic cell. Opposite, a bookcase: the Russian Bible, works by Einstein, the collected poems of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, novels by Henry James, the autobiography of Yeats and the complete works of Virginia Woolf (Josephine Pasternak’s favourite author), along with Shakespeare and the teachings of Jawaharlal Nehru. Facing the desk, on an artist’s easel, a large black and white photograph of Boris himself. Wearing a black suit, white shirt and dark tie, I considered that he looked about my age, mid-forties. Pain, passion, determination, resignation, fear and fury emanate from his eyes. His lips are almost pursed, set with conviction. There was nothing soft or yielding about his sanctuary; he saved his sensuousness for his prose.

I thought about Boris’s courage, a courage that meant he could sit there and write his truth about Russia. How he defiantly stared the Soviet authorities in the face, and how persecution and the threat of death eventually took its toll. How, despite outliving Stalin, in spite of his colossal literary achievements, he lived his last years here in imposed isolation, the Soviet authorities watching and monitoring his every move. His study became his personal quarantine: writing upstairs; his wife Zinaida downstairs, chain-smoking as she played cards or watched the clunky antique Soviet television, one of the first ever made.

And I imagined his lover Olga Ivinskaya, in the last years of Boris’s life, anxiously waiting for him every afternoon to join her in the ‘Little House’ across the lake at Izmalkovo, a kilometre away. Here she would soothe and support, encourage and type up his manuscripts. Not visible in his home by way of cherished photograph or painting, her absence is jarring. For what is the love story in Doctor Zhivago if it is not his passionate cri de coeur to Olga? I thought of her endlessly reassuring him of his talent when the authorities taunted that he had none; how she brought fun and tenderness into his life when everything else was so strategic, harsh, political and fraught. How she loved him but, just as crucially, how she understood him. Many artists are selfish and self-indulgent, as he was. It would be easy to conclude that Boris used Olga. It is my intention to show that, rather, his great omission was that he did not match her cast-iron loyalty and moral fortitude. He did not do the one thing in his power to do: he did not save her.

Looking around his study for the last time, I knew that I wanted to write a book which would try to explain why he performed this uncharacteristic act of moral cowardice, putting his ambition before his heart. If I could understand why he behaved as he did and appreciate the extent of his suffering and self-attack, could I forgive him for letting himself and his true love down? For not publicly claiming or honouring Olga – for not marrying her – when she was to risk her life loving him? As he writes in Doctor Zhivago: ‘How well he loved her, and how loveable she was in exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and needed … She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line which the Creator at a single stroke had drawn round her, and in this divine outline she had been handed over, like a child tightly wound up in a sheet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul.’

* Josephine married her cousin, Frederick Pasternak, hence the continuation of the surname.

† Every Russian has three names. A first name, a patronymic and a surname. The patronymic name is derived from the father’s first name. The usual form of address among adults is the first name and the patronymic.

1

A Girl from a Different World

Novy Mir, meaning ‘New World’, the leading Soviet literary monthly where Olga Ivinskaya worked, was set up in 1925. Literary journals such as Novy Mir, the official organ of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, enjoyed huge influence in the Stalinist period and had a readership of tens of millions. They were vehicles for political ideas in a country where debate was harshly censored, and the contributors held enormous sway in Russian society. The offices in Pushkin Square were situated in a grand former ballroom, painted a rich dark red with gilded cornices, where Pushkin once danced. The magazine’s editor, the poet and author Konstantin Simonov, a flamboyant figure with a silvery mane of hair who sported chunky signet rings and the latest style of American loose-fitting suits, was keen to attract ‘living classics’ to the journal, and counted Pavel Antokolsky, Nicolai Chukovski and Boris Pasternak among its contributors. Olga was in charge of the section for new authors.

On an icy October day in 1946, just as a fine snow was beginning to swirl outside the windows, Olga was about to go for lunch with her friend Natasha Bianchi, the magazine’s production manager. As she pulled on her squirrel fur coat, her colleague Zinaida Piddubnaya interrupted: ‘Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce one of your most ardent admirers,’ gesturing to Olga.

Olga was stunned when ‘this God’ appeared before her and ‘stood there on the carpet and smiled at me’. Boldly, she held out her hand for him to kiss. Boris bent over her hand and asked what books of his she had. Astounded and ecstatic to be face-to-face with her idol, Olga replied that she only had one. He looked surprised. ‘Oh, I’ll get you some others,’ he said, ‘though I’ve given almost all my copies away …’ Boris explained that he was mainly doing translation work and hardly writing any poems at all due to the repressive strictures of the day. He told her that he was still translating Shakespeare plays.

Throughout his writing career, Pasternak earned the bulk of his income through commissioned translation work. Proficient in several languages, including French, German and English, he was deeply interested in the intricacies and dilemmas of translating. Gifted in interpreting, and conveying a colloquial essence, he was to become Russia’s premiere translator of Shakespeare, and would be nominated for the Nobel Prize six times for his accomplishments in this area. In 1943 the British embassy had written to him with compliments and gratitude for his efforts translating the Bard. The work provided several years of steady income. He told a friend in 1945: ‘Shakespeare, the old man of Chistopol, is feeding me as before.’

‘I’ve started on a novel,’ he told Olga at Novy Mir, ‘though I’m not yet sure what kind of thing it will turn out to be. I want to go back to the old Moscow – which you don’t remember – and talk about art, and put down some thoughts.’ At this stage, the novel’s draft title was ‘Boys and Girls’. He paused, before adding a little awkwardly: ‘how interesting that I still have admirers …’. Even at the age of fifty-six, more than twenty years Olga’s senior, Pasternak was considered handsome in a strong, striking way, despite the fact that his elongated face was often likened to an Arab horse’s – hardly flattering – partly because he had long yellowish teeth. It seems slightly disingenuous that Boris should have questioned that he had admirers – a faux modesty – when he knew perfectly well that he had a hypnotic effect on people, and that men and women everywhere were in awe of him. The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, to whom Pasternak would become a mentor figure, was captivated by the poet’s dazzling presence the first time he met him, that same year, 1946:

Boris Leonidovich started talking, going straight to the point. His cheekbones would twitch, like the triangular shaped cases of wings pressed tight shut, prior to opening. I worshipped him. There was a magnetic quality about him, great strength and celestial otherworldliness. When he spoke, he would jerk his chin, thrusting it up, as if trying to break free of his collar and body. His short nose hooked right from the bridge, then went straight, making one think of the butt of a gun in miniature. The lips of a sphinx. Grey hair, cropped short. But, overshadowing everything else, was the pulsating wave of magnetism that flowed from him.

All through his life women pursued Boris Pasternak. Yet he was no quasi-Don Juanesque character; quite the opposite. He revered women, feeling an innate empathy for them because he saw that for women, as for poets, things could often become complex and entangled in their emotional and sentimental lives. His fateful meeting with Olga at Novy Mir was to become the greatest entanglement, enmeshing his emotional and creative lives.

After exchanging a few words with Zinaida Piddubnaya, he kissed both women’s hands and left. Olga stood there, speechless. It was one of those life-changing moments when she felt the axis of her world tilt. ‘I was simply shaken by the sense of fate when my “god” looked at me with his penetrating eyes. The way he looked at me was so imperious, it was so much a man’s appraising gaze that there could be no mistake about it; here he was, the one person I needed more than any other, the very one who was in actual fact already part of me. A thing like this is stunning, a miracle.’

In Doctor Zhivago the reader is introduced to Lara in chapter two, ‘A Girl from a Different World’. Yury Zhivago’s first impressions of Lara are based on Boris’s early meetings with Olga: ‘“She has no coquetry,” he thought. “She does not wish to please or to look beautiful. She despises all that side of a woman’s life, it’s as though she were punishing herself for being lovely. But this proud hostility to herself makes her more attractive than ever.”’

There was an instant attraction between Boris and Olga, recalled Irina: ‘Boris was sensitive to my mother’s kind of beauty. It was a tired beauty. It wasn’t the beauty of a brilliant victor, it was almost the beauty of a defeated victim. It was the beauty of suffering. When Boris looked into my mother’s beautiful eyes, he could probably see many, many things in them.’

The following day, Pasternak sent Olga a parcel. Five slim volumes of his poems and translations appeared on her desk at the offices at Novy Mir. His tenacious pursuit of her had begun.

Olga had first set eyes on him fourteen years earlier, when, as a student at the Moscow Faculty of Literature, she went to one of Pasternak’s poetry recitals. She was hurrying through the corridor to get to her seat at Herzen House, Moscow, anxious to hear the ‘poet hero’ recite his famous poem ‘Marburg’, which chronicled his first experience of love and rejection. Suddenly, as the bell rang to announce the performance, the nervous black-haired poet rushed past her. He had an electric energy, she thought, which made him seem ‘dishevelled and on fire’. When he finished his recital, the excitable crowd surged forwards to surround him. Olga watched as a handkerchief belonging to him was torn to shreds and even the remaining crumbs of tobacco from his cigarette butts were snatched up by fans as meaningful keepsakes.

Over a decade later, in 1946, when Olga was thirty-four, she was given a ticket to an evening in the library of the Historical Museum where Pasternak was to read from his Shakespeare translations. The Russian writer had been first introduced to the works of the English playwright by his first love, Ida Davidovna Vysotskaya, when he was at Marburg University; Ida was the inspiration for his poem ‘Marburg’. The daughter of a wealthy Moscow merchant, she had been tutored by Boris as a young girl. Ida and her sister visited Cambridge in 1912, where she discovered Shakespeare and English poetry. She spent three days with Boris in Marburg later that summer, presenting her serious-minded friend with an edition of Shakespeare’s plays and indirectly giving birth to a fresh calling.

On 5 November 1939, Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, which had been commissioned by the great theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, had been accepted for staging at the Moscow Art Theatre. This made Pasternak immeasurably proud, not least because the 1930s had been a decade filled with terror and frustration for him. Just as Pasternak had warmed to the task of writing his novel, external circumstances kept him from fulfilling his creative dream. At first, he was hampered by financial need, later by isolation, depression and fear. In 1933 he had written to Maksim Gorky, the godfather of Soviet letters and the founder of the ‘socialist realism’ literary style, that he needed to write short works and publish quickly in order to support his family, which after divorce and remarriage had doubled in size. Already, Pasternak’s attitude to his work was one of risk-taking. Completely against being any sort of mouthpiece for Soviet propaganda, he believed it a moral imperative that he write the truth about the age. He considered it dishonest to be in a privileged position against a backdrop of universal deprivation. Yet publication of his work was regularly delayed by censorship problems.

In August 1929, the whole literary community were affected by an issue that broke out in the press. During the 1920s it was frequent practice among Soviet authors to publish works abroad to secure international copyright (the USSR was not a signatory to any international copyright convention) and to circumvent official censorship. On 26 August the Soviet press accused two authors, Evgenyi Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak, who published abroad, of major acts of treachery involving anti-Soviet slander. The party- and state-organised campaign of vilification played out in the press lasted several weeks, leaving the writing community in a state of fear and insecurity. In the end Zamyatin emigrated to France and Pilnyak was forced to resign from the Writers’ Union. Pasternak took these cases closely to heart as he shared stylistic features and close personal relations with the two writers. These literary witch hunts coincided with the collectivisation of agriculture. Over the next few years, its violent enactment would devastate the rural economy and destroy the lives of millions.

On 21 September 1932 Pasternak added a note to a collection of poems under preparation at the Federatsiya state publishing house. ‘The Revolution is so unbelievably harsh towards the hundreds of thousands and the millions: yet so gentle towards those with qualifications and those with assured positions.’ Openly voicing the struggles of this oppressive and cruel period of post-revolutionary Russia through his poetry quickly brought counterattacks and noises of displeasure from Soviet authorities. Boris continued fearlessly. As his son Evgeny commented: he ‘had to become the witness to truth and the conscience-bearer for his age’. Perhaps this is because Boris took his own father’s advice to heart. ‘Be honest in your art,’ Leonid Pasternak had encouraged him; ‘then your enemies will be powerless against you.’

During the summer of 1930 Pasternak composed the poem ‘To a Friend’, bravely addressing it ‘To Boris Pilnyak’ whose recent novella, Mahogany, which presented an idealised portrait of a Trotskyite communist, had been published in Berlin and banned in the Soviet Union. Pasternak’s poem was published in Novy Mir in 1931 and in a reprint that year of Above the Barriers. Written as a statement of solidarity with Pilnyak, and as a warning that writers were under assault, it drew damning comment from Pasternak’s orthodox colleagues and critics. Paradoxically it caused more controversy than the stance taken by Pilnyak and his novella. In ‘To a Friend’, Pasternak wrote:

And is it not true that my personal measure

Is the Five-Year Plan, its rise and its fall?

Yet what can I do with my rib-cage’s pressure

And with my inertia, most sluggish of all?

In vain in our day, when the Soviet’s at work

By high passion all seats on the stage have been taken.

But the poet has forsaken the place they reserved.

When that place is not vacant, the poet is in danger

By 1933, it had become clear that collectivisation – during which at least five million peasants died – had been a terrible and irreversible disaster. As Pasternak would write in Zhivago: ‘I think that collectivisation was both a mistake and a failure, and because that couldn’t be admitted, every means of intimidation had to be used to make people forget how to think and judge for themselves, to force them to see what wasn’t there, and to maintain the contrary of what their eyes told them … And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’ At another point Yury says to Lara: ‘everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common round, has crumbled into dust and been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganisation of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred … ’

During the Great Terror in the 1930s, during which much of the old Bolshevik elite, generals, writers and artists perished, Pasternak was increasingly forced to retreat into silence, sure that he too would not have to wait long for the late-night knock at his door. His fear and distress were compounded when soon after Vsevolod Meyerhold had invited him to translate Hamlet, the director and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, perished at the hands of the secret police. Boris valiantly persisted in his translation, finding in it ‘the mental space to escape constant fear’.

His courage paid off. On 14 April 1940 he was asked to read his Hamlet aloud at the Moscow Writers’ Club. Of the evening, he wrote to his cousin Olga Freidenberg: ‘The highest incomparable delight is to read aloud, without cuts, even though it is only half of your work. For three hours you are feeling Man in the highest sense, independent, hot for three hours, you are in spheres you know from the day you were born, from the first half of your life, and then, exhausted, with your energy spent, you are falling back down, nobody knows where to come back to reality.’

The first time that Olga Ivinskaya saw Boris properly, at close range, and ‘feeling Man’ and ‘hot for three hours’, was the autumn evening in 1946 when he read out his Shakespeare translations at the Moscow museum library. She found him ‘tall and trim, extraordinarily youthful, with the strong neck of a young man, and he spoke in a deep, low voice, conversing with the audience as one talks with an intimate friend or communes with oneself’. In the interval some of the audience summoned up the courage to ask him to read work of his own, but he declined, explaining that the evening was supposed to be devoted to Shakespeare and not to himself. Olga was too nervous to join the ‘privileged people’ brave enough to approach the writer, and left. She arrived home after midnight and, having forgotten her door key, was forced to wake her mother. When her mother angrily reprimanded her, Olga retorted: ‘Leave me alone, I’ve just been talking to God!’

Olga had spent her adolescent years, along with her friends at school and ‘everybody else of my age’, infatuated with Boris Pasternak. As a teenager she frequently wandered through the streets of Moscow repeating the seductive lines of his poetry over and over to herself. She knew ‘instinctively that these were the words of a god, of the all-powerful “god of detail” and “god of love”.’ When as a teenager she went for her first trip to the sea, in the south, a friend gave her a small volume of Pasternak’s prose, The Childhood of Luvers. Lilac-coloured and shaped like an elongated school exercise book, the binding was rough to the touch. This novella, which Boris started writing in 1917 and had published in 1922, was his first work of prose fiction. Originally published in the Nashia Dni almanac, Pasternak wanted this to be the first part of a novel about the coming-into-consciousness of a young girl, Zhenia Luvers, the daughter of a Belgian factory director in the Urals. Although Zhenia Luvers has typically been viewed as the prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak based much of the characterisation on the childhood of his sister, Josephine.

Lying on the upper bunk of her sleeping compartment, as the train sped south, Olga tried to fathom how a man could have such insight into a young girl’s secret world. Like many of her peers, she often found it hard to understand Pasternak’s poetic images, as she was accustomed to more traditional verse. ‘But the answers were already in the air all around us,’ she wrote. ‘Spring could be recognised by its “little bundle of laundry/of a patient leaving hospital”. Those “candle-drippings” stuck on the branches in springtime did not have to be called “buds” – it was sorcery and a miracle. It gave you the feeling of personally discovering something hitherto unknown and locked away by a god behind a closed door.’ Olga could now barely believe that the ‘magician who had first entered my life so long ago, when I was sixteen, had now come to me in person, living and real’.

Their courtship moved at a furious pace. Not for one moment did Boris attempt to hide his attraction for the beguiling editor, nor fight his desire for her. He phoned her every day at her offices, where Olga, ‘dying of happiness’ yet fearing to meet or talk with the poet, always told Pasternak that she was busy. Undeterred, her suitor arrived at the offices every afternoon. He walked her home through the boulevards of Moscow to her apartment in Potapov Street, where she lived with her son and daughter, Mitia and Irina, and her mother and stepfather.

As both Boris and Olga had family at home, most of their initial romance was spent walking the wide streets of Moscow, talking. They met at the memorials of great writers; their usual rendezvous was by the Pushkin statue in Pushkinskaya Square, at the crossing of Tverskoy Boulevard and Tverskaya Street. On one of their city walks, they passed a manhole cover with the name of the industrialist ‘Zhivago’ written on it. The translation of Zhivago is ‘life’ or ‘Doctor Lively’ and Boris was suitably inspired by the name. As he fell in love with Olga, finding his true Lara, he changed the working title of the novel, from Boys and Girls to Doctor Zhivago.

In the new year, on 4 January 1947, Olga received her first note from Boris: ‘Once again I send you all best wishes from the bottom of my heart. Wish me godspeed (cast a spell over me in your thoughts!) with the revision of Hamlet and 1905, and a new start on my work. You are very marvellous, and I want you to be well. B.P. ’ Although Olga was pleased to have her first written communication from her esteemed admirer, she was a little disappointed by the tone of cool formality. The romantic in her, hoping for something warmer, worried that this was his way of warding her off. She need not have been concerned. For the obsessive writer wooing his young beauty, soon even daily contact with Olga was not enough.

Because Olga had no telephone in her apartment, and as Boris wanted to speak to her in the evenings as well, she boldly gave him the number of her neighbours, the Volkovas, who lived below them on the same staircase and were the proud owners of a telephone – rare in Moscow at that time. Every evening Olga would hear a Morse code-like knocking on the hot-water pipes, a signal that Pasternak was on the telephone for her. She would knock back on the damp walls of her apartment, before rushing downstairs, eager just to hear the distinctive voice of the man she was falling in love with. ‘When she would come back a few moments later, her face would be somewhere else, like it was facing inwards,’ remembered Irina. ‘For a whole year, their meetings would take place in the midst of reproaches, knocks on walls, constant surveillance until one day, faced with the ineluctability of their passion, it was decided that our family would officially meet Pasternak.’