Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago

The day before, Boris had called Olga at her office and told her that he had to see her as he had two important things to say to her. He asked her to meet him as soon as she could at the Pushkin statue. When Olga arrived, taking a quick break from work, Boris was already there, pacing up and down, agitated. He spoke in an awkward tone, quite unlike his usual voice of bellowing confidence. ‘Don’t look at me for a moment, while I tell you briefly what I want,’ he instructed Olga. ‘I want you to say “thou” to me because “you” is by now a lie.’

In terms of their courtship, this was a significant step forwards, away from the formality of ‘you’, to the familiarity of ‘thou’.

‘I cannot call you “thou” Boris Leonidovich,’ Olga pleaded. ‘It’s just impossible for me. I am afraid still …’

‘No, no! You’ll get used to it,’ he commanded. ‘Very well, then, go on saying “you” to me for the time being but let me call you “thou”.’

Flattered and concerned by this new intimacy, Olga returned to work, flustered. At about nine in the evening, she heard the familiar tapping on the pipes in her apartment. She raced downstairs to speak. ‘I didn’t get to the second thing I wanted to tell you,’ he said. ‘And you didn’t ask me what it was. Well, the first thing was that we should say “thou” to each other. The second thing was; I love you. I love you and this is my whole life now. I won’t come to your office tomorrow but to your house instead – I’ll wait for you to come down and we’ll walk round the town.’

That night, Olga wrote out a ‘confession’ to Boris; a letter that filled a whole notebook. In it she detailed her past history, sparing no detail of her two marriages and the difficulties that she had already endured in her life. She told him that she was born in 1912 in a provincial town where her father had been a high school teacher. The family moved to Moscow in 1915. In 1933 she graduated from the Faculty of Literature of Moscow University. Both her previous marriages had ended in tragedy.

Olga’s past was colourful and complex, a fact her detractors in Moscow literary circles leapt upon when gossip of her affair with Boris began to circulate. She told Boris every detail, writing in her confessional notebook about the deaths of both her previous husbands. She could not be accused of hiding anything from him. However, it is odd that even her daughter, Irina, was unsure whether Ivan Emelianov was her mother’s first or second husband. ‘Ivan [Vania] Emelianov is the man I got my name from,’ Irina wrote later. ‘He was my mum’s second husband (or maybe third) and posed as my father. When you look at his face in photographs, it is hard to believe that he was a mere farmer and that his mother, wrapped up in a black scarf, was illiterate. There was something classy about his family, some kind of elegance.’

Ivan Emelianov hanged himself in 1939, when Irina was nine months old, apparently because he suspected Olga was having an affair with his rival and enemy, Alexander Vinogradov. According to Irina, her father was ‘a man from a different era, a good family man, a principled husband and difficult to live with. Their marriage was destined to fail.’ In family photographs her father was a ‘tall man with a sombre face and doleful expression but handsome’.

Although Olga mourned Ivan’s death, Irina noted wryly that her sorrow did not last very long. The forty-day mourning period was barely over when a man in a long leather coat (Vinogradov) was seen standing outside the family home, waiting for her mother. Olga and Vinogradov soon married and had a son, Dimitri (known by the family as Mitia). From a large impoverished family ‘worn down by diseases and alcohol’, Vinogradov was ‘brilliant and strong-willed’. He embraced the new Soviet order, working his way up from being in charge of a poor farmer committee at the age of fourteen. He was quickly promoted to run a collective farm, then moved to Moscow, where he gained a managerial position on the editorial board of a magazine called Samolet. It was there that he had first met Olga, who was working as a secretary.

Vinogradov died in 1942 from lung congestion, leaving Olga a widow for the second time. ‘I had already gone through more than enough horrors,’ she later wrote: ‘The suicide of Ira’s father, my first husband Ivan Vasilyevich Yemelyanov; the death of my second husband, Alexander Petrovich Vinogradov – who had died in my arms in hospital. I had had many passing affairs and disappointments in love.’ Olga concluded in her confessional letter to Boris: ‘If you have been a cause of tears [she was still addressing him as ‘you’ as opposed to ‘thou’] so have I! Judge for yourself the things I have to say in reply to “I love you” – which gives me more joy than anything that has ever happened to me.’

The next morning, when she went down from her apartment to work, Boris was already waiting for her by an empty fountain in their courtyard. She gave him the notebook and eager to read it, he embraced her and left soon afterwards. Olga was hardly able to concentrate at work all day, jittery inside as to how he would react to the highly personal details she had chronicled. If on some level, her confessional was a bid to push him away, she failed miserably, underestimating Boris’s admiration for the plight of wronged womanhood.

That night, Olga was summoned by a knock on the pipe at half past eleven. Her grumpy, long-suffering neighbour, clad in her nightgown, led Olga into her apartment to speak to her amour. Olga felt terribly embarrassed for her neighbour but did not have the heart to tell Boris not to ring at such an unsociable hour as his voice sounded so joyous.

‘Olia, I love you,’ Boris declared. ‘I try to spend my evenings alone now, and I think of you sitting in your office – where for some reason I always imagine there must be mice – and of the way you worry about your children. You have come tripping right into my life. This notebook will always be with me, but you must keep it for me – I dare not leave it at home in case it is found there.’

During that call, Olga knew that they had crossed a boundary line and now nothing could stop them from being together, no matter how challenging the obstacles. There was little doubt that they had found each other. Boris needed the miracle of love at first sight as much as Olga did. They were both lonely, full of yearning for romance and in difficult, emotionally unsatisfying domestic situations.

On 3 April 1947 Boris was invited to Olga’s apartment, on the top floor of a six-storey building, to meet her family. Irina, who was nine years old, was wearing a smart pink dress with matching ribbons. Used to the ‘misery that comes with war and post war time’ she felt uncomfortable trussed up. She also felt under considerable pressure, as the night before Olga had read and reread Pasternak’s poems to her, which she wanted her daughter to learn and recite to their esteemed visitor. Irina, who did not understand a word she was saying, became flustered: ‘Even words I knew like “garage” and “taxi depot” have an unusual meaning in those verses and it felt like I had never seen them before. I became so disarmed; I was incapable of pronouncing them. Mum was distraught, what could she do?’

Olga had placed a bottle of cognac and a box of chocolates on the table before Boris. According to Irina, her mother had decided to go for the ‘minimalistic option’, concerned that the writer would judge their eating habits, which were ‘not really worthy of a man like him’. Boris sat at the oversized wax cloth that covered the table and, as always, kept his long black coat on and did not remove his well-worn astrakhan black cap. As conversation was a little awkward to begin with, Olga told him that Irina wrote verse too. Irina blushed, embarrassed, especially when Boris promised that he would look at her poetry at a later date.

Irina, however, was smitten. There was ‘something remarkable about him. His booming voice interrupting with its famous “yes, yes, yes”. He had a magnetic, magic quality.’

Although Irina felt nervous and intimidated in front of her mother’s ‘idol’, their first meeting was to have an equally indelible impact on the burgeoning novelist: ‘The day came when my children saw BL for the first time,’ Olga later wrote. ‘I remember how Irina, stretching out her thin little arm to hold on to the table, recited one of his poems to him. It was a difficult one, and Lord knows how and when she had managed to learn it.’ Afterwards, Boris wiped away a tear and kissed her: ‘What extraordinary eyes she has!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look at me, Ira. You could go straight into my novel!’

She did go straight into the pages of his book. In Doctor Zhivago Pasternak describes Lara’s daughter Katenka: ‘A little girl of about eight came in, her hair done up in finely braided plaits. Her narrow eyes had a sly, mischievous look and went up at the corners when she laughed. She knew her mother had a visitor, she had heard his voice outside the door, but she thought it necessary to put on an air of surprise. She curtsied and looked at Yury with the fearless, unblinking stare of a lonely child who had started to think early in life.’

From the moment that Boris entered Olga’s family’s life, he felt torn – torn between his love and loyalty to them, and to his wife Zinaida and their son Leonid. Just as years before he had previously been torn between Zinaida and his first wife, Evgenia, and their son, Evgeny. Almost a decade earlier, on 1 October 1937, Pasternak had written to his parents about the unsettled air of regret in his home: ‘A divided family, lacerated by suffering and constantly looking over our shoulders at that other family, the first ones.’

Although Boris was tortured by guilt for the suffering he caused Zinaida (and to Evgenia before her), part of him seemed to enjoy – or at least need – the drama of anguish. Renouncing Olga was never something he seriously considered. Early into his affair with Olga he told his artist friend Liusia Popova that he had fallen in love. When asked about Zinaida, he replied: ‘What is life if not love? She [Olga] is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person. And now this golden sun has come into my life, it is so wonderful. So wonderful. I never thought I would still know such joy.’

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