My great-uncle's lover was the inspiration for Lara in Doctor Zhivago - not his wife
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/my-great-uncles-lover-was-the-inspiration-for-lara-in-doctor-zhi/
Anna Pasternak
Olga and Boris Pasternak, who wrote Doctor Zhivago
Credit: HarperCollins
Anna Pasternak 20 August 2016 • 6:00am
It was in 1935 that Boris Pasternak, then aged 45, first spoke of his intent to write an epic Russian novel. And it was to my grandmother, his younger sister, Josephine, (who married her Pasternak cousin, hence the continuation of the surname) that he confided that the seeds of a novel were germinating in his mind; an enduring love story set between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War.
Josephine was stunned. She later told me: "I could not believe my ears. Was this the man as I had known him, unique, towering above platitudes and trivialities, intending to lend his inimitable prose to a subject petty and vulgar? Surely he would never write one of those sentimental stories?"
My grandmother could not have predicted the power nor legendary success that Boris's "sentimental" love story would hold. Doctor Zhivago would win him the Nobel Prize for literature after six previous nominations. It became an instant, international best-seller in 1957 when first published in Italy, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the book, regarded as anti-revolutionary, was legitimately published in Boris's adored "Mother Russia." (Until then the novel had been considered so controversial that British intelligence would smuggle in banned copies to Soviet readers as part of covert publishing programmes that flourished during the Cold War.)
Pasternak with Olga Ivinskaya and their daughter Irina Credit:
Ullstein bild via Getty Images
Central to the novel is the passionate love affair shared by Yury Zhivago, a doctor and poet, and Lara Guichard, the heroine, who becomes a nurse. It was during the research for my book Lara, that I discovered that the true inspiration for this character was Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya, a twice widowed editor who met Boris in 1946 when was 34, he was 56. Their affair lasted fourteen years until Boris's death in 1960.
Her character was immortalised in 1965 by a breath-taking Julie Christie in David Lean's film adaptation of the book. The film won five Academy Awards and was nominated for five more. It remains the eighth highest-grossing film in American film history. Yet the true love story that inspired it has never been fully explored before.
I became interested in the story 1990,when I asked my ninety year old grandmother to reminisce about her brother. Three years before she died, I sat with her in her Oxford home as she vividly brought their Moscow childhood and life alive for me. I was haunted by the sense that so much was left unsaid about Olga’s love affair with Boris. Fifteen years later, after reading copious biographies of my great uncle, I knew that I wanted to write my book, Lara, about Olga and Boris's love affair.
Moscow celebrates World War Two victory anniversary Play! 01:58
My research took me to Moscow, to meet Boris's son, Evgeny, (then 87) and to Peredelkino, the writer's colony outside Moscow where Boris wrote his novel, to speak with his daughter-in-law, Natasha. I travelled to Stanford University, California, where Josephine bequeathed her archives and to Milan, to the Feltrinelli Foundation, where I touched the original Zhivago manuscript that had been smuggled out of Russia for the Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who bought world rights.
When it became clear that the Russians would never publish Zhivago, due to the anti-revolutionary stance of the book, Boris risked death under Stalin by sanctioning publication abroad. Feltrinelli's son, Carlo, who discussed his father's meetings with Olga with me, agreed with my thesis; that Olga is the unsung heroine behind the publication of the novel.
This is controversial as the role of Olga in Boris's life has been consistently repressed both by the Pasternak family and Boris's biographers. Olga has been belittled and dismissed as an "adventurous" and "temptress." Josephine, who refused to even mention Olga's name, tried to convince me that Lara was based on Boris's second wife, Zinaida. It is true that when Boris started writing the novel, he had not yet met Olga. Lara's teenage trauma of being seduced by the much older Victor Komarovsky is a direct echo of Zinaida's experiences with her sexually predatory cousin. However, as soon as Boris met and fell in love with Olga in 1946, his Lara changed and softened, to completely embody her.
Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the film,
Doctor Zhivago Credit: Sharok Hatami/REX
My family downplayed the role of Olga in Boris's life because they held him in such high esteem that for him to have had two wives - Evgenia and Zinaida - and a public mistress, was indigestible to their strict moral code. They were loyal to Boris's second wife, Zinaida, to whom he remained married throughout his affair. Boris had two sons; one from his first wife, Evgenia, and one with Zinaida.
It took me five years to persuade Olga's daughter, Irina, to meet me. Irina is immortalised as Katenka, Lara's daughter in the novel. She was eight when her mother met Boris and her teenage years were dominated by their affair. I was finally to meet her in Paris, where she has lived for thirty years. It was a precious moment when she showed me a translation of Goethe's Faust that Boris had given her. She proudly read the final inscription to me: "Almost like a father, Your BP." After Boris's death, both she and her mother were sent to a prison camp on fabricated charges of smuggling royalties, yet Irina still worships Boris.
Olga paid an enormous price for loving "her Boria" as she also became a pawn in a highly political game. Stalin, who had a special admiration for Pasternak, did not imprison the controversial writer for writing anti-Soviet slander. This is miraculous; after 1917, nearly 1500 writers in the Soviet Union were executed or died in labour camps. Instead, Stalin ordered that Olga was harassed and persecuted. She was twice sentenced to periods in labour camps. Firstly, in 1949, while Boris was writing Zhivago.
Rosalia, Leonid and Alexander in the
dining room of their Moscow apartment
For nine months she was interrogated about Boris's work in progress yet not once did she reveal the content of the book. The interrogation transcripts are testament to her courage and loyalty. She miscarried Boris's child in the Lubyanka before being sent to a Mordavian labour camp for three and a half years. Her mother, Maria, looked after Irina. Boris, meanwhile, channelled the anguish, guilt and pain caused by their separation into his prose, creating scenes of aching longing between Yury and Lara.
When Olga was released on Stalin's death in 1953, she became Boris's "right hand"; indispensible to him. While he lived with Zinaida in "the big house" at Peredelkino, Olga moved nearby into "the little house." He openly split his days between the two. Olga typed his manuscript out twice for him and acted as an unofficial literary agent. After he won the Nobel Prize and the Soviet authorities savaged him for daring to write his truth about the Russian Revolution, expelling him from the Writers' Union, Olga persuaded him from committing suicide. Although Boris did not do the one thing that Olga wanted - he did not leave his wife for her- he loved her wholeheartedly. He would say to guests "Lara exists, go and meet her" handing out her telephone number.
If he had left Zinaida and married Olga, Olga would not have been sent to the gulag again after his death. The Pasternak surname would have protected her. On his deathbed, Boris expressed his guilt at his weakness. Doctor Zhivago is his lasting cri de coeur to Olga. As Boris writes of his Lara/Olga in Doctor Zhivago: "How well he loved her, and how loveable she was in exactly the way he needed..."
Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak is published by HarperCollins Publishers (£20). To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
