Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  One month into their sentences, Taishet camp was closed down and Olga and Irina were transferred the thousands of miles back across the USSR – to Potma. In the Khrushchev years, as the huge labour camp complexes of Siberia and the far north were wound down, those in Mordovia became the main centre for the detention of ‘political’ prisoners. Olga, of course, already knew the hell of Potma; Irina to some extent too, remembering her mother’s stories and Boris’s fantastical postcards, when ‘from the autumn of 1950, the small republic of Mordovia came into our lives never to leave it again’. The two women did not know if being sent to Siberia was due to chaos in the camp system, or if it was another of the regime’s sadistic jokes.

  ‘I still cannot think without horror of the final stage of our journey to the camp in Taishet,’ wrote Olga, ‘which were we forced to do on foot, late at night.’

  It was a silvery, Siberian night with a full moon. The pine trees cast their squat, deep-blue shadows across the snow. On either side of the road the grizzled northern fir trees with their spreading branches were bathed in ghostly moonlight, which made them look improbably vast.

  The sleigh which should have been waiting for us at the rail junction had not been sent, and our two escort guards had refused to wait, so they had marched us off into the night, to our unknown destination. The two spectral shadows with rifles followed behind us as we stumbled along, shaking all over in this frost which would have seemed nothing much to native-born Siberians, but was unbearable for Muscovites like us who were quite unused to such bitter cold. It penetrated to the marrow of our bones.

  In Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak grimly prophesised the Soviet state’s treatment of Olga: ‘One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.’

  * The last line is a Russian proverb.

  EPILOGUE

  Think of Me Then

  Olga spent three and a half years in prison, half of her sentence. She was released in 1964, aged fifty-two. Irina was released two years earlier, having served half of her sentence also. Olga had written to Khrushchev from the prison camp, appealing for her daughter’s early release, describing Irina as ‘dying slowly right in front of my eyes’.

  The conditions at Potma were ‘unbearable, beyond imagination’, Irina remembers. ‘We were working in the fields in freezing winters and parched, baking summers. There were sixty women in the same barracks, the radio always on, propaganda blaring out from six in the morning until midnight.’ Irina had been due to marry Georges Nivat in the summer of 1960. Several weeks after Pasternak’s death, the authorities granted Irina a date for the wedding – ten days after Georges’s visa expired. He was refused a renewal of his visa and forced to leave Russia.

  Georges Nivat campaigned vigorously for Olga and Irina’s release from the gulag. Through a friend, he asked Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, the first royal to visit the Soviet Union, in 1958, to appeal directly to Khrushchev. ‘Had Boris Pasternak, whom I loved as a father, still lived, this [incarceration] would not have happened,’ he wrote.

  Irina did not marry Georges, but they remained friends. She met her future husband, Vadim Kosovoi, a political dissident, in Potma. They never once spoke in the camp as the sexes were segregated, but they saw each other from afar and began an exchange of letters, facilitated by prison inmates who created stealthy networks of correspondence. After their release, their romance flourished. Irina has lived in Paris for the last thirty years and had two children. ‘France has helped repair many of the wounds of Russia, created thirty years ago,’ she says. Olga’s beloved son, Mitia, died in 2005.

  Leonid Pasternak, Boris’s son with Zinaida, died aged thirty-eight. He suffered a fatal heart attack while sitting in his car off Presnya Street in central Moscow – dying at almost the same age and near the exact spot that Yury Zhivago dies of a heart attack in a moving tram in Doctor Zhivago. Leonid’s wife, Natasha, spoke of a ‘mystery’ in Boris Pasternak’s ‘creation’: it was ‘like he was writing his son’s death at a subconscious level. So much of what he wrote held great portent.’

  Olga Ivinskaya died in 1995 aged eighty-three in Moscow. Before her death she wrote a pleading letter to the Russian president Boris Yeltsin requesting the return of all Boris’s love letters to her and other precious papers which the KGB had taken from the Little House after his death. Her request was not fulfilled.

  Khrushchev, who found time to read Doctor Zhivago in his retirement, said he regretted his treatment of Pasternak. He admitted that he had had the opportunity to allow publication of the novel, but had ‘failed to act’. He expressed regrets about these shortcomings, and acknowledged that the decision to ban the novel in Russia and force Boris to renounce the Nobel Prize ‘left a bad aftertaste for a long time to come. People raised a storm of protest against the Soviet Union for not allowing Pasternak to go abroad to receive the prize.’

  In 1987, the Soviet Writers’ Union posthumously reinstated Boris, a move which gave his work legitimacy in the Soviet Union. This allowed the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russia for the first time, in 1988. Hundreds of people queued outside Moscow bookshops for shipments of the book to arrive.

  On 9 December 1989, the Swedish Academy invited Pasternak’s eldest son, Evgeny, and his wife to Stockholm to be presented with the gold medal for the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, thirty-one years after Boris had been forced to renounce it. Evgeny was overcome with emotion when he stepped forward to accept the prize on behalf of his father.

  ***

  When I began Lara, I was secretly concerned that I would discover that Boris used Olga. As I dug deeper into the story, I was relieved to find that this was far from the case. It was the authorities who used Olga. True, Boris did not save her by publicly ‘claiming’ her. But he loved her. I believe the depth and passion of his ardour differed from anything he felt for either of his wives. Not just out of gratitude that Olga risked her life in loving and standing by him. But because she understood him; she had a deep inner knowing that in order for him to find a resting place of fulfilment within himself, he needed to write Doctor Zhivago.

  Although he did not do the one thing Olga desperately wanted – he did not leave his wife for her – from the moment he pledged himself to her, he did his utmost within the constraints of his domestic situation to honour her and her family. He supported them financially, he loved Irina as the daughter he never had, and he trusted Olga with his most precious commodity – his work. He sought her advice, her editing and typing assistance. And what is Doctor Zhivago, if not his long and heartfelt love letter to her?

  As I wrote Lara, I was surprised to develop a more tolerant affection for Boris. I felt like a close friend or relative who overlooks someone’s annoying idiosyncrasies – in Boris’s case, his self-absorbed soliloquies, his false modesty, his vanity, his addiction to high drama – due to an intrinsic and burgeoning fondness. As Boris began to write Doctor Zhivago, refusing to be crushed by the pressure of the Soviet state, I grew in admiration for him. I salute his granite defiance, I applaud his rebellious spirit and I bow down before his monumental courage, especially his publish-and-be-damned attitude to Feltrinelli and the publication of the novel.

  As I began to champion him, I mostly forgave him his shortcomings, just as Olga and Irina did. I could see the complexity of the man and his situation. The inconsistency of his character. He was both hero and coward, genius and naïve fool, tortured neurotic and clinical strategist. His loyalty to Russia and her people never wavered. His loyalty to Olga was never steadfast. In spite of everything she did for him, including being prepared to die for him, she could not rely on him.

  There were times when I felt immeasurably frustrated by his weakness; his letters to Olga from Tbilisi, when he rejected her desire for marriage, citing their mythical co
nnection as more important than anything as mundane and everyday as marriage, infuriated me. Olga was right; he was wrong. If he had married her, the Soviet authorities would not have dared to treat her so cruelly and unnecessarily after his death.

  Yet at other times, I ached for him. When I wrote of the savaging he received after the Nobel Prize award, his pain was palpable, his suffering agonising. If it wasn’t for Olga, he might well have committed suicide. She was his strength when his resolution was finally extinguished; she was his guiding light when all around him seemed interminably dark. When they were separated, his letters show the extent of his love, missing and need for her.

  But in the end, for all his blistering brilliance, he did not save Olga. I can appreciate that at the conclusion of his life, he did not have the energy to fight any more. Every ounce of his potency was drained in defying the authorities to ensure that Doctor Zhivago was published. In this, at least, he ensured that Olga, his Lara, would never be forgotten. While she was fighting for him in the Lubyanka, he was at least exalting her in the pages of his book. She lost two of his children; the legacy of Doctor Zhivago is their only child. Both Lara and Yury gain immortality through Yury’s poems, the true fruit of their love. Pasternak intended all along to redeem himself by immortalising Olga as Lara. Perhaps on one level he was right; their love would remain everlasting. As he wrote in Doctor Zhivago:

  It was not out of necessity that they loved each other, ‘enslaved by passion’, as lovers are described. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the landscapes drawn up for them to see on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, were even more pleased with their love than they were themselves.

  Many years will go by. Many great years. I shall then no longer be alive. There will be no return to the times of our fathers and grandfathers. This would, indeed, be both undesirable and unnecessary. But at last there will appear once more things that have long lain dormant: noble, creative and great things. It will be a time of final accounting. Your life will be rich and fruitful as never before.

  Think of me then.

  Boris Pasternak, 1958

  NOTES

  In most cases the sources of quotations are made clear in the text. The principal narrative sources are: Olga Ivinskaya’s A Captive of Time (Collins and Harvill, 1978), Irina Emelianova’s Légendes de la rue Potapov (Fayard, 1997), and author interviews with Pasternak family members (see Acknowledgements). With the help of the Bibliography interested readers will be able to trace any other references without undue trouble.

  PROLOGUE: STRAIGHTENING COBWEBS

  ‘There was in Russia’: Boris Pasternak, Fifty Poems, translated and with introduction by Lydia Pasternak Slater, Unwin Books, 1963, p. 13.

  ‘Nothing I have’: ibid., p. 16.

  ‘growing into the revolution’: Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Volume 2, 1928–1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 4.

  Pasternak wrote: Edith Clowes (ed.), Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, Northwestern University Press, 1995, p. 12.

  February Revolution: the Russian Revolution is the collective term for the revolutions in February and October 1917, which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the eventual rise of the Soviet Union.

  ‘most celebrated’: Boris Pasternak, Fifty Poems, p. 13.

  ‘To read Pasternak’s’: Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, Harvill Secker, 2014, p. 33.

  ‘My brother’s poems’: Lydia Pasternak Slater, New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct 1961.

  In a poem: Clowes (ed.), Critical Companion, p. 12; Evgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years 1930–1960, Collins and Harvill, 1990, p. 298.

  ‘We drag everyday things’: Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct: An Early Autobiography and Other Works, Elek Books, 1959, p. 181, quoted in Clowes (ed.), Critical Companion, p. 10.

  ‘From the bottom of the sea’: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, Collins and Harvill, 1958 (henceforward Doctor Zhivago), p. 489.

  ‘And now there he was’: Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, Collins and Harvill, 1978, p. 9.

  ‘a terrible man …’: Guy de Mallac, Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art, University of Oklahoma Press, 1981, p. 204.

  an estimated 20 million: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, p. 658.

  ‘The immense talent’: Finn and Couvée, Zhivago Affair, p. 42.

  ‘Revolutionaries who take’: Doctor Zhivago, pp. 268, 269.

  ‘a kind of autobiography’: Clowes (ed.), Critical Companion, p. 20.

  ‘I’ve never done anything’: Robert Bolt quoted in Daily Mail, 25 Nov 2002.

  ‘Doctor Zhivago encompasses generations’: Omar Sharif quoted in Daily Express, Jun 1993.

  ‘like cranes’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 15.

  ‘How well he loved her’: Doctor Zhivago, p. 330.

  CHAPTER 1: A GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT WORLD

  ‘Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 15.

  ‘this God’, ‘stood there’: ibid.

  He told a friend: Barnes, Literary Biography, p. 213.

  ‘I’ve started on a novel’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 10.

  ‘Boris Leonidovich started’: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Poems, compiled by Evgeny Pasternak, with a Foreword by Andrei Voznesensky, Raduga, Moscow, 1990, p. 22.

  ‘I was simply shaken’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 10.

  ‘“She has no coquetry”’: Doctor Zhivago, p. 264.

  ‘dishevelled and on fire’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 7.

  In 1933 he had written: Clowes (ed.), Critical Companion, p. 15.

  On 26 August: Barnes, Literary Biography, pp. 18–19.

  ‘The Revolution is’: Evgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, p. 57.

  ‘had to become … for his age’: Author interview Evgeny Pasternak, Moscow, Feb 2010.

  ‘I think that collectivisation’: Doctor Zhivago, p. 453.

  ‘everything established, settled’: ibid., p. 362.

  ‘the mental space’: Clowes (ed.), Critical Companion, p. 16.

  ‘The highest incomparable’: Boris Pasternak, Biographical Album, Gamma Press, Moscow, 2007, p. 309.

  ‘tall and trim’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 6.

  She knew ‘instinctively’: ibid., p. 11.

  ‘But the answers’: ibid., p. 12.

  ‘magician who had first’: ibid., p. 10.

  ‘Once again I send’: ibid., p. 15.

  ‘Don’t look at me’: ibid., p. 16.

  ‘I didn’t get … round the town’: ibid.

  ‘Ivan [Vania] Emelianov’: Irina Emelianova, Légendes de la rue Potapov, Fayard, 1997, p. 16.

  ‘a man from a different era’: Emelianova, Légendes, p. 18.

  ‘worn down’, ‘brilliant and strong-willed’: Author interview Irina Emelianova, Paris, Sep 2015.

  ‘I had already gone’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 10.

  ‘If you have been’: ibid., p. 17.

  ‘Olia, I love you’: ibid., p. 18.

  ‘misery that comes’: Author interview Irina Emelianova.

  ‘Even words I knew’: Emelianova, Légendes, p. 13.

  ‘minimalistic option’, ‘not really … worthy of a man like him’: Author interview Irina Emelianova.

  ‘something remarkable’: Author interview Irina Emelianova.

  ‘The day came when’: Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 18.

  ‘A little girl of about eight’: Doctor Zhivago, p. 270.

  ‘A divided family’: Maya Slater (ed.), Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence, 1921–1960, translated by Nicholas Pasternak Slater, Hoover Institution Press, 2010, p. 321.

  ‘What is life if not love?’:
Ivinskaya, Captive, p. 15.

  CHAPTER 2: MOTHER LAND AND WONDER PAPA

  ‘shining perennial’: Author interview Josephine Pasternak, Oxford, Oct 1990.

  ‘You were a real man’: ibid.

  ‘I wrote to father’: Slater (ed.), Family Correspondence, p. 366.

  ‘He was a genius … rare thing’: Author interview Evgeny Pasternak.

  ‘Pasternak’s children’: The Museum of Private Collections: Museum Guidebook, Moscow, 2004, p. 94.

  ‘He always wore … off a canvas’: Author interview Charles Pasternak, Oxford, Apr 2015.

  ‘I felt more attracted … purity’: Leonid Pasternak and Josephine Pasternak, The Memoirs of Leonid Pasternak, translated by Jennifer Bradshaw, Quartet Books Ltd, 1982, p. 44.

  ‘One unsolved question’: ibid.

  ‘I now realise … existence of Boris’: Author interview Josephine Pasternak.

  ‘When I think back’: Josephine Pasternak, Tightrope Walking: A Memoir, Slavica Publishers, 2005, Introduction, p. xi.

  ‘From his childhood’: Peter Levi, Boris Pasternak, Century Hutchinson, 1990, p. 23.

  ‘I lacked perfect pitch’: Boris Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography, Collins and Harvill, 1959, p. 48.

  ‘They offer the squirrel nuts’: Leonid Pasternak, Josephine Pasternak, Memoirs, p. 133.

  ‘Some of the most memorable’: ibid., p. 151.

  ‘Ah, you express’: Author interview Charles Pasternak.

  ‘It was from our kitchen’: Pasternak, Essay in Autobiography, p. 37.

  ‘I remember how pressed’: ibid.

  ‘My imagination was impressed’: ibid., p. 38.