The streets of Moscow shivered under a coating of ice the October day in 1946 when Boris Pasternak met his soulmate. He was introduced to Olga Ivinskaya in the offices of the prestigious literary journal, Novy Mir, situated in a former ballroom where the great poet Alexander Pushkin once danced.
Pasternak, who was my great-uncle, was at the time the most famous writer in Russia — it was said his poetry could ‘provide a cure for tuberculosis’. He enjoyed rock-star status, and he was handsome, too.
No wonder Olga, blonde and cherubically pretty, was stunned when ‘this god’ appeared before her. The attraction between the 56-year-old poet and the 34-year-old beauty was mutual and instant.
Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the 1965 romantic-drama film Doctor Zhivago
Olga later wrote: ‘And now there he was at my desk by the window, the most unstinting man in the world, to whom it had been given to speak in the name of the clouds, the stars and the wind, who had found eternal words to say about man’s passion and woman’s weakness. People say that he summons the stars to his table and the whole world to the carpet at his bedside.’
So began the great romantic passion which was to be immortalised in the pages of the Nobel Prize-winning novel Doctor Zhivago.
I first became interested in the story behind Doctor Zhivago in 1990, when I asked my 90-year-old grandmother Josephine about her brother and she vividly brought their Moscow childhood and life alive.
Fifteen years later, after reading copious biographies of my great-uncle and finally persuading Olga’s daughter to speak to me, I knew that I wanted to write about Olga and Boris’s affair. And it is that relationship which is at the heart of my new book, Lara. I felt I needed to right an ancestral wrong. My family belittled Olga’s role in Boris’s life, as they couldn’t accept her as his mistress.
Although Boris had already started his magnum opus in 1935 — a love story set between the Russian Revolution and World War II — when he met Olga, his heroine Lara flowered to completely embody her.
Boris Pasternak, the Russian writer photographed with his muse and life companion Olga Ivinskaya and their daughter Irina in the late 1950s
Central to the novel is the passionate love affair shared by Yury Zhivago, a doctor and poet, and Lara Guichard, a nurse. Like Boris Pasternak, who was married to his second wife Zinaida, Dr Zhivago is married to a dutiful spouse.
He is torn between his loyalty to his wife and his yearning for his lover. (Yury and Lara were, of course, immortalised in David Lean’s Academy Award-winning film of Doctor Zhivago by a brooding Omar Sharif and a breathtaking Julie Christie.)
Yury Zhivago’s first impressions of Lara are based on Boris’s early meetings with Olga, who worked as an editorial assistant. In Doctor Zhivago, he writes: ‘She has no coquetry . . . she does not wish to please or 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.’
Despite his second marriage, Boris’s courtship with Olga proceeded at a furious pace.
Olga, who lived with her mother, was already twice-widowed with a son and daughter. Boris also had two children — a son from each marriage. By April 1947, Olga and Boris had consummated their relationship and were inseparable.
Boris, who lived with his second wife in a writer’s countryside colony called Peredelkino outside Moscow, would come to Olga’s Moscow apartment every morning at dawn. The couple were completely in love, able to exist on little sleep, fuelled by the adrenaline of desire.
Boris wrote a poem, Summer In Town, about this heady period. It became one of Yury Zhivago’s poems in the famous novel. As the affair intensified, Boris was torn between his fervent longing to be with Olga, and his guilty self-disgust at deceiving his wife.
Omar Sharif and Julie Christie played the lead roles in Doctor Zhivago which is one of the highest grossing films of its time
It was a struggle he poured straight into the pages of his novel, which was still a decade away from publication.
But while he was absorbed in writing it, it was increasingly difficult for Boris to earn an income.
He was Russia’s premier translator of Shakespeare, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize six times for his translations of the Bard, yet that was not a lucrative trade. And besides, Boris was running into trouble with the authorities for his anti-Soviet views.
A political resolution was passed against him, denouncing him as ‘an author lacking in ideology, and remote from Soviet reality’.
His paid translation work dried up, and the journal Novy Mir rejected some of his poems.
He poured his anger and frustration into Zhivago, courageously portraying the truth about the appalling living conditions for so many citizens in Russia after the Revolution.
Yet this was foolishly naive or wantonly brazen, given the authorities’ surveillance of him. He even chose to give regular readings from his work as it progressed.
As word spread of these readings, his literary fans began to covet an invitation.
In retrospect, it seems miraculous that Boris survived under Stalin, given his controversial views, when nearly 1,500 writers in the Soviet Union were executed or died in labour camps after 1917 for alleged infractions. But what he didn’t know was that he had special protection from Stalin.
The tyrant, who was from Georgia, was particularly moved by Pasternak’s translations of Georgian poetry. Unbeknown to the rebellious writer, on Pasternak’s KGB file the immortal words were stamped: ‘Leave the cloud-dweller alone.’
Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago which was shot largely in Spain
And so the authorities did just that, leaving him to write his controversial novel. But the cruelty of the state apparatus knew no bounds, and even Stalin’s edict had its limits.
The Soviet thought-police hatched a plan to send his beloved mistress Olga to a prison camp and torture her instead. So it was that on the evening of October 6, 1949, 12 of Stalin’s state security men burst into Olga’s apartment and arrested her.
She was taken to the terrifying Moscow Lubyanka, where for nine months she was interrogated nightly over the book her lover was writing.
The transcripts from these interrogations reveal Olga’s quick wit, loyalty and devotion to Boris.
When asked: ‘How do you explain your relationship with Pasternak? He is, after all, a lot older than you?’, she shot back: ‘Love.’
Boris, who knew that Olga was in the Lubyanka, was possessed by guilt. He wrote to a friend that his suffering would make his work ‘deeper’.
What the writer did not yet know, as he poured his torment on to the page, was that reality was exceeding even his reaches for fiction.
Olga was pregnant with Boris’s child. When she revealed this, her treatment improved somewhat. The blinding lights designed to cause sleep deprivation ceased, and she was granted extra buckwheat porridge.
Olga Ivinskaya aged 25 in Moscow taken from Anna Pasternak's new book which is out now
But her captors were not above psychological cruelty. When she was six months pregnant, she was told she was to be granted a meeting with her lover.
‘Giddy with happiness’ she was taken in a prison van to another government building, where she was left alone in a freezing morgue. Terrified, she initially thought that Boris’s corpse was lying on the zinc-topped tables beneath a tarpaulin.
That was not the case, but the ‘meeting’ with Pasternak was a hoax. Olga returned to her cell in the Lubyanka, where, soon after, she miscarried. She was then sentenced to five years in a labour camp in the region of Mordovia, in the west of the Soviet Union, for ‘close contact with persons suspected of espionage’.
Olga spent three-and-a-half years in the camp, tilling the soil in the baking summers, and managing to survive the bitter winters.
Years later, Boris wrote to a fellow poet: ‘Olga was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a gruelling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life and the fact that they did not touch me in those years to her heroism and endurance.’
In 1953, when Stalin died, Olga was freed under an amnesty. Boris declared of the dictator: ‘A terrible man died, a man who drenched Russia in blood.’
While Olga had been in the labour camp, the guilt and strain on Boris caused him to have two heart attacks. His wife nursed him back to health, which meant that when Olga was released, he was further torn because he felt he now owed both women his life.
He promised his wife he would break off the affair, yet the moment Olga returned to Moscow, the lovers were ‘seized by a kind of desperate tenderness’ and a resolve to stay together for the rest of their lives. He simply could not stay away from her.
Julie Christie in a scene from the film Doctor Zhivago which won five Academy Awards
Olga moved into ‘The Little House’, a cottage across a lake from ‘The Big House’ in the writer’s commune where Boris still lived. By now, her place in his life was non-negotiable. Every day, Boris would write in The Big House in the morning, then cross a bridge over the lake to the Little House in the afternoon, where Olga would type his manuscript for him.
Olga’s reappearance into his life inspired Boris, and lifted his spirits. He would say to visitors: ‘Lara exists, go and meet her’, sometimes handing them Olga’s phone number.
He threw himself into writing Doctor Zhivago with a gusto he had not experienced since the traumatic first few months of Olga’s incarceration. Of the doctor’s reunion with his lover Lara, Boris wrote: ‘To them — and this made them unusual — the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of greater understanding of life and of themselves.’
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ShareIn 1957, when it became clear that the Soviets would never publish his novel because of its anti-Soviet content, Boris smuggled it out to the Italian Communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Doctor Zhivago was published in Italy on November 10, 1957.
The Soviets were furious. They expelled Boris from the Writers’ Union, dashing his chances of earning a living from writing. The irony was that while the publisher made millions from the novel, selling the film rights to MGM for $450,000, Boris was virtually penniless.
In 1958, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, which the authorities forced him to denounce if he wanted to stay in his adored ‘Mother Russia’.
During the last few years of Boris’s life, when he continued to fight ideological battles with the state, Olga bought fun and tenderness into his life.
Olga Ivinskaya with daughter Irina as a baby in 1939 featured in the book: Lara, The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak
She was unwaveringly supportive in helping him complete his novel, which took him 20 years to write, twice typing the entire manuscript.
She loved him wholeheartedly, but unlike his two wives, more crucially, she understood him.
For his part, Boris did his best for Olga, supporting her family financially and loving her daughter Irina (from an earlier marriage) as the girl he never had. But he never did the one thing that could have protected her from the vengeful authorities: he never divorced Zinaida in order to marry Olga.
If Olga had had the security of the Pasternak surname, she would have been safe.
As it was, just three months after Boris died, aged 70, in 1960, a grieving Olga was arrested again.
Both Olga and her daughter were sent to a gulag in Eastern Siberia on trumped-up charges of smuggling royalties from Doctor Zhivago. Olga served a three-and-a-half year sentence.
Thankfully, she survived, and published her memoirs in the late Seventies. Her daughter Irina also lived through her time in the gulag and in 1985 emigrated to France. Her mother died ten years later.
How bitterly ironic that in Doctor Zhivago, Boris had grimly prophesied 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.’
Olga may have been immortalised for ever as Lara, one of the most romantic characters in all literature, but she paid a terrible price.
- Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak is published in hardback by William Collins, £20.
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