Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago. Anna Pasternak

disposal and then continue my journey with him. From the Tikhiye Gory we sped on in a covered wagon on runners, for an evening, right through the night and part of the following day. Wrapped up in three long coats and half buried in hay, I rolled on the floor of the sleigh like some bulky sack, robbed of any freedom of movement.’

      The February Revolution was focused around Petrograd (now St Petersburg). In the chaos, members of the Imperial Parliament assumed control of the country, forming a provisional government. The army leadership felt that they did not have the means to suppress the Revolution, resulting in Tsar Nicholas’s abdication. A period of dual power ensued, during which the provisional government held state power while the national network of ‘soviets’, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the working classes and the political left. During this period there were frequent mutinies, protests and strikes as attempts at political reform failed and the proletariat gained power. In the October Revolution (November in the Gregorian calendar) the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, overthrew the provisional government and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, moving the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918 out of fear of imminent foreign invasion. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside. Civil war subsequently erupted among the ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks) and ‘Whites’ (anti-socialist factions). It continued for several years, creating poverty, famine and fear, especially amongst the intelligentsia. The Bolsheviks eventually defeated the Whites and all rival socialists, paving the way for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.

      In Doctor Zhivago, Yury Zhivago bears witness to the momentous political upheaval:

      The paper was a late extra, printed on one side only; it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People’s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were established in Russia. There followed the first decrees of the new government and various brief news items received by telegraph and telephone.

      The blizzard slashed at Yury’s eyes and covered the printed page with a grey, rustling snowy gruel, but it was not the snowstorm that prevented Yury from reading. He was shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment and the thought of its significance for centuries to come.

      After 1917 life in Moscow was harrowing. Food and fuel were scarce and living conditions poor. Fortunately, Boris’s brother Alexander, a budding architect, knew exactly which bits of roof beams could be cut away and sawn up for firewood without causing the whole house to collapse, as a number did in the Moscow winter of 1918–19. Fuel was in such demand that at night Boris broke planks from rotten fences or stole firewood from government places, and guests invited for tea brought a log as a gift instead of sweets or chocolates. In the grey hours before sunrise, the Pasternak children would set out for the Boloto, a market where villagers sold what vegetables they could. In Zhivago, Pasternak recalls the privations and pressures of war, the resulting famine and spread of typhoid:

      Winter was at hand and in the world of men the air was heavy with something as inexorable as the coming death of nature. It was on everybody’s lips.

      Food and logs had to be got in. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become an abstract notion, and food and firewood were replaced by the problems of alimentation and fuel supply.

      The people in the towns were as helpless as children in the face of the unknown – of that unknown which swept every known usage aside and left nothing but desolation in its wake – although it was the offspring and creation of the towns.

      People were still talking and deceiving themselves as their daily life struggled on, limping and shuffling to its unknown destination. But Yury saw it as it was, he could see that it was doomed, and that he and such as he were sentenced to destruction. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. The days were counted, and these days were running out before his eyes.

      … He understood that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future. He both feared and loved that future and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if saying good-bye, was avidly aware of the trees and clouds and of the people walking in the streets, of the great Russian city struggling through misfortune – and he was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better but was powerless to do anything.

      In 1921, to Boris’s great distress, his sisters and parents left Russia and travelled to Germany. Unbeknownst to any of them, they would never live in Russia together again. Deprived of her rights for higher education in Russia – just as any offspring of a non-proletarian family in the post-revolutionary climate was – Josephine went to Berlin on her own, keen to enter a university and rent accommodation for her parents, who intended to come after her. She was soon joined by Lydia, Leonid and Rosalia. Boris and Alexander stayed on at the family’s studio apartment at 14 Volkhonka Street in Moscow, as they had embarked on their respective careers as writer and architect. Rosalia and Leonid had managed to obtain visas for Germany for a long course of health treatment – Leonid had to have a cataract removed and Rosalia had heart problems. The hungry years of the Revolution had undermined their health, strength and spirit, while Leonid Pasternak was deeply concerned by the threat that he would lose his Moscow apartment to state requisition. However, it never occurred to any of the family that they would not be reunited in Russia after the country’s upheavals.

      Josephine’s last memories of her childhood in Moscow were the gruelling winters when the town was covered in snow and the citizens had to report at labour centres. ‘They were given spades and perhaps a day’s ration and had to clear the roads,’ she remembered. ‘Lydia was underage and did not need to report, but she went instead of me as I was not strong enough to shovel the heavy snow. She and Boris were in the same group. It must have been an unforgettable day … A day of such brilliance of sun and snow, of purity of landscape, of concerted effort and of friendliness among the people at work.’ In Doctor Zhivago, to escape starvation and the political uncertainties in Moscow after the 1917 Revolution, the Zhivago family travels to Varykino, Tonya’s ancestral estate in the Urals. When their train is halted by snowdrifts, the civilian passengers are commandeered to clear the rails. Yury Zhivago remembers these three days as the most pleasant part of their journey:

      But the sun sparkled on the blinding whiteness and Yury cut clean slices out of the snow, starting landfalls of dry diamond fires. It reminded him of his childhood. He saw himself in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn into the curly fleece, cutting the same dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream buns and fortresses and cave cities. Life had had a splendid taste in those far-off days, everything had been a feast for the eyes and for the stomach!

      But at this time, too, during their three days of work in the open air, the workers had a feeling of pleasantly full stomachs. And no wonder. At night they were issued with great chunks of hot fresh bread (no one knew where it came from or by whose orders); it had a tasty crisp crust, shiny on top, cracked at the side and with bits of charcoal baked into it underneath.

      Berlin in the 1920s was a period of high productivity for Leonid Pasternak, as the city had become a meeting place of the Russian intelligentsia. Over 100,000 Russians were living in exile. Leonid painted and befriended Albert Einstein, and the opera singer Chaliapin, who was rehearsing for his Berlin recital. He also sketched and painted the Russian composer, pianist and conductor Prokofiev at the piano, painter Max Liebermann and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was to enjoy an intense correspondence with Boris.

      It was an immeasurable source of pain for Boris that after his parents left Moscow, he only saw them once again. He visited them in Berlin in 1922 and lived with them for nearly a year with his first wife, Evgenia. Afterwards, in the ensuing correspondence, lasting over twenty years, the constant ache of his missing them and echo of regret is tangible.

      Conditions meanwhile were worsening throughout Russia, with food shortages and ration cards introduced in 1929. Collectivisation was regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution, mainly in grain deliveries in Russia. In 1930, there was a decree of the Federation of Soviet Writers’ Associations providing for the formation of writers’ shock brigades, to be sent out to the collective and state farms.