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

‘this is the first letter that I have been able to write to you, for various reasons, after Mama’s death. It has turned my life upside down, devastated it and made it meaningless; and in an instant, as though drawing me after it, it has brought me closer to my own grave. It aged me in an hour. A cloud of unkindness and chaos has settled over my whole existence; I’m permanently distracted, downcast and dazed from grief, astonishment, tiredness and pain.’

      A week after Rosalia’s death, world war broke out. Leonid lived the rest of his life in Oxford, surrounded by his daughters and grandchildren. He would never see his sons, Boris or Alexander, again.

      During the war, Pasternak was actively involved and served as a firewatcher on Volkhonka Street. Several times he dealt with the incendiary bombs that fell on the family apartment’s roof. With others, he spent time on drill, fire-watching and shooting practice, delighted to discover that he had skill as a marksman. In spite of the war, Boris enjoyed moments of happiness, feeling that he was collaborating in the interest of Mother Russia and national survival. Yet amidst the camaraderie, there was the constant ‘acuteness of pain’ of the ‘excessive intolerable separation’ from his family.

      Leonid Pasternak died on 31 May 1945, weeks after Russia’s final victory in the war. ‘When Mother died it was as if harmony had abandoned the world,’ said Josephine. ‘When Father died it seemed that truth had left it.’ Boris shed ‘an ocean of tears’, on Leonid’s death (he had often addressed him as ‘my wonder papa’ in his letters). It troubled the writer greatly that he had never been able to replicate the rare depth and quality of enduring, harmonious marital love that his parents had experienced. In most of his correspondence with his father, he rails against his own emotional shortcomings, endlessly verbally flagellating himself – ‘I’m like someone bewitched, as if I’d cast a spell on myself. I’ve destroyed the lives of my family’ – and relentlessly exposing his acute sense of guilt, which runs like a continuous fever through him.

      Given how profoundly he revered his parents and loved his siblings, his choice to stay in Soviet Russia and to live apart from them was surprising. Despite the unbearable oppression of Stalin’s censorship of the 1920s and ’30s, he did not consider leaving Russia. On 2 February 1932 he had written to his parents about his calling to his beloved ‘Mother land’: ‘This fate of not belonging to oneself, of living in a prison cell warmed from all sides – it transforms you, it makes you a prisoner of time. For herein too lies the primeval cruelty of poor Russia; once she bestows her love upon someone, her beloved is caught forever within her sights. It is as if he stands before her in the Roman arena, forced to provide her with a spectacle in return for her love.’

      He continuously made it plain that he did not want to live the life of an exile. Yet, after the Revolution he was in emotional exile from his family. However successful he became, there is a sense that he was rudderless without them. Always searching, in many ways, he was lost. It was a constant source of shame and self-reproach that he was not able to emulate his parents’ stable and happy union. He may have fallen in love easily, but his inability to sustain a happy marriage was one of his greatest torments.

      3

       The Cloud Dweller

      It was at a party in Moscow in 1921 that the thirty-one-year-old Boris met the painter Evgenia Vladimirovna Lure. Petite and elegant, with blue eyes and soft brown hair, Evgenia came from a traditional Jewish intellectual family from Petrograd. She spoke French fluently and had a cultural finesse which Boris was drawn to. His attraction no doubt bolstered by the fact that Leonid knew Evgenia’s family and heartily approved of the union. Boris, who always sought his father’s approval, duly fell in love with her.

      ‘One wanted to bathe in her face,’ he said, but also pointed out that ‘she always needed this illumination in order to be beautiful, she had to have happiness in order to be liked’. An insecure and vulnerable beauty, she was flattered by the famous writer’s interest in her. By the spring of 1922, they were married. ‘Zhenya’ was twenty-one years old.

      If relationships act as mirrors to our flaws and our needs, Boris learned much about himself during his first marriage. Evgenia also had a volatile, artistic streak and their clash of egos was not conducive to marital harmony. Boris’s fame was impacting his ego; he did not consider Evgenia enough of an artist to merit her difficult, emotional behaviour. Of the two of them, he considered himself the greater artist and assumed Evgenia would lay aside her ambition to help foster his, just as he had witnessed his mother do for his father. While he was by nature active, preferring to run everywhere rather than walk – probably to help burn off his excess nervous energy – Evgenia was languid, preferring to sit around the house. Energetically, they did not seem compatible.

      Boris travelled with his new wife to Berlin for a holiday in the summer of 1922. It was Evgenia’s first time abroad and the newlyweds relished their time in the German capital, visiting bustling cafes and art galleries. While Evgenia liked to sightsee and enjoy the pulsating life of fashionable quarters, Boris, like Tolstoy, was more drawn to the ‘real Germany’: the misery of slums in the northern districts of the city.

      Boris was paid in dollars for some of his translation work. He spent his money freely. Ashamed of having so much relative to the poverty of so many, his tips, like his brother-in-law Frederick’s, were always blushingly generous. According to Josephine, who sometimes accompanied her brother on his walks around Berlin, he also ‘showered hard cash upon pale urchins with outstretched hands’. Boris explained his and Tolstoy’s attraction to the less privileged: ‘people of an artistic nature will be attracted by the poor, by those with a difficult, modest lot in life. There everything is warmer and riper, and there is more soul and colour there than anywhere else.’

      Once the first cloudless weeks of gallery visiting and seeing old friends were over, the writer began to get restless, and irritable. Evgenia suffered from gingivitis, an inflammation of the gums, which caused her to cry a lot. But Boris was indifferent to her suffering. ‘We, the family, sided with her,’ explained Josephine, ‘but what could we do? Boris did not display any kind of callousness: he simply seemed fed up with the incongruity of the whole set-up – the boarding house, the lack of privacy, his wife’s uncontrollable tearful moods.’ The family raised eyebrows further when he decided to take a room of his own where he could work in peace. This they considered sheer extravagance. The last straw came when Evgenia discovered that she was pregnant. The quarrels became fiercer: ‘A child! Slavery! It is your concern, after all,’ Boris would say to his wife, ‘you are the mother.’

      ‘What?’ Zhenya would cry out, ‘mine? Mine? Oh! You, you – you forget that I am devoted to my art, you selfish creature!’

      The main source of their tension was whether and when they should return to Moscow. Boris was keen to get back to Russia, while Evgenia preferred Berlin, ‘Russia’s second capital’. The vitality of Russian intellectual life reached its zenith in the early 1920s, then declined under the impact of widespread political unrest and soaring inflation. The bleakness of Germany’s fate saddened Pasternak, who later wrote: ‘Germany was cold and starving, deceived about nothing and deceiving no one, her hand stretched out to the age like a beggar (a gesture not her own at all) and the entire country on crutches.’ Typically theatrical, he added that it took him ‘a daily bottle of brandy and Charles Dickens to forget it’.

      Back in Moscow the couple moved into the Pasternaks’ old apartment on Volkhonka Street. Soon after returning, on 23 September 1923, their son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, was born. ‘He is so tiny – how could we give him a new, an unfamiliar name?’ Boris wrote. ‘So we chose what was closest to him: the name of his mother – Zhenya.’

      Uncertain of his income, and unable to make ends meet with the advances from publishers for his own work and translations, Pasternak worked for a short time as a researcher for the Library of the People’s Commissariat for Education in Moscow. Here he was responsible for reading through foreign papers and censoring