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

hands astonished him like a sublime idea. Her shadow on the wall of the hotel room had seemed to him the outline of innocence. Her vest was stretched over her breast, as firmly and simply as linen on an embroidery frame … Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.’ When Lara talks of how damaged she is by her affair with Komarovksy, you can almost hear Zinaida on the train trying to discourage Boris. ‘There is something broken in me, there is something broken in my whole life,’ Lara says to Yury Zhivago. ‘I discovered life much too early, I was made to discover it, and I was made to see it from the very worst side – a cheap, distorted version of it – through the eyes of an elderly roué. One of those useless, self-satisfied egoists of the old days who took advantage of everything and allowed themselves whatever they fancied.’

      The seeds for Lara’s character were sown by his meeting Zinaida, but when Boris later fell for Olga Ivinskaya, it was she who fully embodied as a living archetype his Lara.

      Soon after his return from Irpen, Boris caused mayhem. Selfishly putting his own desires first, he confessed his love for Zinaida to Evgenia, then went to Genrikh and declared his devotion to the pianist’s wife. In typical Boris style, the meeting was emotional and highly charged, with both men weeping. Boris spoke of his deep admiration and affection for Genrikh, and in an act of gauche insensitivity presented him with a copy of ‘Ballade’. He then insisted that he was incapable of spending his life without Zinaida.

      Boris’s confidante, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, thought her friend was falling headlong into disaster. ‘I fear for Boris,’ she wrote. ‘In Russia poets die as an epidemic – a whole list of deaths in ten years. A catastrophe is unavoidable; first, the husband. Second, Boris has a wife and son; third, she is beautiful (Boris will be jealous) and fourth and chiefly, Boris is incapable of a happy love. For him to love means to be tortured.’

      If Pasternak was tortured, so too were the women he loved. For months Zinaida would be torn by overwhelming guilt at breaking up her marriage. Boris was similarly racked over his treatment of Evgenia, writing to his parents in March 1931 that he had caused Evgenia ‘undiminished suffering’. He concluded that his wife loved him because she did not understand him and deluded himself that she needed rest and freedom – ‘complete freedom’ to realise herself professionally. He appeared to be projecting – he needed freedom from his unhappy marriage to Evgenia, while the melodrama he thrived on was exactly the creative fuel he required.

      On New Year’s Day 1931, when Genrikh left for a concert tour of Siberia, Boris began obsessively calling on Zinaida, as often as three times a day, and temporarily moved out of the family’s apartment. Unable to withstand Zinaida’s vacillation any longer, after five months of ardent pursuit, he turned up at the Neigauses’ Moscow home. Genrikh opened the door to Boris and addressed him in German as ‘Der spätkommende Gast’ (the belated guest) and left to go to play at a concert.

      Boris begged Zinaida once more to leave Genrikh. When Zinaida refused, he grabbed a bottle of iodine from the bathroom cupboard and in some sort of weak suicide bid, swallowed it all. His gullet burned and he started making involuntary chewing movements. When Zinaida realised what he had done she poured milk down Boris’s throat to induce vomiting – he was sick twelve times – probably saving his life. A doctor came and ‘rinsed out his insides’ as a precaution against internal burns. The doctor insisted that the exhausted Pasternak must have complete bed rest for two days and that for the first night he must not move. So he stayed at the Neigauses, in a ‘state of utter bliss’ as Zinaida tended to him, moving noiselessly and efficiently around him.

      Extraordinarily, such was his reverence for the melodramatic poet, that when Genrikh returned home at two o’clock that morning and learned of what had happened, it was to his wife that he turned and said: ‘Well, are you satisfied? Has he now proved his love for you?’ Genrikh then agreed to hand Zinaida over to Boris.

      ‘I’ve fallen in love with Z[inaida] N[ikolaevna], the wife of my best friend, N[euhaus],’ Pasternak wrote to his parents 8 March 1931. ‘On January 1st he left for a concert tour of Siberia. I had feared this trip and tried to talk him out of it. In his absence, the thing that was inevitable and would have come about in any event, has acquired the stain of dishonesty. I’ve shown myself unworthy of N[euhaus] whom I still love and always will; I’ve caused prolonged, terrible and as yet undiminished suffering to Zhenia – and yet I am purer and more innocent than before I entered this life.’

      Although Genrikh was shaken and hurt by Boris and Zinaida’s affair – he had to stop playing in the middle of one concert during his Siberian tour and left the stage in tears – he was by no means an innocent party. Zinaida’s eventual break with him was eased by Genrikh’s own infidelities. In 1929 he had sired a daughter by his former fiancée, Militsa Borodkina, and he married her in the mid-1930s.

      In November 1932 Boris wrote to his parents and sisters from Moscow that Genrikh ‘is a very contradictory person, and although everything settled down last autumn he still has moods in which he tells Zina that one day in an attack of misery he’ll kill her and me. And yet he continues to meet us almost every other day, not only because he can’t forget her, but because he can’t part from me either. This creates some touching and curious situations.’ However, Sir Isaiah Berlin, a great friend of Boris and Josephine, remembered that for years after Zinaida left him, Genrikh was a frequent visitor at the couple’s dacha in Peredelkino, where Boris and Zinaida lived from 1936. After one typical Sunday lunch, Isaiah Berlin and Genrikh travelled back to Moscow together on the train. Sir Isaiah was somewhat taken aback when Genrikh turned to him and said, by way of explanation for why he had let his wife go: ‘You know, Boris is really a saint.’

      Sadly though, Boris was all too human. One of the things that plagued him most during his marriage to Zinaida was his fixation with Zinaida’s teenage affair with Melitinsky. As mental torture is largely irrational, Zinaida was powerless to quell her husband’s jealous anxieties. He often became paranoid staying in hotels because the ‘semi-debauched set-up’ reminded him of Zinaida’s teenage trysts with Melitinksy. The story of Zinaida’s youthful liaison became an obsession which triggered sleeplessness and mental depression. Boris once destroyed a photograph of Melitinksy which his daughter had bought to Zinaida as a gift following her cousin’s death.

      On 5 May 1931, when it was clear that Boris was not going to return to Evgenia, she and her son left Russia. They travelled to Germany, where Boris’s family – Josephine, Frederick, Lydia, Rosalia and Leonid – greeted them with open arms, intent on cocooning them with familial love. ‘Look after her,’ Boris instructed his family. ‘And we did,’ said Josephine. Frederick organised and paid for Evgenia, who had been ill with tuberculosis, to spend the summer at a sanatorium in the Black Forest while her son stayed with the family at a pension on the Starnberger See in Munich.

      Understandably, Boris’s family in Germany, who loved Evgenia and adored little Evgeny, were shocked by Boris’s behaviour. They saw him as having discarded his first wife and son, and handing responsibility over to them. Leonid’s censure weighed heavily on Boris, who was left in no doubt that his family were appalled by the way he had treated Evgenia and Evgeny. On 18 December 1931, when Boris was openly living with Zinaida, his father wrote to him from Berlin:

      Dear Boria!

      What a lot I ought to write to you on all sorts of subjects – the terrible thing is that I know in advance that it’s a pointless waste of time, because you, and all of you, act without thinking out the consequences in advance; you’re irresponsible. And of course one’s sorry for you as well, we are especially so – what a mess you’ve got yourself into, you poor boy! And instead of doing all you can to disentangle everything and as far as possible reduce the suffering on both sides, you’re dragging it out even more and making it worse!

      In early February 1932, Boris wrote Josephine a letter running over twenty pages. It is part an emotional confession of the guilt he feels at his treatment of Evgenia, part justification of his love for Zinaida – who he at one stage describes unflatteringly: ‘always comes back from the hairdresser looking terrible, like a freshly polished boot’ – part a catalogue of his neurotic mental state, which seems to veer near to madness; and part