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

first year of marriage to Zinaida that he had made a fearful mistake. Astonishingly, he confessed that it was not really her he liked but her husband, Genrikh, whose talents he revered. ‘I was so captivated by the way he played the piano,’ Boris said. ‘At first he wanted to kill me, the strange fellow, after she left him. But later on he was very grateful to me!’

      Boris spoke with such anguish to Olga about the drama of the break-up of his first marriage and the ‘hell’ of his domestic set-up with Zinaida, that there was no question of Olga doubting him and his motives towards her. Of course he wanted more than anything to pursue a great love affair with her, but he could not envisage how he could disentangle himself from yet another marriage. As he stood at the door to leave her, the night folding in behind him, he told Olga that he felt that he had no right to love. The good things in life were not for him. He was a man of duty and she must not deflect him from his set way of life – and his work. He added that he would look after Olga for the rest of his life. An honourable promise, considering they had not yet consummated their relationship.

      After Boris left, Olga could not sleep. Restless, she kept going to the balcony, listening to the sounds of daybreak, watching the street lamps grow dim under the young lime trees of Potapov Street. At six in the morning the doorbell rang. Boris was standing there. He had gone to his dacha at Peredelkino by train – unlike Yury Zhivago, who galloped to and from his true love – then come straight back and walked the streets of Moscow until dawn. Olga was wearing her favourite Japanese dressing gown, decorated with little houses. She pulled him towards her and they embraced in silence. Both knew that regardless of the complexity of the situation and the potential destruction caused by their ardour, they could not live without each other.

      The next day Olga’s mother took the family on a trip to Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo on the outskirts of Moscow, where there was an eighteenth-century house surrounded by sweeping parkland. Boris and Olga were left to spend their first night and day together ‘like newlyweds’. Olga took great pleasure in ironing Boris’s crumpled trousers for him: not the most romantic of acts, but Boris being Boris, he was ‘jubilant’ that they could live like a married couple for this twenty-four-hour period. To mark the happy occasion, he inscribed a small red volume of his verse for Olga: ‘My life, my angel, I love you truly. April 4th, 1947.’

      From the moment that they became lovers, Boris and Olga were inseparable. He would come to her apartment every day at six or seven in the morning. Spring that year turned into a hot summer: the lime trees were laden with blossom, the boulevards seemed to have the fragrance of molten honey. They were completely in love, able to exist on little sleep, fuelled by the adrenalin of desire, excitement and yearning. Boris wrote a poem called ‘Summer in Town’, about this time. It became one of Yury Zhivago’s poems in Doctor Zhivago.

      Conversation in a half tone.

      With a flurry of haste

      The whole sheaf of hair

      Is gathered up from the nape of the neck.

      From under the heavy comb

      A helmeted woman looks out,

      Her head thrown back

      With all its plaited hair.

      Outside, the hot night

      Promises a storm,

      The passers-by scatter,

      Shuffling home.

      Brief thunder

      Echoes sharply,

      And the wind stirs

      The curtain at the window.

      Sultry

      Silence.

      Fingers of lightning

      Search the sky.

      And when the dawn-filled,

      Heated morning

      Has dried the puddles in the streets

      After the night rain

      The centuries-old, scented,

      Blossoming lime-trees

      Frown

      For lack of sleep.

      As the affair between the besotted writer and Olga intensified, tensions escalated between Olga and her mother, Maria Kostko. For while Olga and even little Irina were excited that a poet of Boris’s calibre had entered their lives, Maria was vehemently against the union. All she wanted was for her daughter to find the emotional and financial security of a suitable third husband. ‘It is impossible, unthinkable, unjustifiable to have a relationship with a married man,’ Maria repeatedly reproached Olga. ‘We even have the same age, him and I.’ It must have been doubly alarming for Maria that her daughter was not only embarking on a relationship with a married man but such a famous and controversial figure. In her eyes this would have been akin to Olga signing her death warrant, given the frequency and ferocity of arrests. She had good reason to fear, for Maria had direct experience of Stalinist repression, having spent three years in the gulag during the war. Worse, the betrayal had originated close to home: it was believed that her second son-in-law, Alexander Vinogradov, had tipped off the authorities, saying Maria had ‘slandered the leader’ in a private conversation about Stalin in their home. It is thought that part of his motive was to get his mother-in-law out of their crowded apartment. A lawyer revealed to Olga that there was indeed a letter of denunciation from Vinogradov towards her mother in Maria’s police files, a revelation that caused fearful rows between Vinogradov and Olga before he died in 1942. Subsequently Olga learned that the camp where her mother was being kept had suffered enemy bombing; prison order had broken down and prisoners were dying of hunger.