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

never tried to shine: she shone as naturally as people breathe.’

      In 1903 the Pasternaks took a summer cottage on an estate in the village of Obolenskoye, 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow. Evenings were spent with Rosalia at the piano, her music flooding through the open windows. While the teenage Boris played Cowboys and Indians with his brother Alexander, they stumbled across the next-door house where the pianist Scriabin was staying. Listening to him compose his The Divine Poem, part of his Symphony No 3 in C Minor, Boris was so enchanted that he decided that he too would become a composer. Thanks to Rosalia’s tutelage, he was already an accomplished pianist. ‘From his childhood, my brother was distinguished by an inordinate passion to accomplish things patently beyond his powers, ludicrously inappropriate to his character and cast of mind,’ said Alexander.

      Part of what Alexander was referring to was a fantasy of his brother’s which ended in disaster. The veranda of the family’s rented dacha had a sweeping view across water meadows and every evening peasant girls galloped by on their unsaddled horses, taking the herd to the grazing land for the night. They were illuminated by the setting sun. Its glowing rays captured the bay horses, the motley skirts and shawls and the sunburnt faces of the riders. Boris longed to ride in this romantic cavalcade, despite having no riding experience. When, on 6 August, one of the peasants failed to show up, Boris rode off on a wild horse that bucked him to the ground. The whole family watched, aghast, as he fell under the horse and the herd thundered over him. The accident left him with a broken leg which, when the cast came off after six weeks, remained shorter than the other. This caused a lifelong limp. As a result, he was unfit for military service – which may, in the long run, have saved his life.

      The disability rankled. Boris hated failure in anything, and this helps explain why, despite considerable success in composition, he decided to give up his musical aspirations when he realised that he had a ‘secret trouble’. ‘I lacked perfect pitch,’ Pasternak wrote later. ‘This was quite unnecessary to me in my work but the discovery was a grief and humiliation and I took it as proof that my music was rejected by heaven or fate. I had not the courage to stand up to all these blows and I lost heart. For six years I had lived for music. Now I tore it up and flung it from me as you throw away your dearest treasure.’

      However, when he had abandoned music, fate played her hand: he took up verse and found his true calling. Once he discovered his vocation as a writer, it was his father’s working relationship with Leo Tolstoy that was to indelibly influence Boris’s creative life and stringent writing ethic.

      In 1898 Leonid’s career hit a high note when Leo Tolstoy commissioned him to illustrate Resurrection, which had taken him ten years to write. Tolstoy had met Leonid five years earlier in 1893 when he attended the regular exhibition of the Wanderers (a show case of distinguished Moscow and St Petersburg artists). Tolstoy was introduced to Leonid and shown Pasternak’s painting The Debutante. Leonid was invited to Tolstoy’s Moscow home the following Friday for tea and told to bring his portfolio. When Tolstoy saw some illustrations that Leonid had done with War and Peace in mind, he turned to Leonid and said: ‘They offer the squirrel nuts when it’s lost its teeth. You know, when I wrote War and Peace, I dreamed of having such illustrations. It’s really wonderful, just wonderful!’

      Working with Tolstoy on Resurrection at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoys’ country estate situated in the Tula region, was a privileged, immensely enjoyable yet challenging time for Leonid. ‘Some of the most memorable and happiest days of my life were spent reading the manuscript in the daytime and conversing with Tolstoy in the evenings.’ He would walk up and down the hall with the writer, discussing what he had read and planned to illustrate the following day. Once, when Tolstoy saw one of Leonid’s illustrations he exclaimed: ‘Ah, you express that better than me. I must go and change my prose.’

      Under incredible pressure to meet the deadlines of Tolstoy’s St Petersburg publisher and do the writer he worshipped justice, Leonid diligently completed thirty-three illustrations in six weeks, afterwards falling ill, burnt out with exhaustion. This intense collaboration made an enduring impression on Boris. ‘It was from our kitchen that my father’s remarkable illustrations for Tolstoy’s Resurrection were dispatched,’ he said.

      The novel appeared, chapter by chapter, in the journal Niva, a periodical edited by the Petersburg publisher Fyodor Marx. Boris was struck by how feverishly his father had to work to meet the deadline. ‘I remember how pressed for time father was. The issues of the journal came out regularly without delay,’ he wrote. ‘One had to be in time for each issue. Tolstoy kept back the proofs, revising them again and again. There was the risk that the illustrations would be at variance with the corrections subsequently introduced into it. But my father’s sketches came from the same source whence the author obtained his observations, the courtroom, the transit prison, the country, the railway. It was the reservoir of living details, the identical realistic presentation of ideas that saved him from the danger of digressing from the spirit of the original.’

      In view of the urgency of the matter, special precautions were taken to prevent any delay in the sending of the illustrations. The services of the conductors of the express trains at the Nikolayevsky railway were enlisted; the guards on the express trains to St Petersburg acted as messengers.

      ‘My imagination was impressed by the sight of a uniformed guard waiting outside our kitchen door, as on a station platform outside a railway carriage,’ wrote Boris. ‘Joiner’s glue sizzled on the range. The drawings were hastily sprinkled with fixative and glued on sheets of cardboard, and the parcels, wrapped up, tied and sealed up with sealing wax and handed over to the guard.’ The whole family was involved in this endeavour – Rosalia used to help with the pressured business of packing and mailing the illustrations, while the children watched, rapt.

      Thirty years later, on 21 May 1939, Pasternak wrote to his father: ‘Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter [Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya-Esenina] came to see me with a friend of hers and they talked a great deal about you. She had already spoken to me several times before about how she loved your illustrations. “Of all Tolstoy’s illustrators, not one has come close to him or embodies his ideas so faithfully as your father” – “Yes, yes, the drawings for Resurrection, they’re just brilliant,” put in the other. And we all agreed that you have no equal.’

      Tolstoy died on 7 November 1910 while ‘fleeing the world’ at Astapovo train station. The world’s press was camped out on the platform. Leonid was summoned to make a drawing of the deceased writer on his death bed and took the twenty-year-old Boris with him. Boris watched as his father drew in pastel the corner of the room where Countess Tolstoy sat ‘shrunken, mournful, humiliated’ at the head of the iron bed where her husband was lying. Sofia Tolstoy explained to Leonid that after Tolstoy left her, due to antagonisms between her and his disciples, she had tried to drown herself and had to be dragged out of the lake at Yasnaya Polyana. It took Leonid fifteen minutes to complete the death-bed drawing. In his notebook, Leonid wrote: ‘Astapovo. Morning. Sofia Andreyevna at his bedside. The people’s farewell. Finale of a family tragedy.’

      The summer before the 1917 Revolution, Boris Pasternak was visiting his parents at the apartment they rented in a manor house in a Molodi estate, 60 kilometres south of Moscow. It was thought that the house had served as a lodge for Catherine II’s journeys to the south of Crimea. The generous proportions of the manor and grand layout of the park, with its converging avenues, suggested royal origins. While his first collection of poetry, Above the Barriers, was being prepared, Pasternak went to work as an industrial office clerk to support the war effort. The twenty-seven-year-old poet was given a job in a chemical works in an industrial town called Tikhiye Gory, on the banks of the River Kama in the Republic of Tatarstan. This town, known as ‘Little Manchester’, was at an important intersection of geographical and trade routes uniting East and Western Russia. While fulfilling his daily filing duties, Pasternak did not cease his literary work. In order to earn money he began translating Swinburne’s trilogy of dramas about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.

      ‘In March 1917, when news of the Revolution that had broken out in Petersburg came through, I set out for Moscow,’ Pasternak later wrote. ‘At the Izhevsk factory I was to find and pick up Zbarsky, a fine fellow of an engineer