No happy endings

Between agreeing to review this book and receiving it, I got worried. Like many, I adore Doctor Zhivago with its tragic love story between the eponymous doctor-poet and the beautiful Lara, set in post-revolutionary Russia. When in Moscow, I followed the trail of literary pilgrims to Boris Pasternak’s dacha in the writers’ village of Peredelkino. I also had fond memories of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in David Lean’s epic 1965 film; never underestimate the enhancing effect on romance of fur hats, sparkling snow and long-distance trains. Anna Pasternak, the writer’s great niece, is a journalist and Daily Mail columnist who made her name with Princess in Love. This 1995 collaboration with ‘love rat’ (as the tabloids dubbed him) James Hewitt detailed his affair with Princess Diana and was followed by the 2008 novel Daisy Dooley Does Divorce.

So it was with trepidation that I opened Lara. How would the author move from love rat to literary muse? And was Olga Ivinskaya, the supposed model for the character of Lara, anything special? Christopher Barnes, Pasternak’s biographer, dismissed (‘slut-shamed’?) Olga as an ‘ambitious and manipulative’ adventuress who fabricated a narrative, placing herself centre stage, and who probably invented her pregnancy by Pasternak and the miscarriage while imprisoned in the terrifying Lubyanka. In fact, he claims, it was just a ‘saccharine flirtation’ with the great man, who admitted a ‘sweet tooth for female company’. The New York Times also summed up a clique of Russian scholars and intellectuals’ opinion of Olga as ‘Lara-Shmara’, suggesting that she had cooperated with the KGB. Unsurprisingly, the Pasternak family demonised Olga and tried to write her out of history.

What a pleasurable surprise, then, to find that Lara is a marvellously interesting book in which the author makes a convincing case for Olga as Pasternak’s great love, literary support, and at least a partial model for the heroine of Doctor Zhivago.