Yet, partly out of cowardice, partly out of selfishness, and partly out of a declared unwillingness to 'live a life together on the ruins of somebody else's,' Pasternak's long public affair with Olga left her woefully vulnerable.

He did not do the one thing in his power to do: he did not save her.' By divorcing Zinaida, his second wife, and marrying Olga, Anna Pasternak argues - as did Olga herself, often angrily - the author would have given his lover and helpmeet status and protection. But while he had the backbone to defy Soviet repression in his literary work, he was less steadfast in his personal life: 'his great omission was that he did not match her cast-iron loyalty and moral fortitude. Did Boris use Olga? Sifting through the evidence more than 50 years after his death, his great-niece concludes that Boris Pasternak truly loved Olga Ivinskaya. With Lara, Anna Pasternak sets out to correct the record. Olga's connection with the persecuted author and her role in ushering his novel into print made her 'a pawn in a highly political game' that landed her in the brutal Soviet gulags - twice.Īnna Pasternak, a British journalist and granddaughter of Boris Pasternak's sister, Josephine, (who married a Pasternak) notes up front in this sympathetic account of Olga's heartbreaking, courageous ordeal that 'both Olga and her daughter, Irina, have received a bad rap from my family.' Relatives and biographers, she writes, have regularly 'belittled and dismissed' the woman who was Boris's mistress from 1946 until his death in 1960, at age 70, as 'a temptress' and 'a woman on the make.' Why? Because recognizing Olga's role in the lionized writer's life would have meant acknowledging his 'moral fallibility.' What price love? Lara chronicles the horrifically steep costs for Olga Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak's mistress, muse, and model for Yuri Zhivago's lover in Doctor Zhivago (alluringly played by Julie Christie in David Lean's 1965 movie adapation).

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