Foreign News: A Lost Lady

Lara was "the purest thing in the world," and "nothing equaled her in spiritual beauty." She was like Russia itself: "martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored." In these words, Boris Pasternak described the beautiful heroine of his great novel, Doctor Zhivago, known to readers the world over—except in Russia, where Zhivago is banned.

Hanged Husband. What was not generally known was the fact that Pasternak had drawn Lara from a real-life model: Olga Ivinskaya, 55, a woman born to poetry and suffering. Pasternak first met her in postwar Moscow, where she was working as a translator for the State Publishing House. Olga had already experienced the full bitterness of Soviet life. Her first husband hanged himself to avoid arrest in the Stalin purges of 1938. Her second died fighting for Russia against the invading Nazis. Each had left her a child: Irina and Dmitry. Olga was a poet herself, and her acquaintanceship with Pasternak grew into an intense and lasting intimacy.

Their growing friendship was interrupted in 1948 for a typically Russian reason: she was hustled off to Moscow's grim Lubianka Prison and reportedly tortured to get a confession implicating Pasternak. Olga steadfastly refused and was sent to a concentration camp.

Five years later, Olga was freed in the amnesty following Stalin's death. She returned to Moscow and Pasternak. In her absence, Pasternak had supported her two children, and he became especially fond of Irina, regarding her as his adopted daughter. Olga moved to the writers' suburb of Peredelkino. With Daughter Irina, she took a cottage near the dacha occupied by Pasternak and his wife Zinaida. Olga acted as Pasternak's literary agent, typed his manuscripts and helped correct his proofs.

When Pasternak was savagely attacked for his brief acceptance of the 1958 Nobel Prize, Olga tried to persuade the Soviet authorities to behave with more intelligence. The authorities retorted that she should have used her influence to make Pasternak follow the official line in Doctor Zhivago. Fearing that Olga might be made scapegoat for his doctrinal errors, Pasternak wrote friends in Paris: "If, God forbid, they should arrest Olga, I will send you a telegram saying someone has caught scarlet fever. In that event all tocsins should be made to ring, just as would have been done in my case, for an attack on her is, in fact, a blow at me."

Expired Visa. The blow did not fall until Pasternak died last May. Soviet officialdom's first threatening move was both petty and spiteful. Irina, by now a pretty girl in her early twenties, had become engaged to a French student attending school in Moscow. Several weeks after Pasternak's death, the authorities fixed a date for the wedding—ten days after the boy's visa expired. Then he was refused a renewal of his visa and forced to leave Russia.