Lara by Anna Pasternak

Author:Anna Pasternak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

What is the hour? It’s dark. Must be three.

Again, I fear, I shall not sleep a wink.

The cowherd in the village will crack his whip at dawn,

And a cold breeze blow through the window

That looks out onto the yard.

And I’m alone.

But no: engulfing me in all your whiteness

You are with me here.

A friend of Boris and Olga’s, Nikolai Liubimov, a Spanish and French translator, visited the writer at Peredelkino. Afterwards he told Olga that Pasternak seemed ‘heart-rendingly lonely’, coming down the stairs from his study to join Liubimov in the drawing room, where Zinaida and her women friends were playing bridge. ‘They all cast disapproving glances at him.’

Zinaida’s trump card, according to Olga, was that she ‘managed to create a kind of “Olympus”’ at the Big House in Peredelkino – ‘everything there could not have been better arranged for living and working’.

Yet Boris did not want material luxuries. The only luxuries he required were the peace and quiet to write. A desk to work at and a study were essential to him. Not as mere creature comforts but for the sake of his writing, which demanded an orderly way of life.

‘I think Zinaida Nikolayevna understood very well that by making a good home for BL, she strengthened her position as his legal wife and the mistress of the “big” house,’ said Olga. ‘This made it easier for her to reconcile herself to the open existence of the “little” house and she knew that any ill-considered attempt to put pressure on BL would have meant disaster for her.’

Although Boris did the bulk of his writing in his study, he would visit Olga a few times a day, and always early evening, with the pages he had written. Or he would sit at the table with the pages he was working on spread out before him, while Olga curled up with a book on the sofa. This cosy domesticity was in complete contrast to his state of solitude in his large upstairs study in the Big House, which Zinaida only entered to clean. Yet, to Olga’s consternation, Boris refused to leave Zinaida or further unsettle the status quo.

‘BL was so tormented by compassion and pangs of conscience because he no longer loved Zinaida Nikolayevna,’ said Ariadna Efron. She told Olga that ‘this uncouth woman who had failed to respond to his love, reminded him of Little Red Riding Hood who had lost her way in the forest, and he wept tears of pity about her’. Speaking about Zinaida, Boris would say to Olga: ‘I do not pity you, and I hope to God it will always be like that with you and me. Let us save our pity for others. I saw that ageing woman standing by the fence and thought: “You wouldn’t want to change places with her, would you?” So let us bestow the blessing of mercy on those around us.’ Olga later wrote of Boris’s dual lives – split between the two women and two homes:

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