Boris Pasternak and Olga.. A Divine Love…
Moscow… trembled…
Shivered…
In icy… freezing…
Sub-zero… weather…
It was… October 1946…
In the… Russian Empire…
Under… Stalin’s socialist…
Cruel… terror…
Boris… Pasternak…
Met his… soulmate and lover…
Olga… Ivinskaya…
It was… love at first sight.
Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning soviet Russian poet.. novelist.. one of the most brilliant writers in Russia.. and the author of the famous novel Doctor Zhivago.
Olga… writer and poet herself.. of German-Polish descent born in Russia.. was thrilled when “this god” stood before her.
The attraction between the thirty-four year old blonde beauty and the fifty-six year old handsome poet.. was immediate.
“And now there he was at my desk by the window, the most unstinting man in the world, to whom it had been given to speak in the name of the clouds, the stars and the wind, who had found eternal words to say about men’s passion and woman’s weakness. People say that he summons the stars to his table and the whole world to the carpet at his bedside.”
Immortalised in the powerful.. moving prize-winning novel Doctor Zhivago, which takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the first World War.
Dr. Yuri Zhivago and his lovely nurse Lara in the epic film.. completely embodied Olga and Pasternak‘s love story.
Pasternak poured his passion and adoration for Olga.. through Lara.. in Doctor Zhivago.
“She has no coquetry.. she does not wish to please or look beautiful. She despises all that side of a woman’s life. It’s as though she were punishing herself for being lovely. But this proud hostility to herself makes her more attractive than ever.”
But due to the author’s courageous and “independent minded stance” on the autocratic, cruel socialist state… the lovers’ fate was…
Tortured…
Doomed…
Yet… although both married to others.. they “comme tous les amoureux“.. could not help being completely inseparable. It was a many splendoured.. heady period for them.
However a dark black cloud.. hovering.. heavy with dangerous foreboding.. was looming.
Olga… was arrested.
On October 6, 1949, Stalin‘s henchmen took her to the horrifying.. terrifying Moscow Lubyanka prison.. where she was relentlessly interrogated over the controversial book her lover was writing against the state.. since Pasternak had special protection from the tyrant dictator himself.. ordering his KGB men “to leave the cloud dweller alone”.
Instead.. they took their revenge on his lover.. torturing her relentlessly.
Hearing of his lover’s plight and misery.. weeping.. Pasternak confided in anguish and shock to a friend..
“She was put in jail on my account.. I owe my life, and the fact they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance.”
He added.. taking the love of his life away from him was.. “like death.. even worse.”
In the meantime.. Pasternak dreamt of a utopia and.. “the birth of an enlightened, affluent, middle-class.. open to occidental influences.. progressive, intelligent, artistic.”
Olga was freed from the Gulag in 1953, when Stalin died. Boris remarked about the man who tortured their life.. “a terrible man died, a man who drenched Russia in blood.”
Promising his wife.. who nursed him through ill health while Olga was in prison.. to stop the love affair with his lover.. yet the moment they met again.. they were “seized by a kind of desperate tenderness.”
They were inseparable.. locked together in an eternal embrace.
Olga.. inspired him.. lifted his spirit. He would insist to visitors that “Lara exists, go and meet her”.. while handing them Olga’s phone number.
Writing Doctor Zhivago feverishly while his lover was in prison.. he wrote of their divine love.. depicted by Yuri and Lara.. “To them.. the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness, were moments of revelation, of greater understanding of life and of themselves.”
In Boris‘ final years.. when he had to continue the “ideological battle” with the state.. Olga inspired and lifted his spirit with her tenderness and love.. but most of all he treasured her unwavering loyalty and understanding.
Pasternak‘s last poem…
“How I remember solstice days
Through many winters long completed!
Each unrepeatable, unique,
And each one countless times repeated.
Of all these days, these only days,
When one rejoiced in the impression
That time had stopped, there grew in years
An unforgettable succession.
Each one of them I can evoke.
The year is to midwinter moving,
The roofs are dripping, roads are soaked,
And on the ice the sun is brooding.
Then lovers hastily are drawn
To one another, vague and dreaming,
And in the heat, upon a tree
The sweating nesting-box is steaming.
And sleepy clock-hands laze away
The clock-face wearily ascending.
Eternal, endless is the day,
And the embrace is never-ending.”
Olga‘s role.. who was arrested again after Pasternak‘s death.. was compared to other famous muses for Russian poets.. “As Pushkin would not be complete without Anna Kern, and Yesenin would be nothing without Isadora, so Pasternak would not be Pasternak without Olga Ivinskaya, who was his inspiration for Doctor Zhivago.”
Overwhelmed… with emotion…
My eyes… heavy with tears…
For two lovers… who fell in love…
In a cold chilly… Russian climate…
Will forever… live in our hearts…
Legendary… beyond torture…
Their… immortal…
Sublime… love…
Will… forever…
Be…
Free.
a.