Part I
Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine…
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
The year 2020 signals both the sixtieth year since Boris Pasternak died and the one hundred thirtieth year since he was born (1890-1960). There is much to the literary and political life in the midst of Stalinist Russia that Pasternak endured and wrote about, but this two-part article will focus on Pasternak himself, his epic novel, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton.
In the 1980s I was on staff with Amnesty International and for a time was chairperson of Group 1 Amnesty International in Canada. When Amnesty International began in 1961, the organization had adopted a variety of Prisoners of Conscience (POC) and one of the women highlighted in Persecution 1961 was Olga Ivinskaya (1912-1995). Ivinskaya has been seen by many as the Larissa (Lara) character in Doctor Zhivago, just as Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, can be seen as Larissa’s daughter, Katya. The fact that Olga Ivinskaya played a significant role in getting Doctor Zhivago published in English in 1958 meant she was suspect by the Russian State and the KGB. When Pasternak died in 1960, Ivinskaya was arrested and given an eight-year prison sentence and her daughter a shorter sentence. Irina was released from prison in 1962 and Olga in 1964. It was not until 1988 that Gorbachev rehabilitated Ivinskaya’s reputation.
The ongoing relationship between the novel Doctor Zhivago and reality has been told from various angles, including Olga Ivinskaya’s own book, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak (1978), and in a more updated version, Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak (2017). Moscow has Ears Everywhere: New Investigations on Pasternak and Ivinskaya by Paolo Mancosu (2019) is another treatment of the subject. There are decided points of convergence and overlap between Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak’s layered life. But to the novel I now turn.
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This article was first posted in Radix Magazine
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