Book Notes: Lara by Anna Pasternak

I have no idea why there are men who enjoy siccing the wife and the mistress at each other and living between two harpies tearing them into pieces. The genius poet Boris Pasternak was one such man. God gave him an extraordinary talent but nothing whatsoever by way of a conscience or morals, and no matter how much his distant descendant Ann Pasternak tries to whitewash his tawdriness in Lara, she’s not very successful.

Lara tells the story of Olga Ivitskaya, Pasternak’s long-time mistress. The author of Lara for some reason concluded that Olga was the inspiration behind the main character of Doctor Zhivago whose name was Lara, hence the title of the book. This makes no sense because Boris Pasternak started writing the novel before meeting Olga and the most distinguishing fact about the otherwise insipid character of Lara – which is that she was a victim of a pedophile – is based on Pasternak’s wife Zinaida on whom he was cheating with Olga. Of course, Zinaida had broken up her own marriage with Pasternak’s best friend as well as the poet’s marriage to another woman in order to become the wife, so it’s not like she wasn’t complicit in creating this whole mess of a love triangle.

Like some sort of a Mexican bureaucrat, the poet made the wife and the mistress live in close proximity to each other. He spent all day trudging from the Big House where the wife lived to the Little House that was the abode of the mistress. The children of everybody involved had to observe the ongoing melodrama for years.

Olga was one of those despicable women who abandon their children the second a fresh pair of trousers appears on the horizon. She explained to her very young kids that her personal life took precedence over them and turned them into a supporting cast for her decades-long fruitless attempts to get the famous writer to dump his wife and marry her. Pasternak didn’t reward her efforts but the Soviet government did, sending Olga to the GULAG twice. One wouldn’t even mind given how horrible this woman was but the tragedy of the situation is that Ivitskaya’s miserable daughter from another relationship was sent to the camps, too.

I absolutely have a double standard for geniuses. I’d never excuse pedophilia or murder but everything else pales in importance compared to producing great art. Humans do a lot of shitty stuff, both individually and collectively. But what redeems humanity is the creation of beauty. For reasons we cannot comprehend, God chose Pasternak to be one of the conduits of beauty he sends to edify and console us. Pasternak was a good conduit, working very hard on bringing this gift to the people. I believe that this excuses his moral nastiness and I also believe that neither Zinaida nor Olga have such an excuse. Please understand that it isn’t their sexual immorality that makes me say these women were vicious harpies from hell. That I don’t care about because they were all equally shit in that situation. If these women were childless, I wouldn’t say a word. They weren’t, though. They sacrificed their children most eagerly to feed their own need to be known as wives (or pseudo wives) of a famous man. That’s shitty and inexcusable. Pasternak was also a crap father, which is equally shit and inexcusable. But at least he created art, and these women created nothing except squabbling.

It’s a nice book, well-written, even though it’s seriously Putinoid in its mood. Pasternak is British and you can’t expect her to know when she’s reciting Putinoid propaganda.