Russia: Lara’s Return

“The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, of unadorned beauty-these things were ours,” wept the beautiful Lara over the body of her lover, Dr. Zhivago. “But the small problems of practical life-things like the reshaping of the planet “these things, no thank you, they are not for us.” Soon afterward, the heroine of Poet Boris Pasternak’s great novel was arrested by Soviet secret police “and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the concentration camps of the north.” Lara’s fictional fate was prophetic. In 1960, after Pasternak himself died, So viet secret police arrested Olga Ivinskaya, the handsome blonde poetess who had been Pasternak’s great love, soul mate, literary agent and secretary -and his model for the tender and generous Lara. It was the second time Olga had had to pay for her devotion: after the Stalin regime accused Paster nak of intellectual heresy, she spent four years in a concentration camp, was re leased only in the amnesty following Stalin’s death in 1953. Last week, possibly as a consequence of Khrushchev’s ouster, Olga, at 59, was again free.

After a fashion. During her four years as librarian of the Potma Work Camp in Siberia, she had written a sheaf of poems-but she needed government permission to publish them. To keep her self alive, she hoped to return to her work as a translator of foreign poets, but that too required government ap proval. Since her small apartment on Moscow’s Potapov Street had been turned over to strangers, she was even dependent on the state for new quarters. But the small problems of practical life were no more for Olga than they had been for Lara. She spent her first day in Moscow at Pasternak’s grave.