Afternoon. You had an excellent
lunch/dinner at the Conch Republic. Linda and Bill came to the condo and you
chatted for an hour or so; Kim, Paul and the boys excused themselves after a
half hour or so and headed to the pool and beach. After Linda and Bill left you
and Carol enjoyed the quiet time reading the Sunday Tampa Times (St. Petersburg Times). There was a new book
review of Lara which you read with intensity and interest.
1634 hours. The focus of the book is on
the love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya.
**
**
BOOK REVIEWS [NPR]
In 'Lara,' The True Story Of
Pasternak's Muse And Mistress.
Lara
The
Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for
Doctor Zhivago
by Anna
Pasternak
Hardcover, 310 pages
What price love? Lara chronicles
the horrifically steep costs for Olga Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak's mistress,
muse, and model for Yuri Zhivago's lover in Doctor Zhivago (alluringly
played by Julie Christie in David Lean's 1965 movie adapation). Olga's
connection with the persecuted author and her role in ushering his novel into
print made her "a pawn in a highly political game" that landed her in
the brutal Soviet gulags — twice.
Anna Pasternak, a British journalist
and granddaughter of Boris Pasternak's sister, Josephine, (who married a
Pasternak) notes up front in this sympathetic account of Olga's heartbreaking,
courageous ordeal that "both Olga and her daughter, Irina, have received a
bad rap from my family." Relatives and biographers, she writes, have
regularly "belittled and dismissed" the woman who was Boris's
mistress from 1946 until his death in 1960, at age 70, as "a temptress"
and "a woman on the make." Why? Because recognizing Olga's role in
the lionized writer's life would have meant acknowledging his "moral
fallibility."
With Lara, Anna Pasternak sets
out to correct the record. Did Boris use Olga? Sifting through the evidence
more than 50 years after his death, his great-niece concludes that Boris
Pasternak truly loved Olga Ivinskaya. But while he had the backbone to defy
Soviet repression in his literary work, he was less steadfast in his personal
life: "his great omission was that he did not match her cast-iron loyalty
and moral fortitude. He did not do the one thing in his power to do: he did not
save her." By divorcing Zinaida, his second wife, and marrying Olga, Anna
Pasternak argues — as did Olga herself, often angrily — the author would have
given his lover and helpmeet status and protection. Yet, partly out of
cowardice, partly out of selfishness, and partly out of a declared
unwillingness to "live a life together on the ruins of somebody
else's," Pasternak's long public affair with Olga left her woefully
vulnerable.
The couple met in 1946 at the offices
of the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir, where Olga, a twice-widowed,
blond-haired, blue-eyed, 34-year-old "tired beauty," worked as an
editorial assistant. The revered poet, 22 years her senior, was 10 years into
his unhappy second marriage — to Zinaida, the wife he'd stolen from one of his
former best friends. He had one son from each of his marriages. Olga had a son,
Mitia, and a daughter, Irina — who was immortalized as Lara's daughter Katenka
in Doctor Zhivago. Irina, too, paid for her close relationship with the
writer, and was sent to a labor camp with her mother within months after his
death.
Pasternak's parents and two sisters had
left Russia for Germany and England in 1921, but he refused to abandon the
country he loved and live as an exile; this unwavering loyalty to his homeland
enhanced his enduring stature. While Pasternak was dogged by the KGB, vilified
as a Jew, and blocked from publishing for years — forced to subsist on his work
as a renowned translator of Shakespeare and Goethe — his life was spared
because of an order from Stalin: "Leave him in peace, he's a cloud
dweller."
The protection did not extend to his
lover. First arrested in 1949, Olga refused to denounce Boris through months of
interrogations in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison — where she lost the child
she was carrying. Postcards from Boris (pretending to write as her mother, a
ruse that probably fooled no one) helped sustain her during grueling, blazing
hot summers and arctic winters in the abysmal Potma labor camp. Boris,
meanwhile, argued continuously for Olga's release and helped support her family
with his meager earnings as a translator, despite suffering a severe heart
attack during her incarceration.
BOOK
REVIEWS
Lara is both a tragic love story and a
dramatic account of the sheer determination it took to write and publish an
uncompromising literary masterpiece under dismal circumstances. The book,
enhanced by family photographs, vividly captures Olga's risky loyalty to the
defiant, desperate, and strikingly handsome author during increasingly hostile
persecution in the late 1950s, when Doctor Zhivago was first
published in Italy and Pasternak was forced to renounce the 1958 Nobel Prize in
literature. As Julian Barnes also makes clear in The Noise of Time, his
novel about Dmitri Shostakovich, the toll of artistic oppression is acute; it
can be argued that Pasternak, who had been called "the last romantic in
Russia," was essentially hounded to death.
With
its overview of Russian history in the mid-20th century, including the privations
of World War II, the abominations of Stalin's Great Terror, and Khruschev's
insufficient thaw, Lara is a chilling, upsetting reminder of what can
happen when free speech is curtailed. One particularly sobering fact among
many: Doctor Zhivago wasn't published in Russia until 1988.
Review
selected and edited from NPR (not the Sunday Tampa Times)
**
**
1652 hours. Doctor Zhivago is, to
me, the most romantic film I have ever seen. I watched it untold times and was
absorbed into the main characters.
**
**
Selected
and heavily edited from Wikipedia
Doctor Zhivago is a 1965
British-Italian epic romantic drama film directed by David Lean. It is set in
Russia between the years prior to World War I and the Russian Civil War of
1917–1922, and is based on the Boris Pasternak novel of the same name. While
immensely popular in the West, the book was banned in the Soviet Union for
decades. For this reason, the film could not be made in the Soviet Union and
was instead filmed mostly in Spain.
The film stars Omar Sharif in the title
role as Yuri Zhivago and Julie Christie as his love interest Lara Antipova.
Contemporary critics were generally
disappointed, complaining of its length at over three hours, and claiming that
it trivialized history, but acknowledging the intensity of the romantic drama
and the treatment of human themes. Over time, however, the film's reputation
has improved greatly.
As of 2016, it is the eighth
highest-grossing film of all time in the United States and Canada, adjusted for
ticket-price inflation. It was ranked by the American Film Institute in 1998 as
the 39th greatest film on their 100 Years Movies list, and by the British Film
Institute the following year as the 27th greatest British film of all time.
**
**
Post. Your passions for the film's love
story are self-evident throughout the blog's history. - Amorella
No comments:
Post a Comment