Word: ivinskaya
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DIED. OLGA IVINSKAYA, 83, longtime mistress of Russian novelist Boris Pasternak and inspiration for Lara, the heroine of his epic love story Doctor Zhivago; in Moscow...
Lately, however, there have been signs that Doctor Zhivago is assuming the place that Wilson had assigned to it. Interest has been quickened by the 1978 publication of A Captive of Time, the memoirs of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak...
Engrossed in love and work, Pasternak appeared oblivious to the menace of the purges. At the age of 58, he had fallen in love with Olga Ivinskaya, and in a state of exaltation much like Yuri Zhivago's over Lara, he wrote: "I am madly, unutterably happy in my free, open, all-embracing acceptance of life, an acceptance I ought to have known at the age of 18 or 20, but then I was constrained, then I had not yet grown up to basic things and did not know how wonderful is the language of life, the language...
...That Ivinskaya served two terms in the Gulag for her association with Pasternak is well known. This book discloses for the first time that Pasternak's cousin Sasha Freidenberg, Olga's brother, was arrested in 1937 and died in the camps, one of the millions of innocent victims of Stalin's Great Purge. Sasha's wife Musya, who was arrested before he was, survived...
Actually, as Pasternak's frantic letters to friends abroad show, his greatest fear during the terror-filled months following the Nobel award was for Ivinskaya. "She and her children are a kind of hostage for me," he wrote. In large part, his refusal of the Nobel Prize and his other concessions had been attempts to save her. Shortly before his death, he managed to send a letter to the West saying: "If, God forbid, they should arrest Olga, all toc sins should ring, just as would have been done in my own case, for an attack...