ABSTRACT
Boris Pasternak was always an endearing figure in the West to those who knew him and his poetry: a handsome dreamer, warm, affectionate, sincere, a little 'unworldly', wise in the ways of Shakespeare and Goethe. Although he remained married, Pasternak had fallen in love with Olga Ivinskaya, probably the model for his heroine Lara in Doctor Zhivago. He first met Ivinskaya in 1946, in the offices of Novyi mir, where she was working. A group of British authors, including Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley and Greene, all normally friendly to the USSR, appealed to the Union of Soviet Writers, insisting that Doctor Zhivago was 'not a political document'. Ilya Ehrenburg commented that too many passages in Doctor Zhivago are 'devoted to what the author has not seen or heard'. Even Pasternak's friend, Anna Akhmatova, in conversation with Lydia Chukovskaya, complained that the characters 'lack vitality, they are contrived'.
