verse for Olga: ‘My life, my angel, I love you truly. April 4th, 1947.’
From the moment that they became lovers, Boris and Olga were inseparable. He would come to her apartment every day at six or seven in the morning. Spring that year turned into a hot summer: the lime trees were laden with blossom, the boulevards seemed to have the fragrance of molten honey. They were completely in love, able to exist on little sleep, fuelled by the adrenalin of desire, excitement and yearning. Boris wrote a poem called ‘Summer in Town’, about this time. It became one of Yury Zhivago’s poems in Doctor Zhivago.
Conversation in a half tone.
With a flurry of haste
The whole sheaf of hair
Is gathered up from the nape of the neck.
From under the heavy comb
A helmeted woman looks out,
Her head thrown back
With all its plaited hair.
Outside, the hot night
Promises a storm,
The passers-by scatter,
Shuffling home.
Brief thunder
Echoes sharply,
And the wind stirs
The curtain at the window.
Sultry
Silence.
Fingers of lightning
Search the sky.
And when the dawn-filled,
Heated morning
Has dried the puddles in the streets
After the night rain
The centuries-old, scented,
Blossoming lime-trees
Frown
For lack of sleep.
As the affair between the besotted writer and Olga intensified, tensions escalated between Olga and her mother, Maria Kostko. For while Olga and even little Irina were excited that a poet of Boris’s calibre had entered their lives, Maria was vehemently against the union. All she wanted was for her daughter to find the emotional and financial security of a suitable third husband. ‘It is impossible, unthinkable, unjustifiable to have a relationship with a married man,’ Maria repeatedly reproached Olga. ‘We even have the same age, him and I.’ It must have been doubly alarming for Maria that her daughter was not only embarking on a relationship with a married man but such a famous and controversial figure. In her eyes this would have been akin to Olga signing her death warrant, given the frequency and ferocity of arrests. She had good reason to fear, for Maria had direct experience of Stalinist repression, having spent three years in the gulag during the war. Worse, the betrayal had originated close to home: it was believed that her second son-in-law, Alexander Vinogradov, had tipped off the authorities, saying Maria had ‘slandered the leader’ in a private conversation about Stalin in their home. It is thought that part of his motive was to get his mother-in-law out of their crowded apartment. A lawyer revealed to Olga that there was indeed a letter of denunciation from Vinogradov towards her mother in Maria’s police files, a revelation that caused fearful rows between Vinogradov and Olga before he died in 1942. Subsequently Olga learned that the camp where her mother was being kept had suffered enemy bombing; prison order had broken down and prisoners were dying of hunger.
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