Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya

Olga Ivinskaya is Boris’s lover and the muse for the main female character, Lara, in his newest novel, Doctor Zhivago. She is a main character of the novel and the narrator of her own story. She is a beautiful, blond widow who worked for the Russian literary magazine, Novy Mir. There, she met the great Russian writer and poet, Boris Pasternak, and they fell in love in an extramarital affair. Olga had two children, Ira and Mitya, from her two late husbands, and lived with her mother in a Moscow apartment. Her narration began in 1949 when she was seized from her apartment and imprisoned in the Lubyanka. At the time, she was pregnant with Boris’s child and interrogated nightly about Doctor Zhivago, revealing nothing. Upon confirmation of her “anti-Soviet opinions,” she lost her unborn baby and was sentenced to time in the Gulag (16).

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