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It can be subtitled “a love story of a lost continent”, but the new non-fiction work by Iain Pears will disappoint readers in search of romance. Lovers – The distinguished historians of art Francis Haskell and Larissa Salmina – meet at the ninth of the 11 chapters.
Even then, passion takes second place in the Soviet bureaucracy, spies, Cambridge apostles and flickering lovers on marriage. The English husband is not sure of his sexuality, while the Russian bride, married to someone else at the time of his meeting in Venice in 1962 and for a period not specified thereafter, enjoys an “adventure” with an old acquaintance.
Such details, also Salaces, are fundamental for Parallel lives. To be fair to Larissa, she did not expect a monogamy. Despite the loss of her virginity because of a Parisian “semi -prorostigious” (semi -prostitated “, visiting Italian brothels and having a history of homosexual relations – all recorded in the 60s of his diaries deposited at the National Gallery in London – Francis turned out to be the most strait of the two.
This joint biography is a story of youth: it does not examine the 35 years of marriage which lasted until the death of Francis in 2000 and the following 24 years of Larissa widowhood. Iain Pears, himself a historian of art and author of a dozen historical and detective novels, was taught by Francis and well known the couple. His book is a work of sewing and leisure at the complex time rather than a testimony of friendship. The real fascination is in the second part of the subtitle, in the lost continent of mid-20th century Europe. The hot war was followed by cold warAnd in Berlin, the divisions were literally placed in stone.
Having grown up at the opposite ideological and geographic ends of Europe, Francis and Larissa represent a generation too often overlooked – in a hurry between war heroes and baby boomers. He started before the rattle of the death of a common cultural cannon, which meant that lovers were influenced by the same books as well as the pieces, the opera and the ballet; Activities that could now be considered elitist and Euro-Parrochiaux.
Paradoxically, London seems more without joy than Leningrad. Even during the most inhuman siege of the Second World War, Larissa finds moments of redemption, in cars with a sweet smell flowing on oils of perfume because nothing else was available, or casual pieces of bread from a local bakery. Meanwhile, Francis can only find happiness by crossing the English chain. If intercourse began in 1963, as Philip Larkin said, it was more true from England of Francis than from Larissa Russia.
In the end, one wonders if the gloom of Francis could only have been attenuated by a person as concerned as Larissa. Although his friends suspected that theirs was a marriage whiteThe genre that has helped many Eastern Europeans from that time escape west, Larissa has played against the type by being reluctant to leave Leningrad. She had grown up with the privileges of a daughter of an officer of the Red Army, who was, unusually, descendant of a noble family, and she won, at an unlikely age, the prestigious position of conservative at the Hermitage Museum. Despite the decline of any interest in politics, she was a member of the party, apparently more lively to join her ranks than her father, who reluctantly made her during the war. Indeed, joining the party required a solid history in Komsomol, the communist youth.
Francis, on the other hand, considered himself a permanent foreigner. The haskells were Iraqi Jewish bankers – although his criticism of Ballet left little money to his son – while his mother came from an intellectual family of Ukrainian Jewish emigrants in Paris. He grew up with French as a first language. Anti -Semitism seemed to be omnipresent: in Eon, “the more sporty variety of the student went on a hunt for the Jews, the holders and throwing them into the Thames”.
Fear has persisted even after it became an accomplished initiate, not only because of being an old Ethonian with a Cambridge diploma and an Oxford teacher, but also by the ability of his family to draw strings. The way of Larissa out of Russia was smoothed by Francis' father appealing to favors in the Soviet Embassy of London, and she received a British passport barely 11 weeks after her arrival in Great Britain, graciousness of Roy Jenkins, then of the new Minister of Labor.
While Pears digests the mountain of the intimate newspapers of a young man (in a revealing way, Francis stopped keeping them after marriage) and tries to see the world through the brilliant of the memories of Larissa (she charms her as surely as she charmed the world everywhere) ,,,, Parallel lives Finally becomes a fascinating puzzle of the lost continent of memory.
Parallel lives: a love story of a lost continent By iain Pears William Collins £ 18.99 / (from August) ww Norton $ 29.99, 288 pages
Vesna Goldsworthy is the author of the novel “Iron Curtain: A Love Story” (Chatto and Windus / WW Norton)
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