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It may be subtitled “A Love Story from a Lost Continent” but Iain Pears’ new work of non-fiction will disappoint readers seeking romance. The lovers — the distinguished art historians Francis Haskell and Larissa Salmina — meet in the ninth of 11 chapters.
Even then, passion takes second place to Soviet bureaucracy, spies, Cambridge Apostles and the lovers’ vacillations about marriage. The English bridegroom is unsure of his sexuality, while the Russian bride, married to someone else at the time of their encounter in Venice in 1962 and for some unspecified period afterwards, enjoys a “fling” with an old acquaintance.
Such details, however salacious, are fundamental to Parallel Lives. To be fair to Larissa, she had never expected monogamy. Despite losing his virginity to a (female) Parisian “semi-prostitute”, visiting Italian brothels and having a history of homosexual relationships — all recorded in the 60 or so volumes of his diaries deposited at the National Gallery in London — Francis turned out to be the more strait-laced of the two.
This joint biography is a story of youth: it does not examine the 35 years of marriage that lasted until Francis’s death in 2000 and the subsequent 24 years of Larissa’s widowhood. Iain Pears, himself an art historian and the author of a dozen historical and detective novels, was taught by Francis and knew the couple well. His book is a work of sleuthing and intricate period recreation 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. Hot war was followed by cold war, and in Berlin the divisions were literally set in stone.
Growing up at opposite ideological and geographical ends of Europe, Francis and Larissa represent a generation too often overlooked — squeezed between war heroes and baby boomers. It began before the death rattle of a common cultural canon, which meant that the lovers were influenced by the same books as well as plays, opera and ballet; pursuits that might now be seen as elitist and Euro-parochial.
Paradoxically, London seems more joyless than Leningrad. Even during the most inhumane siege of the second world war, Larissa finds moments of redemption, in sweet-smelling cars running on perfume oils because nothing else was available, or occasional pieces of bread from a local bakery. Meanwhile, Francis can only find happiness by crossing the English Channel. If sexual intercourse began in 1963, as Philip Larkin put it, that was truer of Francis’s England than of Larissa’s Russia.
In the end one wonders if Francis’s gloom could only have been alleviated by someone as relentlessly positive as Larissa. Although his friends suspected that theirs was a marriage blanc, of the kind that helped many East Europeans of that era escape westwards, Larissa played against type by being reluctant to leave Leningrad. She had grown up with the privileges of a daughter of a Red Army officer, one who was, unusually, descended from a noble family, and she gained, at an improbably young age, the prestigious position of curator at the Hermitage museum. Despite disclaiming any interest in politics, she was a party member, apparently keener to join its ranks than her father, who did so reluctantly during the war. Indeed, joining the party required a solid track record in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth.
Francis, on the other hand, saw himself as a permanent outsider. The Haskells were Iraqi Jewish bankers — though his ballet critic father left little money to his son — while his mother came from an intellectual family of Ukrainian Jewish émigrés in Paris. He grew up with French as his first language. Antisemitism seemed omnipresent: at Eton “the sportier variety of pupil would go on a Jew hunt, taunting them and throwing them into the Thames.”
The fear persisted even after he became a consummate insider, not just by virtue of being an old Etonian with a Cambridge degree and an Oxford professorship, but also through his family’s ability to pull strings. Larissa’s path out of Russia was smoothed by Francis’s father calling on favours in the Soviet Embassy in London, and she received a British passport just 11 weeks after arrival in Britain, courtesy of Roy Jenkins, then the newly appointed Labour home secretary.
While Pears digests the mountain of a young man’s diaries (tellingly, Francis ceased to keep them after marriage) and tries to see the world through the gloss of Larissa’s recollection (she charms him just as surely as she charmed the world wherever she went), Parallel Lives ultimately becomes a fascinating jigsaw puzzle of the lost continent of memory.
Parallel Lives: A Love Story from 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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