Parallel Lives
A Love Story from a Lost Continent
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary love story of two unlikely figures played out against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting.
Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. Parallel Lives is the story of how these two star-crossed lovers met, instantly understand each other, and were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together.
Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, and after the war rose to become the youngest commissar in the Soviet Union and keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting, and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal.
Iain Pears, who was neighbors with Larissa and Francis in Oxford, knew both his principal characters well. In telling Larissa and Francis’s love story, he is also capturing the Europe of a bygone era: a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Cold War romance reveals a lost world of mid-century art, culture, and political adventurism in the exquisite latest from novelist Pears (Arcadia). Soviet curator Larissa Salmina and British art historian Francis Haskell met and married in the 1960s, but not in the way readers might assume—Salmina was no dissident (she had to be talked into leaving Russia), though she was not starry-eyed about the regime either (she joked that her family was fond of Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD, because he killed the man who tortured her uncle). Pears uses the seemingly unlikely nature of the couple's relationship to explore the era's contradictions and nuances. Of the two, Haskell felt far more repressed—an Iraqi Jew, he never felt accepted at Eton and Cambridge—and it was the open and free Salmina who "saved" him by drawing him out of his shell. Salmina, meanwhile, was not overly bothered by the political repression of her homeland; while still living there, she cavalierly engaged in small acts of resistance without much apparent concern. Yet the two lovers also had much in common. By constructing a carefully layered account of their milieus, Pears shows that they were living "parallel lives" a continent apart, mostly hinging on their commitment to art—a common cultural currency that spanned Europe. It makes for captivatingly counterintuitive view of the postwar era.
