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Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent
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.
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Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent
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.
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Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent
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Overview
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.
Novelist and art historian Pears recounts the unlikely love story of Larissa Salmina (1931-2024), a Russian art curator, and British art historian Francis Haskell (1928-2000), who were Pears’ neighbors in Oxford. Drawing on conversations with Salmina and on Haskell’s 60 volumes of diaries, Pears conveys in rich detail the worlds from which the two emerged: Larissa’s in the repressive Soviet Union, Francis’ in class-conscious England. Their personalities were vastly different: Larissa was a rule-breaker, freewheeling and irreverent; Francis was self-doubting, lonely, and, from long years in one school and another, meticulous in following rules. Larissa feared for her Jewish friends as antisemitism raged; Francis hid his Jewish ancestry. Both were drawn to the arts. Larissa trained in art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, doing so well that she continued directly to a three-year postgraduate course at the Hermitage. In 1962, she was assigned to bring Soviet art to the Venice Biennale—works she lost when the freight car carrying them was decoupled from the rest of the train. Francis was in Venice at the time, studying art history on his own. Through a friend, they met and were instantly smitten. Although Larissa was married, she dived enthusiastically into an affair with Francis, breaking the terms of her visa to travel with him. For his part, he was amazed that anyone would fall in love with him and reveled in the newfound intimacy. Intricate machinations were involved to allow them to marry at Leningrad’s Palace of Marriages in 1965. Though Larissa, who never aspired to emigrate, was initially unhappy when they settled in England, her resilience and adaptability, and the couple’s shared spirit of adventure, sustained a long, loving marriage.
