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Parallel Lives
Iain Pears
A love story from 1962 - from a different age -
from the Soviet Union of 1960 and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite.
A world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. And it has gone forever.
Iain Pears was born in 1955, educated at Wadham College and Wolfson College, Oxford. He was chief corporate correspondent at Reuters, won a Getty Fellowship to Yale University, and worked a television consultant for the BBC and ZDF. He is the author of 14 books of fiction and non-fiction, including An Instance of the Fingerpost and The
Dream Of Scipio.
Iain will tell a simple tale, a true story, about two people who met and fell in love in 1962. Larissa was the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad when she was a young girl by eating cats’ tails. She grew up to become
Director of Venetian drawings at the Hermitage by the age of 30. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, and a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. She was exuberant and daring, he was insecure and introverted. In their characters they had almost nothing in common. But the moment they met in Venice in 1962, they fell so hopelessly in love that both were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together. Explaining "why" brings
into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. Their tale shows 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.
