Lara

The Roman poet Ovid tells the mythological legend of Lara in his poem “Fasti” written in the early first century A.D. (Book 2, verses 533–616). In the story, Lara is described as a water nymph and the daughter of Almo, a river god. Beautiful yet chatty, Lara could not keep a secret. When she learned of Jupiter’s burning love for Juturna (Lara’s sister-nymph), she went directly to Juno (Jupiter’s wife) and tattled on the High King of gods. This sent Jupiter into a rage so he chopped off Lara’s tongue in retribution. As further punishment, Jupiter ordered Mercury (messenger of the gods) to deliver Lara unto Pluto in the Underworld. The only hitch? Mercury fell for the lovely nymph and ended up sleeping with her. Lara bore Mercury twin sons known as the Lares, household gods who presided over Roman hearths and homes. Tongue-less Lara thereafter became known as Muta (the mute one) or Dea Tacita (the silent one). We guess she stopped telling secrets after all that.

Larissa “Lara” Fyodorovna Guishar Antipova is a main character in Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, first published in 1957, and later made into a highly successful movie in 1965, starring Julie Christie as Lara. Set against the tumultuous background of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, this is a soaring and lyrical love story played out against Maurice Jarre’s haunting melody, Lara’s Theme. Lara has already been mishandled by life when she meets Yuri Zhivago. She had been seduced as a young girl by her mother’s lover, and subsequently married a man whose first allegiance is to the Bolshevik cause. When he is reported missing, Lara takes a nursing position in the army in order to search for him. Here she meets the married Zhivago, and their connection is fierce and immediate, although not consummated at first. The vagaries of war separate and reunite them, taking their terrible physical and emotion toil of common humanity, yet allowing for a certain abandonment of the restrictive rules of a society that has gone mad. Lara loves as she lives, passionately and fully, but this love is doomed. It will be a victim of the cruel dehumanizing of an entire people that happens in the wake of the war and its aftermath. Ultimately Lara meets her fate at the hands of the Stalinists, but not before proving herself to be an enduring survivor of all that has been put in her path. One is assured that the daughter of such a woman will inherit the same will to survive as her mother exhibited in the face of overwhelming odds. As it is said of Lara” “She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.”