The Secrets We Kept

As described above, Sally is all that Irina is not. She is also a round character, though less dynamic. From the way she dresses to her hair, she attracts attention. The typists note, “Unlike Irina, Sally could never be invisible. Everything about her screamed Look at me! Look at me! I am the one who should be looked at!” (223). Sally is a “swallow,” the term in espionage for a female spy who uses sex and seduction to gain information—another connection between women and birds in the novel. Though she was, by all accounts, a successful OSS agent while in Kandy, Ceylon, that doesn’t translate to landing an appropriate job or even garnering respect from former colleagues. When her assignment to find out if Henry is a mole goes horribly awry and he assaults her, he refers to her role as a swallow as a justification for rape. When Anderson ignores the obvious signs of an attack, she understands just how little they actually regard her.

The other women in the Agency, however, admire her. This is shown in how carefully they plan their attire for the birthday party at her apartment. The women see her as a power-wielder, observing, “She spoke the way the men spoke, and they listened. Not only that, but she scared the hell out of a few. Her perceived power may have come from the tightness of her skirt, but her real power was that she never accepted the roles men assigned her” (226). She is ambitious at a time when women were looked down upon for showing that openly. She credits her ambition to having grown up poor in Pittsburgh but believed she “was someone special, and the world owed [her] something—perhaps because [she] was brought up with nothing. […] The problem with that type of ambition is that it requires constant reassurance from others, and when that assurance doesn’t come, you falter” (192). Therefore, when she cannot get much out of Feltrinelli, her target, she starts to question her abilities and whether she’s too old to do her job. This demonstrates some dynamism in her character throughout the narrative.

Sally points to her “heightened appreciation for beautiful things” as the reason people could easily believe her origins were posher than they were and for her default method of getting her rent paid after the OSS, wooing wealthy men who would buy things for her. She claims that it is a “curse […] that [her] good eye often exceeded [her] means” (63). Her desire to own a bookstore seems out of character for such a flashy persona, but literature is just another means of expressing the beauty that Sally so appreciates, which emphasizes the novel’s depiction of Literature as a Balm and a Weapon. In Sally’s case, this theme intersects with the idea of Female Soft Power and Hidden Talent. Literature can provide readers with an escape, and Sally is so accustomed to playing other people that there’s a heightened appeal in reading about other lives without needing to assume another identity.

As presented in this novel, Olga Ivinskaya is strong, capable, and more aware of the political milieu than her lover. The reader first encounters her under arrest, where she is defiant in protecting not only Boris but the act of creative writing itself. Despite nightly pressure from the interrogator Semionov, she “didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear: that the novel was critical of the revolution. That Boris had rejected socialist realism in favor of writing characters who lived and loved by their hearts’ intent, independent of the State’s influence” (20). As the inspiration for Lara, the love interest in Doctor Zhivago, Olga also desires to live and love the way she wants, independent of the State. However, not only does the State create issues in their relationship, but Boris’s choice of how to live also prevents her from living as she would. She is “the almost wife” (21), his companion for book readings and most of the time in Moscow. When he dies, she is the “almost widow,” prevented from being with him as he dies by his wife, Zinaida. She is round and also more dynamic than any other character besides Irina.

Olga’s devotion to Boris is evident by the lengths to which she goes to be with him and to assist him, moving out to the country to be closer to his dacha and serving time in the Gulag because of him. And yet, she is not without some resentment for that situation. While in the Gulag, she envies the nuns their faith, which serves as an antidote to loneliness. For Olga, however, “My only faith was put into a man: my Borya, a mere mortal, a poet” (79). A mere mortal can disappoint, though, which Olga knows when Boris fails to show up at the train station. They move on from that, hoping to put the painful experience behind them. However, Olga is stunned and angry when she learns that he gave the manuscript to an Italian publisher. “How could he be so selfish? Had he thought of me even once?” (149), she thinks as he brushes aside her concerns about what the Central Committee will do to them.

Though Boris comforts her in the moment by saying he’d rather burn the manuscript than see her go back to the Gulag, she notes, “His words felt like running a hand under cold water after burning it on the stove—the pain might be soothed while the water runs, but as soon as you turn off the faucet, the throbbing continues. And in that moment, for the first time, I lost faith in him” (149). Instead of distancing herself from Boris, however, she works harder at being his emissary, negotiating with D’Angelo and the Central Committee on his behalf. When Boris comes to her and suggests they take pills to end their suffering, she realizes that she can go on without him where once she might have fallen apart. She has grown in her personal integrity and sense of self. Though she loves him, Olga has suffered on his behalf and only asks that he acknowledge that through his actions. During her second incarceration, Olga muses: “[M]y story no longer belongs to me. In the collective imagination, I have become someone else—a heroine, a character. I have become Lara. And yet when I look, I don’t find her here” (339). She doesn’t find Lara in herself because in Doctor Zhivago, Lara “vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid” (340). Through this work, Olga Ivinskaya, both the real and the fictional, is not forgotten.