Parallel Lives

Iain Pears reconstructs the lives of two art historians formed on opposite sides of twentieth-century Europe. Larissa Salmina survives the Siege of Leningrad, is evacuated to the Urals and later becomes curator of Italian drawings at the Hermitage Museum. Francis Haskell grows up in England within a cosmopolitan Jewish family, studies at Cambridge and develops an influential career examining the social history of art. Their paths converge in Venice in 1962, when Larissa accompanies the Soviet contribution to the Biennale.

Their relationship unfolds within the restrictions of the Cold War, when marriage, travel and emigration across the Iron Curtain required political negotiation as well as personal commitment. Drawing on Haskell’s diaries, Salmina’s recollections and Pears’s knowledge of the couple, the book follows two scholars whose shared European culture crossed national and ideological divisions. It is a joint biography of love, art, displacement and the freedoms that each discovered through the other.