Parallel Lives

Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell met by chance in a Venetian restaurant in September 1962. Prior to this fateful meal, Larissa escaped the siege of Leningrad and lived in the Urals, surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries. She became Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage and attended the 1962 Venice Biennale, where she stole ("I didn't steal it. I liberated it") a Matisse painting. Francis was a historian who never felt safe in England, his own country, and had abandoned hope of falling in love or finding anyone who could love him. But broader forces of destiny and luck brought them together and changed both of their lives. Parallel Lives 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 is a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.