Word: freidenberg
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...Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, edited by Elliott Mossman...
NONFICTION: The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, edited by Elliott Mossman ∙ Going to the Dance, Arlene Croce ∙ Killing of Bonnie Garland, Willard Gaylin Love, Eleanor, Joseph P. Lash Midnights, Alec Wilkinson ∙ The Red Smith Reader, edited by Dave Anderson
From Olga Freidenberg's diary, which Editor Mossman has used to illuminate the letters, we also learn that Pasternak's brother Alexander was a member of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, during the Great Purge. An architect, Alexander helped design and supervise the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was built by slave labor in 1936. According to the diary, when Alexander was slated to receive a medal from Soviet Chairman Mikhail Kalinin for his work on the canal, Cousin Sasha on the eve of his arrest pleaded with the Chekist to try to save...
Judging from Freidenberg's remarkable disclosure about Alexander, it now seems likely that Pasternak had his own brother in mind when he composed the most mysterious figure in his novel, Evgraf, the secret policeman who is Yuri Zhivago's halfbrother...
...Freidenberg's part in the correspondence is as mesmerizing as Pasternak's. The plight of philologists and linguists under Stalin, who considered himself an expert in linguistics, has never been more acidly described. It is good to know that Freidenberg's long-suppressed writings on such innocent topics as the "Poetics of Plot and Genre" in classical Greek literature are gradually being rescued from oblivion by young linguists in the Soviet Union. But until the rescue is complete, Freidenberg, who died in 1955, will be remembered as the tough-minded and rigorous scholar who gave her inspired...