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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
...letters span 44 terrible years, from Revolution and Red Terror through the great purges and war. The correspondents were cousins, akin in blood, spirit and culture: Olga, the distinguished classical scholar, and Boris, one of Russia's greatest modern poets. Of Pasternak's letters the most revealing bear upon Doctor Zhivago...
Engrossed in love and work, Pasternak appeared oblivious to the menace of the purges. At the age of 58, he had fallen in love with Olga Ivinskaya, and in a state of exaltation much like Yuri Zhivago's over Lara, he wrote: "I am madly, unutterably happy in my free, open, all-embracing acceptance of life, an acceptance I ought to have known at the age of 18 or 20, but then I was constrained, then I had not yet grown up to basic things and did not know how wonderful is the language of life, the language...
That Ivinskaya served two terms in the Gulag for her association with Pasternak is well known. This book discloses for the first time that Pasternak's cousin Sasha Freidenberg, Olga's brother, was arrested in 1937 and died in the camps, one of the millions of innocent victims of Stalin's Great Purge. Sasha's wife Musya, who was arrested before he was, survived...
...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...