Word: pasternak
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Ivinskaya paid cruelly for her 14-year association with Pasternak. In 1949, after refusing to falsely denounce her lover as a British spy, she was imprisoned for five years. Singularly diabolical torture was inflicted on Ivinskaya, who was pregnant by Pasternak at the time. At one point she was led through interminable prison corridors on the promise of a visit from Pasternak. Instead, she was thrown into the morgue. After she came to among the cadavers, she miscarried. Following Pasternak's death, she was again arrested. This time her tormentors tried to extract a confession that she had written...
...living in Moscow, Ivinskaya has had her intimate recollections of Pasternak published in the West, thus risking the further wrath of the authorities in the Soviet Union. She has also made another, perhaps more portentous choice: to expose the human frailty that is the underlay of heroism and the foolishness that may be attendant upon genius. She tells of her endless "female tantrums," provoked by Pasternak's determination not to leave his wife and children but to maintain two households instead. To these outbursts the writer often responded, "this is something out of a bad novel." "I suppose...
...equally unsparing of Pasternak's wife Zinaida, who died in 1966. But she does cite some of Pasternak's letters to third parties that are full of praise for Zinaida: "I owe my life to her," the writer declared after a long illness. At times, Ivinskaya tends to confuse art and life. She often asserts that particular lines in Pasternak's work refer specifically to her. In his overwhelmingly expressive portrait of Lara, Pasternak offered no other physical description of his heroine than a mention of "strong, white, woman's arms." Ivinskaya would have been well...
...other respects, however, her memoirs illuminate Pasternak's last years of private miseries and public persecution until his death of cancer in 1960. Historically, the most important piece of information she discloses is that Pasternak was not the author of two famous 1958 letters to Nikita Khrushchev and to Pravda, in which the writer pleaded not to be exiled from Russia and asserted that he had not been coerced into renouncing the Nobel Prize. Both letters were concocted by Ivinskaya. In the case of the letter to Pravda, she "worked" with a Central Committee official: "Like a pair...
...other respects, Pasternak acted with exemplary, even foolhardy courage, as Ivinskaya makes plain. During the Great Terror of the '30s, he had refused to sign an endorsement of the death sentence meted out to Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other officers. In her memoirs Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled that Pasternak was the only person who dared visit her when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in a concentration camp. Pasternak bravely directed that the royalties for his translations of Shakespeare's tragedies be spent to help prisoners in the Gulag. When prison regulations eased after Stalin's death...