Word: pasternaks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...