Word: zhivago
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...functions of the Cheka. Accordingly, the NKVD uniform that Alexander was obliged to wear carried unpleasant associations, associations he detested because he was afraid of one department being confused with another, more sinister one, as has now been done in your review. Consequently, your subsequent speculations about Doctor Zhivago derive from this error and are worthless...
...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...
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...
...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 cousin a 44-year sampling of her critical intelligence. Her rigor melted only once, when she read Doctor Zhivago for the first time. She wrote Pasternak: "This book must be possessed rather than read, as a man does not read a woman but possesses her." -By Patricia Blake