Volume 11, Number 8 · November 7, 1968
Pasternak in His Letters
By Helen Muchnic
Letters to Georgian Friends
by Boris Pasternak, translated by David Magarshack
Harcourt, Brace & World, 190 pp., $4.75
Georgia is a region of Transcaucasia with a 2,000-year-old history. Obliged for centuries to rely on Russia for protection, it became a Russian province in 1801. Its culture is European, its religion predominantly Greek Orthodox; and while its people are obliged to learn Russian, they have a language of their own that does not seem to belong to the Indo-European family, though its alphabet resembles the Arabic, and a literature that goes back to the Middle Ages and is especially rich in twentieth-century lyric poetry. Stalin, who was a Georgian, spoke Russian with an accent. Mayakovsky, born in Georgia of Russian parents, defended the Georgian tongue in boyhood against a chauvinistic schoolmaster and, after he had become famous, flaunted proudly what little of it he knew when he revisited his birthplace.
Review, 2735 words
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