Volume 29, Number 13 · August 12, 1982
Private Lives
By V.S. Pritchett
The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910-1954
complied and edited by Elliott Mossman, translated by Elliott Mossman, by Margaret Wettlin
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book), 365 pp., $19.95
From despotisms like the Soviet Union the only voices that tell one anything are the voices of private life. These distinguish the sporadic correspondence of Olga Freidenberg with her first cousin Boris Pasternak between 1910 and 1954. She was in Leningrad, he mostly in Moscow. Forty-five years of this harassed exchange of news and affection come out of their cold envelopes and bring us close to the dire and confusing realities of their time. The cousins were born in 1890 in distinguished and cultivated families who were assimilated Jews. (One can guess at their hopeful childhood and youth in Pasternak's early writings.) We see them first in 1910 and—after the long gap of the First World War—in touch with each other again through the Second World War and the Stalinist terror, until 1954, the year before she died.
Review, 1745 words
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