Volume 9, Number 6 · October 12, 1967
The Crown Jewels
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Twenty Letters to a Friend
by Svetlana Alliluyeva
Harper & Row, 246 pp., $5.95
I am not quite sure why the passing months make one feel less and less interested in Svetlana. Perhaps it is that everything she has experienced and remembered is now hard news, mercilessly distributed in every capital and hamlet. When you come now to the reading of her actual book there is, about some of it at least, the staleness of yesterday's headlines; it is the eleven o'clock news telling you just as the seven o'clock news told you that when Stalin's son failed in a suicide attempt the great leader screamed, 'Even this he cannot do right.' (For my own part I 'prefer' Stalin's warning to Lenin's widow that if she didn't stop complaining he could 'easily find someone else to be Lenin's widow.') More importantly, a resistance grows in our fertilized soil quite as naturally as that freedom of expression Svetlana came here to enjoy. This is our defense, for we have so often seen expression turn into unwanted evangelism and have discovered that he who tries, publicly, to find himself also finds the engulfing temptation, almost the necessity, of self-exploitation. Tragedy and courage, so profoundly covered for our information and pleasure, so exuberantly donated to the indifferent and interested alike, turn, the next dawn, into Pop. This is one of the oddities of our abundance.
Review, 2422 words
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