Blood Relatives

By Patricia Blake

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF BORIS PASTERNAK AND OLGA FREIDENBERG 1910-1954 Edited by Elliott Mossman Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 365 pages; $19.95

"No novel in this century has drawn such worldwide acclaim," said the London Daily Express of Doctor Zhivago. That was the trouble. By the time an English version reached the U.S. in 1958, two years after Boris Pasternak had sent his manuscript out of the Soviet Union, the novel's potential readers were already weary, and wary, of the Pasternak affair. It had been in the headlines for more than a year. In literary circles, skepticism and envy were aroused by the celebrity of the author and by his Nobel Prize. More disturbing to some intellectuals was the political aspect of the book. Caught in a crossfire of extravagant praise in the Western press ("a new version of War and Peace") and attacks by Soviet officials ("the dungwater of lyrical manure"), Doctor Zhivago became suspect as literature.

Thus when Edmund Wilson declared in 1959 that the novel would "come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history," scarcely anybody seemed to believe him. Since then it has been principally Russian exiles and specialists who have persisted in treating Doctor Zhivago as a masterwork of 20th century fiction. For all the attention the book has received from American critics, Doctor Zhivago might be a novelization of the movie of the same name.

Lately, however, there have been signs that Doctor Zhivago is assuming the place that Wilson had assigned to it. Interest has been quickened by the 1978 publication of A Captive of Time, the memoirs of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak's

"Lara." Last year there appeared a splendid biography of Pasternak by Guy de Mallac, the first in any language. Now comes an intriguing volume of letters by Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, lovingly edited and annotated by Elliott Mossman.

The letters span 44 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.

Shortly after Pasternak began 'writing his novel in the mid-1940s he wrote to Freidenberg: "It is my first real work. In it I want to convey the historical image of Russia over the past 45 years, and at the same time I want to express in every aspect of the story--a sad, dismal story, worked out in fine detail, ideally, as in a

Dickens or Dostoyevsky novel--my own views on art, the Gospels, the life of man in history, and much more."

Two years later Pasternak had completed the first part of his novel, which he then envisioned as a two-volume work. The book, he wrote his cousin in 1948, is "not even intended for current publication. Furthermore, I am not even writing it as a work of art, although it is literature in a deeper sense than anything I have ever done before. But I just don't know whether there is any art left in this world, or what art means." Following this veiled reference to Stalin's purges of the artistic intelligentsia, then raging in Moscow, Pasternak continued: "There are people who love me very much (only a few)... It is for them I am writing this novel, as if it were a long letter to them, in two volumes."

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 of earth, the language of heaven." The following year Ivinskaya was arrested and sentenced to five years in a forced-labor camp.

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 his wife. "Sasha wasted no time in asking him to slip Kalinin a petition to have Musya freed when he received the medal from Kalinin's hands," Freidenberg wrote. "The idea was preposterous and utterly hopeless. Alexander rejected it, of course, for which both Sasha and Mama turned against him, and from that day on Mama disavowed all connection with her nephew and refused to see any member of his family."

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 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

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