Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Volume 2: 1928–1960 by Christopher Barnes (review)

468 letters in canada 1999 ably enriched by historicizing O'Neill's explicit dramatizations of oedipal relationships. The work of Ann Douglas is especially relevant and deserves citation. Black's biography convincingly describes a structure for O'Neill's œuvre and provides an important new perspective on O'Neill's artistic life. If a sense of dissatisfaction remains, it is a tribute to wells of creativity yet untapped. (ALAN ACKERMAN) Christopher Barnes. Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Volume 2: 1928B1960 Cambridge University Press 1998. xviii, 492. US $85.00 Guilt by association was a powerful concept in the Soviet Union, so powerful that it was not only wise but merely routine to conceal one's associates. A biographer is thus deprived of the hints and mentions, the names jotted and dropped, that would provide clues in another, more open political context. Christopher Barnes's biography of Boris Pasternak divides into two volumes around 1928, a date almost arbitrarily chosen, roughly at the mid-point of Pasternak's seventy-year span. Though no special date in Pasternak's life, it is one of grim significance for life in the Soviet Union, for it marks the onset of collective paranoia, a paranoia that was no less disturbed for being entirely justified by events. The privileged freedom and openness of Pasternak's youth and education, his musical studies with Scriabin, his year in Marburg, his correspondence with Rilke B the matter of Barnes's excellent first volume B all cease. The correspondence that continued in the Stalin years and beyond becomes secretive, even coded. Although Pasternak's cousin Olga Friedenberg and his friend the pianist Maria Yudina are both known to have been friends of Bakhtin, we do not know whether Bakhtin and Pasternak ever met. Around 1970 Bakhtin wrote: For the word (and, consequently, for the human being) there is nothing more terrible than a lack of response. Even a word that is known to be false is not absolutely false, and always presupposes an instance that will understand and justify it, even if in the form: `anyone in my position would have lied too.' Pasternak and Bakhtin are famous and even legendary figures in twentieth-century Russia not only for their integrity but also for their tolerance of the weakness of others. Pasternak is charmingly indifferent to betrayal by those friends who were coerced into acts and utterances of denunciation. Through his insistence on the redemptive power of every word, even the false word, Bakhtin renders indignation and contempt as forms of the grossest crime, the refusal to listen. The capacity for tolerance shared by Bakhtin and Pasternak is, it might be noted, very different from humanities 469 the `moral self-indulgence' of a Tolstoy or a Solzhenitsyn. Pasternak was himself considerably more compromised than this biography ever concedes. His serial acts of renunciation of the Nobel Prize in 1958 have always been treated with great leniency in the West: here was a man who refused to condemn others, yet succumbed to pressure to condemn himself. Why the latter should be more forgivable than the former is obscure. At least one Soviet citizen at the time was not impressed: of this biography's many omissions, among the most glaring must be that of Solzhenitsyn's reaction to the Zhivago-affair: `How could he flinch before the threat of exile and humbly plead with the government, mumbling about his ``mistakes and failings,'' about his ``own fault'' as regards the novel, renouncing his own ideas, his very spirit ...?' The memoir of Pasternak's mistress Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time (1978), contains an unforgettable anecdote, from the early 1970s, of an overnight train journey from Leningrad to Moscow in a compartment shared (as arbitrarily as that of Myshkin and Rogozhin at the opening of Dostoevsky's Idiot) by two well-known people unrecognized by each other, Ivinskaya and B she confesses her stupidity in not even noticing the cello on the luggage-rack B Rostropovich. Unaware of his listener's identity, Rostropovich discloses Solzhenitsyn's feelings about Pasternak:`such shameful, cowardly behaviour ... those idiotic letters of renunciation Pasternak allowed himself to write!' Ivinskaya replies that Solzhenitsyn has had vocal support from friends, among...