Vol. 4 No. 20 · 4 November 1982
page 10 | 2786 words
Pasternak and the Russians
John Bayley
- The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Friedenberg 1910-1954 edited by Elliott Mossman, translated by Elliott Mossman and Margaret Wettlin
Secker, 365 pp, £15.00, September 1982, ISBN 0 436 78855 1
The flowering of European Jewry in the days before 1914 is a cultural phenomenon comparable to the ‘golden’ periods of national art in Spain, France and England, even to the great years of the Italian Renaissance. Like other such peaks of civilisation, it might have faded of its own accord had it not been brought to a tragic end by the xenophobia engendered by two world wars, by Nazism and Soviet Fascism. It was, above all, cosmopolitan. Not for nothing (a favourite phrase of Russian critics) did Mandelstam observe that Acmeism, the literary movement which he helped to found in 1910 in St Petersburg, took as the inspiration for its poetry the whole European cultural tradition.
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Letters
Vol. 4 No. 22 · 2 December 1982
From Elizabeth Roberts
SIR: I would like to know John Bayley’s evidence for claiming (LRB, Vol. 4, No 20) that Olga Pasternak’s Poetics of Plot and Genre reached many more readers than it would have done in a ‘free’ (Professor Bayley’s inverted commas) society as a result of having been banned. And do those inverted commas mean that he believes that we do not enjoy freedom of expression here in a way denied to the Soviet citizen? He goes on: ‘Few among us would read the Russian dissidents if they were not so well touted by the Western propaganda machine.’ More correct, surely, if he had said ‘none among us’, since dissident work is forbidden publication in its country of origin: if it were not published in the West, it would not be published at all. The sneer at the ‘colour-supplement press’ (pretty élitist) is incomprehensible in the context of describing how letters of Jamesian ‘discreet indirection’ have thereby been pressed into the service of ‘the usual mechanical interests of anti-Soviet mythology’. If he means that the letters were serialised, surely he doesn’t need the late Dr Leavis as sponsor for calling a Sunday newspaper a Sunday newspaper. If he doesn’t mean serialisation but some other form of publication, perhaps he would care to elucidate? Finally, there’s that ‘anti-Soviet mythology’ business. If he means (as surely he must) that books are somehow not banned in Russia, that the non-appearance of Dr Zhivago in the USSR was some kind of paradoxical publicity stunt, then it is he who is being perverse.
Elizabeth Roberts
London SW3
Vol. 5 No. 1 · 10 January 1983
From John Bayley
SIR: Elizabeth Roberts’s letter about the Pasternak-Freidenberg correspondence (LRB, Vol. 4, No 22/23) puzzles me: I think we are at cross-purposes rather than in disagreement. Olga Freidenberg’s (not Olga Pasternak’s) Poetics of Plot and Genre did very well in the bookshops (‘sales began to mount,’ she writes) before it was withdrawn by the Soviet authorities. Hard to imagine a work with that title selling so well in the West? I apologise for the inverted commas in my phrase ‘free’ society. They were not intended ironically. We have perfect freedom to buy, and the publisher to publish, which is why a book like hers would only appear in limited numbers here.
Elizabeth Roberts also appears to query my point that books like the Pasternak-Freidenberg correspondence are serialised in the Sunday papers, not because of what is in them, but because anything of that kind has anti-Soviet publicity value. Well, I do not think some interesting letters between a French, English or American poet and his cousin would be likely to get serialised in this way. I have nothing against the Sunday paper, and I am very glad it did extracts from the correspondence. It would be even more gratifying if the paper serialised extracts from Poetics of Plot and Genre: then we might see why the Soviet censors banned Olga’s dissertation.
John Bayley
Oxford
