George Gömöri
Prisoner of Peredelkino
Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence, 1921–1960
By Maya Slater (ed) (Translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater)
Hoover Institution Press 424pp £25.19 hbk/£16.14 pbk order from our bookshop
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) is undoubtedly one of the major Russian poets and writers of the twentieth century. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, an edition of his correspondence with his family has been published in English. There are two editions in Russian that contain the letters exchanged between the poet, his parents and his sisters. The collection under review draws on the material from the more complete Moscow edition (edited by Pasternak’s son Evgeni and Evgeni’s wife, Elena), though it restricts itself to the period from 1921 when Boris’s father (the painter Leonid Pasternak) and the rest of his family emigrated to Berlin, to the death of Boris on 30 May 1960 in Peredelkino, Russia.
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