Books: Blood Relatives

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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.