Books: Blood Relatives

(3 of 3)

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