Tsvetayeva's Letters

In Boris Pasternak's Essay in Autobiography the story is briefly told of by what means he came to lose almost a hundr alphabetic characters written to him over sum of two units decades by Marina Tsvetayeva. The disaster (my word, not his; by the agency of the standards of the time the los was scarcely an event) occurr during the Great Patriotic War when Pasternak entrusted the alphabetic characters along with others from his parents, Maxim Gorky, and Romain Rolland, to a shut friend on the staff of the Scriabin Museum. The friend deposited greatest in quantity of Pasternak's hoard in the fireproof museum safe; on the other hand fearing the worst she kept Tsvetayeva's alphabetic characters with her at all times, not at any time letting them out of her sight. The denouement might have been predicted. single winter evening, walking utterly exhausted [i]or[/i] part of to the other a dark wood between the station and her domicile outside the city, the friend realized that she had left her attache case containing the alphabetic characters on the train from Moscow "That was in what way Tsvetayeva's letters were borne away and vanished," Pasternak ends Stoic toward all concerned he says not a word about the reaction of his friend, the nameless heroine of this exemplary tale, when she grasped what she had done.

MICHAEL FRIED teaches at John Hopkins University. He is the author of Powers and To the Center of the Earth, and has almost complet a novel manuscript, A Summer Night.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated May/Jun 2002

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