Editor's Note

Abstract

The year 1990 marks the centenary of the birth of Boris Pasternak, as well as the thirtieth anniversary of his death, and many Soviet journals are, naturally, honoring the occasion with articles, archive materials, or even whole issues devoted to the great poet, prosaist, and translator. Commemorative journal publications to date (the February 1990 issues of Soviet journals are at this writing the latest to have reached the West) include excerpts from the forthcoming book of memoirs by Pasternak's second wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna Neigauz, brought out in Neva with a sensitive preface by Lev Ozerov; brief essays by Pasternak on Mayakovsky and Aseev in Prostor; the correspondence between Pasternak and the pianist Maria Veniaminovna Iudina published in Novyi mir with an introduction by his son, Evgenii Pasternak, that illuminates aspects of the poet's intense association with the musical world throughout his life; and a promised series of publications in Druzhba narodov that begins with a segment from Lazar Fleishman's book on Pasternak in the thirties (Jerusalem, 1984) and is to include, inter alia, the text of Father Alexander Schmemann's encomium at the time of Pasternak's death, originally broadcast over the radio and then published in the émigré journal Novyi zhurnal (1960, 60). The entire second issue of Literaturnoe obozrenie for 1990 is devoted to Pasternak and comprises a splendid selection of materials by both Soviet and Western contributors.