I found this book in one of the vanishing small, used bookstores in my community today and it is a perfect summer read.
Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky
The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century’s greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.
QUOTES
These letters are literature. All three poets are as eloquent here as they are in any of their other works…In the battle against repression, it is letters like these that show how the soul works its way out of the underground.
— Mark Rudman
An extraordinary correspondence…the high-minded cosmopolitanism of those days might make us weep for what seems a vanished golden age of European culture.
— John Bayley
Even more, this three-way correspondence sheds abundant light on the nature of inspiration, the creative process and how the poets influence each other….
— The New York Times Book Review
…Important as keys to the three poets’ literary attitudes, and to the intentions which lie behind some of the finest twentieth-century verse…
— Times Literary Supplement
Nothing can dim the incandescence of those exchanges over a few months in 1926 when they were hurling themselves at one another, making their impossible, glorious demands.
— Susan Sontag, Los Angeles Times
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