Svetlana Alliluyeva

The ATLANTIC is privileged to publish this remarkable document, the first appearance in English of the writing of Svetlana Alliluyeva. It was written in Switzerland this spring as her spontaneous response to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, a book she found to be “ a revelation about my own life, and about the life of the Russia I knew.”Max Hayward, who made this translation and was also co-translator of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, writes: “Svetlana Alliluyeva’s reflections illuminate the sense of Pasternak’s work as no other comment has ever done. In the fate of Zhivago and of Lara, she sees her personal tragedy, that of her contemporaries and children (Katya, seventeen, and Joseph, twenty-two), and that of Russia as a whole. The closeness of the parallel is underlined by an extraordinary coincidence of names: for example, Svetlana’s daughter, like Lara’s, is called Katya. ... Her thoughts on the novel gradually turn into a lament, in traditional Russian fashion, for her late husband Brajesh Singh,, whom the Soviet authorities did not allow to take her to India while he was still alive. . . . DOCTOR ZHIVAGOis about the tragedy of separation and death, which no country has seen in such measure as Russia, but it is also about faith in life. Svetlana Alliluyeva, while mourning the fate of so many fellow countrymen and her own biller losses, evokes Pasternak’s recurrent images of rebirth: the spring, and the rowan tree with its bright red berries in the midst of winter.”