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The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva. Catherine Ciepiela. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 303. $29.95 (cloth).
The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva is devoted to a creative relationship that lasted just over ten years and exerted a formative influence on the creative selves and the writings of two leading poets of the twentieth century. Given the stature of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak and the intensity of their engagement, their correspondence and artistic exchanges have naturally attracted critical and scholarly attention of high caliber. Catherine Ciepiela's study is an important addition to this corpus.
Enlarging on existing scholarship and drawing on primary materials that have recently become available, The Same Solitude attends to Tsvetaeva's and Pasternak's erotically charged epistolary and poetic exchanges in the context of the shifting biographical, cultural, historical, and sociopolitical circumstances in which the relationship unfolded. Exercising impressive command over a vast range of materials, Ciepiela demonstrates the extent to which the two poets participated in one another's creative worlds and the complexity and subtlety of this participation.
In reading Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, Ciepiela is attuned to how they read one another and their surrounding world. The overarching...