ABSTRACT
Akhmatova and Pasternak were to outlive their two colleagues by twenty and more years, but the story of the poets as a quartet of closely linked individuals has been brought to an end by the deaths of Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva. During their remaining years Akhmatova and Pasternak were to live through the Soviet Union’s early wartime defeats, and through nearly four years of bitter struggle followed by the Allied victory over Germany in 1945. They were then to suffer the eight appalling years of Stalin’s postwar rule before they could at last celebrate his death in March 1953. Paradoxical as it seems, the war against Germany brought general relief, since the presence of an identifiable enemy diverted Soviet citizens from destroying each other to destroying the invader. Life was more hazardous than ever, but there was less mutual suspicion and fear. There was, rather, an upsurge of national morale fostered by an official policy of relaxing political controls.
