ABSTRACT
After the rigours of the Yezhovshchina had been slightly relaxed in 1938, the Soviet Union entered an alliance with Hitlerite Germany in August of the following year; whereupon the Second World War broke out between Germany and the Western Allies. The USSR joined Germany in subduing Poland, and went to war in Finland in November 1939. But the general tenor of Soviet life remained unchanged, even though certain minor cultural relaxations were permitted. One such concession was the publication of Akhmatova’s verse in a comprehensive one-volume collection after she had been virtually excluded from the press for seventeen years. In late 1940 Akhmatova’s new book of verse was suddenly withdrawn by order from on high, and she resumed her previous position as a disgraced and unpublishable poet. In cultivating intelligibility Pasternak happened to be fulfilling one of the obligations placed on writers by political authority — that literature should be understood by the average reader.
