Twenty Letters to a Friend

Fülszöveg

SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA Twenty Letters to a Frienl Translated by Prucilla Johnson McMillan "Let the judging be done by those who come later, by men and women who didn't know the times and the'people we knew. Let it be left to new people to whom these years in Russia will be as remote and inexplicable, as terrible and strange, as the reign of Iván the Terrible. But I do not think they'Il call our era a 'progressive' one, or that they'Il say it was all for the 'good of Russia/ Hardly . . . "They will have their say. And what they say will be something new and cogent. Instead of idle whining, they will give voice to a new sense of purpose. They will read through this page in their country's history with a feeling of pain, contrition and bewilderment, and they'Il be led by this feeling to live their lives differently, "But I hope they won't forget that what is Good never dies-that it lived on in the hearts of men even in the darkest times and was hidden where no one thought to look for it, that it never died out or disappeared completely. "Everything on our tormented earth that is alive and breathes, that blossoms and bears fruit, lives only by virtue of and in the name of Truth and Good." These are the concluding sentences of an extraordinary work. The author has used one of the oldest and most flexible literary forms-the letter to an unidentified friend, who is, essentially, each reader of her book-to relate the harrowing journey of one soul, one consciousness, through three dark decades of a totalitarian tyranny which sowed terror throughout an entire nation and reached into every corner of her personal life. From the death of her father, Josef Stalin, in 1953, and her "double" life in the deeade that followed-outwardly fortunate, inwardly tormented-Mme. Alliluyeva casts back to her unclouded childhood in the tranquil household created by her mother, and to her mother's gifted and close-knit family. She telis her mother's Vissza