Safe Conduct is Boris Pasternak's first and best autobiography, penned after the great success of Dr. Zhivago. Here translated by Alec Brown and Lydia Pasternak-Slater, and written when he was forty, Safe Conduct puzzled many readers in Russia and when it appeared in English, because its isolated sharp impressions and juxtapositions seem to deny chronology, but at least one critic recognized it as "the most original of autobiographies, employing...