Prologue

“This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.”

O n May 20, 1956, two men took the suburban electric train
from Moscow’s Kiev station to the village of Peredelkino, a
thirty-­minute ride southwest of the city. It was a blue-­sky Sun-
day morning. Spring had pushed the last of the snow away just
the previous month, and the air was sweet with the scent of
blooming lilac. Vladlen Vladimirsky, easily the bigger of the two,
had bright blond hair and wore the billowing pants and double-­
breasted jacket favored by most Soviet officials. His slender com-
panion was clearly a foreigner—­Russians teased the man that he
was a stilyaga, or “style maven,” because of his Western cloth-
ing. Sergio D’Angelo also had the kind of quick smile that was
uncommon in a country where circumspection was ingrained.
The Italian was in Peredelkino to charm a poet.
The previous month D’Angelo, an Italian Communist work-
ing at Radio Moscow, read a brief cultural news item noting the
imminent publication of a first novel by the Russian poet Boris
Pasternak. The two-­sentence bulletin told him little except that
Pasternak’s book promised to be another Russian epic. The novel
was called Doctor Zhivago.
Before leaving Italy, D’Angelo had agreed to scout out new
Soviet literature for a young publishing house in Milan that had
been established by a party loyalist, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Get-
ting the rights to a first novel by one of Russia’s best-­known poets

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

would be a major coup both for himself and the new publishing
concern. He wrote a letter to an editor in Milan in late April, and
before receiving a reply asked Vladimirsky, a colleague at Radio
Moscow, to set up a meeting with Pasternak.
Peredelkino was a writers’ colony built on the former estate
of a Russian nobleman. Set down amid virgin pine, lime trees,
cedars, and larches, it was created in 1934 to reward the Soviet
Union’s most prominent authors with a retreat that provided
escape from their apartments in the city. About fifty country
homes, or dachas, were built on large lots on 250 acres. Writers
shared the village with peasants who lived in wooden huts—­the
women wore kerchiefs and men rode on horse-­drawn sleds.
Some of the biggest names in Soviet letters lived in
Peredelkino—­the novelists Konstantin Fedin and Vsevolod Iva-
nov lived on either side of Pasternak. Kornei Chukovsky, the
Soviet Union’s most beloved children’s-­book writer, lived a cou-
ple of streets away as did the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky. As
idyllic as it looked, the village was haunted by its dead, those
executed by the state during the Great Terror of the late 1930s—­
the writers Isaak Babel and Boris Pilnyak were both arrested at
their dachas in Peredelkino. Their homes were handed off to
other writers.
According to village lore, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had
asked Maxim Gorky, the father of Soviet literature and one of
the founders of the socialist-­realist school of writing, how his
counterparts in the West lived. When Gorky said they lived in
villas, Peredelkino was ordered up by Stalin. Legend or not, writ-
ers were a privileged caste. They were organized into the nearly
four-thousand–­strong Union of Soviet Writers, and lavished with
perks unimaginable for ordinary Soviet citizens, who often lived
in tiny spaces and suffered through long lines for basic goods.
“Entrapping writers within a cocoon of comforts, surrounding
them with a network of spies” was how Chukovsky described
the system.
Novels, plays, and poems were seen as critical instruments of
mass propaganda that would help lead the masses to socialism.
Stalin expected his authors to produce fictional or poetic celebra-
tions of the Communist state, the story lines full of muscular

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 The Zhivago Affair

progress in the factories and the fields. In 1932, during a meeting

with writers at Gorky’s home, Stalin launched the new literature
with a toast: “The production of souls is more important than the
production of tanks. . . . Here someone correctly said that a writer
must not sit still, that a writer must know the life of a country.
And that is correct. Man is remade by life itself. But you, too, will
assist in remaking his soul. This is important, the production of
souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, the engi-
neers of the human soul.”

A fter leaving the train station, D’Angelo and Vladimirsky

passed the walled summer residence of the patriarch of the
Russian Orthodox Church. They crossed a stream by a graveyard
and walked along roads that were still a little muddy before turn-
ing onto Pavlenko Street, the narrow lane at the edge of the vil-
lage where Pasternak lived. D’Angelo was unsure what to expect.
He knew from his research that Pasternak was esteemed as a
supremely gifted poet and was praised by scholars in the West
as someone who stood out brightly in the stolid world of Soviet
letters. But D’Angelo had never actually read anything by him.
Within the Soviet establishment, recognition of Pasternak’s tal-
ent was tempered by doubts about his political commitment, and
for long periods original work by the poet was not published. He
earned a living as a translator of foreign literature, becoming one
of the premier Russian interpreters of Shakespeare’s plays and
Goethe’s Faust.
Pasternak’s dacha, emerging from stands of fir and birch, was
a chocolate-­brown, two-­story building with bay windows and a
veranda; it reminded some visitors of an American timber-­frame
house. As D’Angelo arrived at the wooden gate, the sixty-­six-­year-­
old writer, in Wellington boots and homespun pants and jacket,
was working in his front garden, where the family had a vegetable
patch among the fruit trees, bushes, and flowers. Pasternak was a
physically arresting man, remarkably youthful, with an elongated
face that seemed sculpted from stone, full sensuous lips, and
lively chestnut eyes. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva said he looked
like an Arab and his horse. A visitor to Peredelkino noted that
he could pause at certain moments as if recognizing the impact

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

“of his own extraordinary face . . . half closing his slanted brown
eyes, turning his head away, reminiscent of a horse balking.”
Pasternak greeted his visitors with firm handshakes. His smile
was exuberant, almost childlike. Pasternak enjoyed the company
of foreigners, a distinct pleasure in the Soviet Union, which only
began to open up to outsiders after the death of Stalin in 1953.
Another Western visitor to Peredelkino that summer, the Oxford
don Isaiah Berlin, said the experience of conversing with writers
there was “like speaking to the victims of shipwreck on a desert
island, cut off for decades from civilization—­all they heard they
received as new, exciting and delightful.”
The three men sat outside on two wooden benches set at right
angles in the garden, and Pasternak took some delight in Sergio’s
last name, stretching it out in his low droning voice with its
slightly nasal timbre. He asked about the name’s origin. Byzan-
tine, said D’Angelo, but very common in Italy. The poet talked
at length about his one trip to Italy when he was a twenty-­two-­
year-­old philosophy student at the University of Marburg in Ger-
many in the summer of 1912. Traveling in a fourth-­class train
carriage, he had visited Venice and Florence but had run out of
money before he could get to Rome. He had written memorably
of Italy in an autobiographical sketch, including a sleepy half-day
in Milan just after he arrived. He remembered approaching the
city’s cathedral, seeing it from various angles as he came closer,
and “like a melting glacier it grew up again and again on the deep
blue perpendicular of the August heat and seemed to nourish the
innumerable Milan cafes with ice and water. When at last a nar-
row platform placed me at its foot and I craned my head, it slid
into me with the whole choral murmur of its pillars and turrets,
like a plug of snow down the jointed column of a drainpipe.”
Forty-­five years later, Pasternak would become bound to Milan.
Just a short distance away from the cathedral, through the glass-­
vaulted Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and past La Scala, was Via
Andegari. At number 6 was the office of Feltrinelli, the man who
would defy the Soviet Union and first publish Doctor Zhivago.

C onversations with Pasternak could become soliloquies. Once

engaged, he talked in long, seemingly chaotic paragraphs, full

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 The Zhivago Affair

of coltish enthusiasm, words and ideas hurtling ahead before he

alighted on some original point. Isaiah Berlin said, “He always
spoke with his peculiar brand of vitality, and flights of imagina-
tive genius.” D’Angelo was enthralled, happy to be an audience,
when Pasternak apologized for talking on and asked his visitor
why he wanted to see him.
D’Angelo explained that his posting in Moscow was sponsored
by the Italian Communist Party, which encouraged its leading
activists to experience life in the Soviet Union. D’Angelo worked
as an Italian-­language producer and reporter for Radio Moscow,
the Soviet Union’s official international broadcaster, which was
housed in two buildings behind Pushkin Square in central Mos-
cow. Before coming to the Soviet Union, he had been the manager
of the Libreria Rinascita, the Italian Communist Party bookstore
in Rome. D’Angelo was a committed activist from an anti-­Fascist
family who joined the party in 1944, but some of his Italian com-
rades felt he was a little too bookish and lacked sufficient zeal.
They hoped a spell in Moscow would stoke some fire. The party
leadership arranged a two-­year assignment in the Soviet capital.
He had been in the Soviet Union since March.
D’Angelo, who spoke Russian well and only occasionally had
to ask Vladimirsky to help him with a word, told Pasternak that
he also acted as a part-­time agent for the publisher Feltrinelli.
Not only was Feltrinelli a committed party member, D’Angelo
said, he was a very rich man, the young multimillionaire scion of
an Italian business dynasty, who had been radicalized during the
war. Feltrinelli had recently started a publishing venture, and he
especially wanted contemporary literature from the Soviet Union.
D’Angelo said he had recently heard about Doctor Zhivago, and it
seemed an ideal book for Feltrinelli’s new house.
Pasternak interrupted the Italian’s pitch with a wave of his
hand. “In the USSR,” he said, “the novel will not come out. It
doesn’t conform to official cultural guidelines.”
D’Angelo protested that the book’s publication had already
been announced and since the death of Stalin there had been a
marked relaxation within Soviet society, a development that got
its name—­“the thaw”—­from the title of a novel by Ilya Ehren-
burg. The horizons of literature seemed to broaden as old dogmas

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

were challenged. Fiction that was somewhat critical of the sys-

tem, reflected on the recent Soviet past, and contained complex,
flawed characters had begun to be published.
The Italian said he had a proposal. Pasternak should give him
a copy of Doctor Zhivago so that Feltrinelli could have it trans-
lated, although he would of course wait until publication in the
Soviet Union before bringing it out in Italy. And Pasternak could
trust Feltrinelli because he was a Communist Party loyalist. This
all sounded reasonable to the eager D’Angelo, anxious as he was
to secure the manuscript and justify the stipend he was receiving
from Feltrinelli.
D’Angelo had no sense of the risk Pasternak would be tak-
ing by placing his manuscript in foreign hands. Pasternak was
all too aware that the unsanctioned publication in the West of a
work that had not first appeared in the Soviet Union could lead to
charges of disloyalty and endanger the author and his family. In a
letter to his sisters in England in December 1948, he warned them
against any printing of some early chapters he had sent them:
“Publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic,
not to mention fatal, dangers.”
Pilnyak, Pasternak’s former next-­door neighbor in Peredelkino
(the side gate between their gardens was never closed), was exe-
cuted with a single bullet to the back of the head in April 1938.
Pilnyak was skeptical of the Soviet project, tackled themes such
as incest in his fiction, and described Stalin’s and Gorky’s literary
commands as the castration of art. Pilnyak’s fate may well have
been foreordained as early as 1929 when he was accused, falsely,
of orchestrating publication abroad of his short novel Mahogany
by anti-­ Soviet elements. Set in a postrevolutionary provincial
town, the novel includes a sympathetically drawn character who
is a supporter of Leon Trotsky—­Stalin’s bitter rival. Pilnyak was
subjected to a public campaign of abuse in the press. “To me a
finished literary work is like a weapon,” wrote Vladimir Maya-
kovsky, the brash and militant Bolshevik poet, in a review of Pil-
nyak’s work that noted, without blushes, he had not actually read
Mahogany. “Even if that weapon were above the class struggle—­
such a thing does not exist (though, perhaps, Pilnyak thinks of
it like that)—­handing it over to the White press strengthens the

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 The Zhivago Affair

arsenals of our enemies. At the present time of darkening storm

clouds this is the same as treachery at the front.”
Pilnyak tried to win his way back into the party’s good graces
with some kowtowing pronouncements about Stalin’s greatness,
but he couldn’t save himself. The charge of disloyalty was memo-
rialized in a file. With the Great Terror at its height, he was tor-
mented by the fear of imminent arrest. The country was in the
grip of a mad, murderous purging of the ranks of the party, the
bureaucracy, and the military as well as the intelligentsia and
whole ethnic groups. Hundreds of thousands were killed or died
in detention between 1936 and 1939; hundreds of writers were
among the victims. Pasternak remembered Pilnyak constantly
looking out the window. Acquaintances he ran into expressed
amazement that he hadn’t already been picked up. “Is it really
you?” they asked. And on October 28, 1937, the secret police
came. Pasternak and his wife were at their neighbor’s house;
it was the birthday of Pilnyak’s three-­year-­old son, also named
Boris. That evening, a car pulled up and several men in uniform
got out. It was all very polite. Pilnyak was needed on urgent busi-
ness, said one officer.
He was charged with belonging to “anti-­ Soviet, Trotskyist,
subversive and terrorist organizations,” preparing to assassinate
Stalin, and spying for Japan; he had traveled to Japan and China in
1927 and written about his journey. He had also spent six months
in the United States in 1931 with Stalin’s permission, traveling
cross-­country in a Ford and working briefly in Hollywood as a
screenwriter for MGM. His travelogue novel Okay offered a harsh
view of American life.
Pilnyak “confessed” to everything, but in a final word to a
military tribunal he said he would like “to have paper” in front
of him on which he “could write something of use to the Soviet
people.” After a fifteen-­minute trial, from 5:45 to 6:00 p.m. on
April 20, 1938, Pilnyak was found guilty and sentenced to the
“ultimate penalty,” which was carried out the next day—­in the
sinister language of the bureaucracy—­by the “head of 1st special
section’s 12th department.” Pilnyak’s wife spent nineteen years
in the Gulag, and his child was raised in the Soviet republic of
Georgia by a grandmother. All of Pilnyak’s works were with-

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

drawn from libraries and bookstores, and destroyed. In 1938–­39,

according to a report by the state censor, 24,138,799 copies of
“politically damaging” works or titles of “absolutely no value to
the Soviet reader” were pulped.
In the wake of the arrest of Pilnyak and others, the Pasternaks,
like many in the village, lived with fear. “It was awful,” said Pas-
ternak’s wife, Zinaida, pregnant at the time with their first son.
“Every minute we expected that Borya would be arrested.”
Even after the death of Stalin, no Soviet writer could entertain
the idea of publication abroad without considering Pilnyak’s fate.
And since 1929 no one had broken the unwritten but iron rule
that unapproved foreign publication was forbidden.
As he continued his patter, D’Angelo suddenly realized that
Pasternak was lost in thought. Chukovsky, Pasternak’s neighbor,
thought he had a “somnambulistic quality”—­“he listens but does
not hear” while away in the world of his own thoughts and cal-
culations. Pasternak had an uncompromising certainty about his
writing, its genius, and his need to have it read by as wide an audi-
ence as possible. The writer was convinced that Doctor Zhivago
was the culmination of his life’s work, a deeply authentic expres-
sion of his vision, and superior to all of the celebrated poetry he
had produced over many decades. “My final happiness and mad-
ness,” he called it.
Both epic and autobiographical, the novel revolves around the
doctor-­poet Yuri Zhivago, his art, loves, and losses in the decades
surrounding the 1917 Russian Revolution. After the death of his
parents, Zhivago is adopted into a family of the bourgeois Mos-
cow intelligentsia. In this genteel and enlightened setting, he
discovers his talents for poetry and healing. He finishes medical
school and marries Tonya, the daughter of his foster parents. Dur-
ing World War I, while serving in a field hospital in southern Rus-
sia, he meets the nurse Lara Antipova and falls in love with her.
Upon his return to his family in 1917, Zhivago finds a changed
city. Controlled by the Reds, Moscow is wracked by the chaos
of revolution and its citizens are starving. The old world of art,
leisure, and intellectual contemplation has been erased. Zhiva-
go’s initial enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks soon fades. Fleeing
typhus, Zhivago and his family travel to Varykino, their estate

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 The Zhivago Affair

in the Urals. Nearby, in the town of Yuryatin, Zhivago and Lara

meet again. Lara’s husband is away with the Red Army. Zhivago’s
desire for her is rekindled, but he is troubled by his infidelity.
Captured by a band of peasant soldiers who press-­gang him
into serving as a field doctor, Zhivago witnesses the atrocities of
the Russian Civil War, committed by both the Red Army and its
enemy, a coalition of anti-­Bolshevik forces known as the Whites.
Zhivago eventually “deserts” the revolutionary fight and returns
home to find that his family, believing him dead, has fled the
country. He moves in with Lara. As the war draws near, they take
refuge in the country house in Varykino. For a brief moment, the
world is shut out, and Zhivago’s muse returns to inspire a burst
of poetry writing. The howling of the wolves outside is a portent
of the relationship’s doom. With the end of the war, and the con-
solidation of Bolshevik power, fate forces the couple apart forever.
Lara leaves for the Russian Far East. Zhivago returns to Moscow
and dies there in 1929. He leaves behind a collection of poetry,
which forms the novel’s last chapter and serves as Zhivago’s artis-
tic legacy and life credo.
Zhivago is Pasternak’s sometime alter ego. Both character and
writer are from a lost past, the cultured milieu of the Moscow
intelligentsia. In Soviet letters, this was a world to be disdained,
if summoned at all. Pasternak knew that the Soviet publishing
world would recoil from Doctor Zhivago’s alien tone, its overt
religiosity, its sprawling indifference to the demands of socialist
realism and the obligation to genuflect before the October Revo-
lution. The novel’s heresies were manifold and undisguised, and
for the Soviet faithful, particular sentences and thoughts carried
the shock of an unexpected slap. A “zoological apostasy” was
the reaction in an early official critique of the novel. The revolu-
tion was not shown as “the cake with cream on top,” Pasternak
acknowledged, as the writing neared completion. The manuscript
“should be given to anyone who asks for it,” he said, “because I
do not believe it will ever appear in print.”
Pasternak had not considered Western publication, but by the
time D’Angelo arrived at his gate, he had endured five months of
complete silence from Goslitizdat, the state literary publisher, to
which he had submitted the novel. Two leading journals, Zna-

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

mya (The Banner) and Novy Mir (New World), which he hoped
might excerpt parts of Doctor Zhivago, had also not responded.
For D’Angelo, the timing of his pitch was the height of good for-
tune; Pasternak, when presented with this unexpected offer, was
ready to act. In a totalitarian society he had long displayed an
unusual fearlessness—­visiting and giving money to the relatives
of people who had been sent to the Gulag when the fear of taint
scared so many others away; intervening with the authorities to
ask for mercy for those accused of political crimes; and refusing
to sign drummed-­up petitions demanding execution for named
enemies of the state. He recoiled from the group-­think of many of
his fellow writers. “Don’t yell at me,” he said to his peers at one
public meeting, where he was heckled for asserting that writers
should not be given orders. “But if you must yell, at least don’t do
it in unison.” Pasternak felt no need to tailor his art to the politi-
cal demands of the state; to sacrifice his novel, he believed, would
be a sin against his own genius.
“Let’s not worry about whether or not the Soviet edition will
eventually come out,” he said to D’Angelo. “I am willing to give
you the novel so long as Feltrinelli promises to send a copy of it,
shall we say in the next few months, to other publishers from
important countries, first and foremost France and England. What
do you think? Can you ask Milan?” D’Angelo replied that it was
not only possible but inevitable because Feltrinelli would surely
want to sell the foreign rights to the book.
Pasternak paused again for a moment before excusing himself
and going into his house, where he worked in a Spartan study
on the second floor. In winter it looked out over “a vast white
expanse dominated by a little cemetery on a hill, like a bit of
background out of a Chagall painting.” Pasternak emerged from
the dacha a short time later with a large package wrapped in a
covering of newspaper. The manuscript was 433 closely typed
pages divided into five parts. Each part, bound in soft paper or
cardboard, was held together by twine that was threaded through
rough holes in the pages and then knotted. The first section was
dated 1948, and the work was still littered with Pasternak’s hand-
written corrections.

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 The Zhivago Affair

“This is Doctor Zhivago,” Pasternak said. “May it make its

way around the world.”
With all that was to come, Pasternak never wavered from that
wish.
D’Angelo explained that he would be able to get the manuscript
to Feltrinelli within a matter of days because he was planning a
trip to the West. It was just before noon, and the men chatted for
a few more minutes.
As they stood at the garden gate saying their good-­byes, the
novel under D’Angelo’s arm, Pasternak had an odd expression—­
wry, ironic—­playing on his face. He said to the Italian: “You are
hereby invited to my execution.”

T he publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West in 1957 and

the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Boris Pasternak
the following year triggered one of the great cultural storms of the
Cold War. Because of the enduring appeal of the novel, and the
1965 David Lean film based on it, Doctor Zhivago remains a land-
mark piece of fiction. Yet few readers know the trials of its birth
and how the novel galvanized a world largely divided between the
competing ideologies of two superpowers.
Doctor Zhivago was banned in the Soviet Union, and the
Kremlin attempted to use the Italian Communist Party to sup-
press the first publication of the novel in translation in Italy. Offi-
cials in Moscow and leading Italian Communists threatened both
Pasternak and his Milan publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The
two men, who never met, resisted the pressure and forged one of
the greatest partnerships in the history of publishing. Their secret
correspondence, carried in and out of the Soviet Union by trusted
couriers, is its own manifesto on artistic freedom.
The Soviet Union’s widely reported hostility to Doctor Zhivago
ensured that a novel that might otherwise have had a small elite
readership became an international best seller. Doctor Zhivago’s
astonishing sales increased even more when Pasternak was hon-
ored by the Swedish Academy with the 1958 Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature. The writer had been nominated several times before in
acknowledgment of his poetry, but the appearance of the novel

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

made Pasternak an almost inevitable choice. The Kremlin dis-

missed Pasternak’s Nobel Prize as an anti-­Soviet provocation and
orchestrated a relentless internal campaign to vilify the writer
as a traitor. Pasternak was driven to the point of suicide. The
scale and viciousness of the assault on the elderly writer shocked
people around the world, including many writers sympathetic to
the Soviet Union. Figures as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and
the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, rose to Pasternak’s
defense.
Pasternak lived in a society where novels, poems, and plays
were hugely significant forms of communication and entertain-
ment. The themes, aesthetics, and political role of literature were
the subjects of fierce ideological disputes, and sometimes the
losers in these debates paid with their lives. After 1917, nearly
1,500 writers in the Soviet Union were executed or died in labor
camps for various alleged infractions. Writers were to be either
marshaled in the creation of a new “Soviet man” or isolated, and
in some cases crushed; literature could either serve the revolu-
tion or the enemies of the state.
The Soviet leadership wrote extensively about revolutionary
art; gave hours-­long speeches about the purpose of fiction and
poetry; and summoned writers to the Kremlin to lecture them
about their responsibilities. The men in the Kremlin cared about
writing all the more because they had experienced its capacity
to transform. The revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was radicalized
by a novel, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? “Art
belongs to the people,” Lenin said. “It should be understood and
loved by the masses. It must unite and elevate their feelings,
thoughts and will. It must stir them to activity and develop the
artistic instincts within them. Should we serve exquisite sweet
cake to a small minority while the worker and peasant masses are
in need of black bread?”
As Stalin consolidated power in the early 1930s, he brought
the country’s literary life under strict control. Literature was no
longer the party’s ally, but its servant. The artistic vitality of the
1920s withered. Stalin, a poet in his youth, was a voracious reader
of fiction, sometimes devouring hundreds of pages in a day. He

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 The Zhivago Affair

red-­lined passages that displeased him. He weighed in on what

plays should be staged. He once telephoned Pasternak to discuss
whether a particular poet, Osip Mandelstam, was a master of his
art—­a conversation that was really about Mandelstam’s fate. He
decided which writers should receive the country’s premier liter-
ary award, inevitably named the Stalin Prize.
The Soviet public longed for great writing with a desire that
was rarely sated. The country’s shelves groaned under the dry,
formulaic dreck produced to order. Isaiah Berlin found it all “irre-
trievably second-­rate.” Those writers who held on to their indi-
vidual voices—­Pasternak and the poet Anna Akhmatova, among
a few others—­were rewarded with near adulation. Their readings
could fill concert halls and their words, even when banned, found
a way to their public’s lips. In the Obozerka forced-­labor camp
near the White Sea, some inmates amused and bolstered each
other by trying to see who could recite the most Pasternak. The
Russian émigré critic Victor Frank, explaining Pasternak’s appeal,
said that in his poetry “the skies were deeper, the stars more radi-
ant, the rains louder and the sun more savage. . . . No other poet
in Russian literature—­ and, perhaps, in the world at large—­ is
capable of charging with the same magic the humdrum objects of
our humdrum lives as he. Nothing is too small, too insignificant
for his piercing eye, the eye of a child, the eye of the first man on
a new planet: rain puddles, window-­sills, mirror stands, aprons,
doors of railway carriages, the little hairlets standing off a wet
overcoat—­all this flotsam and jetsam of daily life is transformed
by him into a joy for ever.”
The poet had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the Com-
munist Party, its leaders, and the Soviet Union’s literary estab-
lishment. Before the Great Terror of the late 1930s, Pasternak had
written poetry in praise of Lenin and Stalin, and he was for a time
transfixed by Stalin’s guile and authority. But as the bloodletting
of the purges swept the country, he became profoundly disillu-
sioned with the Soviet state. That he survived the Terror when
so many others were swallowed by its relentless, blind maw has
no single explanation. The Terror could be bizarrely random—­
mowing down the loyal and leaving some of the suspect alive.

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 Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

Pasternak was protected by luck, by his international status, and,

perhaps most critically, by Stalin’s interested observation of the
poet’s unique and sometimes eccentric talent.
Pasternak did not seek to confront the authorities but lived in
the purposeful isolation of his creativity and his country life. He
began to write Doctor Zhivago in 1945 and it took him ten years
to complete. The writing was slowed by periods of illness; by the
need to set it aside to make money from commissioned transla-
tions of foreign works; and by Pasternak’s growing ambition and
wonder at what was flowing from his pen.
It was, effectively, a first novel, and Pasternak was sixty-­five
when he finished it. He channeled much of his own experience
and opinions into its pages. Doctor Zhivago was not a polemic, or
an attack on the Soviet Union, or a defense of any other political
system. Its power lay in its individual spirit, Pasternak’s wish to
find some communion with the earth, some truth in life, some
love. Like Dostoevsky, he wanted to settle with the past and
express this period of Russia’s history through “fidelity to poetic
truth.”
As the story evolved, Pasternak realized that Doctor Zhivago
stood as a rebuke to the short history of the Soviet state. The
plot, the characters, the atmosphere embodied much that was
alien to Soviet literature. There was in its pages a disdain for the
“deadening and merciless” ideology that animated so many of
his contemporaries. Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s final testa-
ment, a salute to an age and a sensibility he cherished but that
had been destroyed. He was obsessively determined to get it
published—­unlike some of his generation who wrote in secret for
the “drawer.”
Doctor Zhivago appeared in succession in Italian, French, Ger-
man, and English, among numerous languages—­but not, at first,
in Russian.
In September 1958, at the World’s Fair in Brussels, a Russian-­
language edition of Doctor Zhivago, handsomely bound in a blue
linen hardcover, was handed out from the Vatican Pavilion to
Soviet visitors. Rumors about the genesis of this mysterious edi-
tion began almost immediately; the CIA was first mentioned by

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 The Zhivago Affair

name as its secret publisher in November 1958. Until now, the

CIA has never acknowledged its role.
Over the years, a series of apocryphal stories have appeared
about how the CIA obtained an original manuscript of Doctor
Zhivago and its motivation in printing the novel in Russian.
It was said that British intelligence had forced down a plane in
Malta that was carrying Feltrinelli from Moscow and secretly
photographed the novel, which they removed from his suitcase in
the plane’s hold. It never happened. Some of Pasternak’s French
friends believed, incorrectly, that an original-­language printing of
Doctor Zhivago was necessary to qualify for the Nobel Prize—­a
theory that has periodically resurfaced. The Nobel Prize was not
a CIA goal, and an internal accounting of the agency’s distribu-
tion of the book shows that no copies were sent to Stockholm;
the CIA simply wanted to get copies of Doctor Zhivago into the
Soviet Union and into the hands of Soviet citizens.
It has also been argued that the printing was the work of
Russian émigrés in Europe and the agency’s involvement was
marginal—­no more than that of the financier of émigré front
organizations. The CIA was in fact deeply involved. The opera-
tion to print and distribute Doctor Zhivago was run by the CIA’s
Soviet Russia Division, monitored by CIA director Allen Dulles,
and sanctioned by President Eisenhower’s Operations Coordinat-
ing Board, which reported to the National Security Council at the
White House. The agency arranged the printing of a hardcover
edition in 1958 in the Netherlands and printed a miniature paper-
back edition of the novel at its headquarters in Washington, D.C.,
in 1959.
A weapon in the ideological battles between East and West—­
this, too, is part of Doctor Zhivago’s extraordinary life.

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