The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for the permission to reprint previously published material:

  Doubleday: “Autumn,” “The Earth,” and “Lieutenant Schmidt” from A Captive of Time by Olga Ivinskaya, translated by Max Hayward, copyright © 1978 by Doubleday & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt from Feltrinelli: A Story of Riches, Revolution and Violent Death by Carlo Feltrinelli, translated by Alastair McEwan. Copyright © 1999 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Translation copyright © 2001 by Alastair McEwen. Excerpt from Meetings with Pasternak: A Memoir by Alexander Gladkov, translated by Max Hayward. Copyright © 1977 by Alexander Gladkov. Translation copyright © 1978 by Max Hayward. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Pantheon Books: “August” and “Winter Night” from Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translation copyright © 2010 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. “Hamlet” from Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, translation copyright © 1958 by William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd., copyright © 1958 by Pantheon Books Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. Underlying rights to Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, copyright © 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, Italy, copyright © The Heirs of Boris Pasternak, granted by Feltrinelli and the agents for the Estate of Pasternak. Reprinted by permission of the heirs of Boris Pasternak and Giangiacomo Feltrinellu Editore, Milan. All rights reserved.

  Random House Group Limited: Excerpts from Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930–1960 by Evgeny Pasternak, translated by M. Duncan. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

  Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Excerpt from Hope Against Hope: A Memoir by Nadezha Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Max Hayward. Copyright © 1970 by Atheneum Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Scribner Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Finn, Peter, [date]

  The Zhivago affair : the Kremlin, the CIA, and the battle over a forbidden book / Peter Finn and Petra Couvée.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  HC ISBN 978-0-307-90800-1. EBK ISBN 978-0-307-90801-8.

  1. Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 1890–1960. Doktor Zhivago. 2. Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 1890–1960—Censorship. 3. Authors, Russian—20th century—Biography. 4. Dissenters—Soviet Union—Biography. 5. Prohibited books—Soviet Union—History. 6. Politics and literature—Soviet Union—History. 7. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—History—20th century. 8. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. 9. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 10. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1953–1985. I. Couvée, Petra. II. Title.

  PG3476.P27D6837 2013 891.7342—dc23 2013033875

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket images: (Boris Pasternak) Bettmann/Corbis; (Kremlin, Moscow) Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  v3.1

  For Nora FitzGerald, and our children, Rachel, Liam, David, and Ria

  and

  For Koos Couvée and Paula van Rossen

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

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

  Chapter 1

  “The roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off.”

  Chapter 2

  “Pasternak, without realizing it, entered the personal life of Stalin.”

  Chapter 3

  “I have arranged to meet you in a novel.”

  Chapter 4

  “You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel?”

  Chapter 5

  “Until it is finished, I am a fantastically, manically unfree man.”

  Chapter 6

  “Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture.”

  Chapter 7

  “If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well, I must say we have a different view of it.”

  Chapter 8

  “We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain.”

  Chapter 9

  “We’ll do it black.”

  Chapter 10

  “He also looks the genius: raw nerves, misfortune, fatality.”

  Chapter 11

  “There would be no mercy, that was clear.”

  Chapter 12

  “Pasternak’s name spells war.”

  Chapter 13

  “I am lost like a beast in an enclosure.”

  Chapter 14

  “A college weekend with Russians”

  Chapter 15

  “An unbearably blue sky”

  Chapter 16

  “It’s too late for me to express regret that the book wasn’t published.”

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Authors

  Illustrations

  Prologue

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

  On 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 Sunday 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 companion was clearly a foreigner—Russians teased the man that he was a stilyaga, or “style maven,” because of his Western clothing. 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 working 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. Getting the rights to a first novel by one of Russia’s best-known poets 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 Ivanov lived on either side of Pasternak. Kornei Chukovsky, the Soviet Union’s most beloved children’s-book writer, lived a couple 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, writers 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 celebrations of the Communist state, the story lines full of muscular 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 engineers of the human soul.”

  After 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 turning onto Pavlenko Street, the narrow lane at the edge of the village 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 talent 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 “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. Byzantine, 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 Germany 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 narrow 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.

  Conversations with Pasternak could become soliloquies. Once engaged, he talked in long, seemingly chaotic paragraphs, full 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 imaginative 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 Moscow. 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 comrades 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 Ehrenburg. The horizons of literature seemed to broaden as old dogmas were challenged. Fiction that was somewhat critical of the system, 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 translated, 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 taking 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 executed 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 Mayakovsky, the brash and militant Bolshevik poet, in a review of Pilnyak’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 arsenals of our enemies. At the present time of darkening storm clouds this is the same as treachery at the front.”