The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book Page 10

  Pasternak spent much of the winter of 1954 in Peredelkino working intensively on the novel’s last chapters. His study looked out on the garden and across a broad meadow to the small church that the poet occasionally attended. He wrote in a room with a cot, a wardrobe, two desks, including one to stand at, and a narrow, dark-stained bookshelf that included a large Russian-English dictionary and a Russian Bible among a small collection of books. “I personally do not keep heirlooms, archives, collections of any kind, including books and furniture. I do not save letters or draft copies of my work. Nothing piles up in my room; it is easier to clean than a hotel room. My life resembles a student’s.”

  He was a man of routine. He rose early and washed outside at a pump, even on harsh winter mornings, steam rising off his face and chest. When he was younger he regularly bathed in the river, and he still dipped his head in its waters when the ice broke in the spring. Each day, he liked a long, briskly taken walk, and he always took candy for children he might meet around the village.

  Pasternak wrote in his upstairs study, and Zinaida was protective of his privacy, refusing to allow visitors to disturb him. She was particularly watchful that winter, having learned that her husband had rekindled relations with Ivinskaya. Akhmatova described Pasternak as half ill, half detained and noted that Zinaida was rude to him. A visitor described “her lips pursed in an injured Cupid’s bow.” Pasternak himself was occasionally irritated by distractions from his rush to get Zhivago finished. He reluctantly translated the speech of the German poet Bertolt Brecht, who was in Moscow to receive the Stalin Prize, but when the Union of Soviet Writers suggested he translate some of Brecht’s poems he was openly irritated: “Surely Brecht realizes that engaging in translations is a disgrace. I am busy with important work, for which the time has not yet come—unlike Brecht’s old junk.” He refused to go into Moscow for the reception for the visiting German.

  Through the summer of 1955, Pasternak continued to edit the manuscript as it neared completion. After reading a newly typed version, he said that several “heavy and complicated passages will have to be simplified and lightened.” Even amid the relative relaxation of the “thaw,” he was not optimistic about publication. As Pasternak and Ivinskaya walked over the footbridge across Izmalkovo Pond one evening that fall, he said: “You mark my words—they will not publish this novel for anything in the world. I don’t believe they will ever publish it. I have come to the conclusion that I should pass it around to be read by all and sundry.”

  A final revision took place in November, and on December 10, 1955, he said the novel was complete: “You cannot imagine what I have achieved! I have found and given names to all this sorcery that has been the cause of suffering, bafflement, amazement, and dispute for several decades. Everything is named in simple, transparent, and sad words. I also once again renewed and redefined the dearest and most important things: land and sky, great passion, creative spirit, life and death.”

  Chapter 6

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

  The publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was an unlikely Communist. His entrepreneurial ancestors, stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century, had over several generations built a great fortune. These businessmen, with multinational interests across numerous sectors, had made Feltrinelli one of those names—like Agnelli, Motta, and Pirelli—synonymous with the industrial development of northern Italy. Feltrinelli was born on June 19, 1926, into a cocooned life of nannies and tutors that shifted, depending on the season, between various villas and hotels—Lake Como, Lake Garda, the Baur au Lac in Zurich, and the Excelsior at the Venice Lido. The family, much like some of Italy’s other great industrial concerns, coexisted—sometimes uneasily, sometimes profitably—with Mussolini’s Fascist government, which had come to power in 1922. Feltrinelli’s father, Carlo, died in 1935 of a heart attack while in the middle of a financial dispute with the regime over assets held abroad by his mother. He was fifty-four. The parenting of Giangiacomo and his sister Antonella now fell to his mother, Giannalisa, insofar as she devoted time to it. She “would punish and then repent. She would mortify and then shower them with kisses and hugs.” Feltrinelli was enrolled by his mother in the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, the Italian Fascist youth movement. A substantial check from Giannalisa also induced Mussolini to bestow the title Marquess of Gargnano on the boy.

  Feltrinelli later described himself as a teenage mass of contradictions, urging on the Fascist armies but also opposing the Germans while listening to Radio London, as some called the BBC World Service during the war. Ignored at home, he befriended the workers and farmhands who took care of his mother’s property, and they opened up a previously invisible world of hard labor and injustice. The allied bombing raids and the arrival of the Germans in Italy to prop up Mussolini added to the radicalization of a young man who was searching for a set of ideas to cling to.

  Feltrinelli was a man of great enthusiasms, whether for politics or literature. He didn’t hold his loyalties and ideas lightly, but when they clashed, as they would over Doctor Zhivago, he followed his conscience, not a party line. A friend said his passion was easily aroused and he was devoted to his principles, “but he was just as prepared to abandon a cause, without standing on ceremony, if he felt it was outdated or did not serve his way of thinking.” By 1944, after the liberation of Rome, and still only eighteen, Feltrinelli was reading The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution. That November, he enlisted with the Legnano combat unit which fought with the American Fifth Army, and he saw some action near Bologna.

  Feltrinelli joined the Communist Party in March 1945. His mother, a royalist, was appalled. When Italy held a referendum in June 1946 on whether to keep the monarchy or adopt a republican form of government, Giannalisa Feltrinelli handed out leaflets in support of the House of Savoy in the streets of Rome—through the window of her Rolls-Royce. Feltrinelli had already skipped town after intelligence he gathered about pro-royalty meetings in his mother’s home ended up in the pages of L’Unità, the Communist newspaper. To wit: “On the basis of information received from an excellent source we are able to provide news of an important meeting held in the home of a family of big industrial sharks, the Feltrinellis.”

  Between the fall of Mussolini (who briefly commandeered the Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda, where he was surrounded by a protective guard of crack Nazi troops) and the first postwar election, the Italian Communist Party was transformed from a small underground organization of fewer than 10,000 activists to a mass movement of 1.7 million members. The party benefited, above all, from its vanguard role in the Resistance, where two-thirds of all partisan bands were inspired by communism. After the war, under the leadership of the pragmatic Palmiro Togliatti, the party advocated “progressive democracy” and appeared more anti-Fascist than anti-capitalist. The Communists seemed open to innovation in the arts, literature, and the social sciences. They were allied with or controlled some of the most progressive forces in the country, from the feminist Unione Donne Italiane to the Movement for the Rebirth of the South to the Union for Popular Sport. The party had a glamorous air. And it attracted a couple of generations of intellectuals and idealists—those who had survived the long years of fascism and young people such as Feltrinelli who were seeking a political movement to champion their desire for social change. The party was the natural home for what the writer Italo Calvino called the “little big world” of anti-Fascists, that passionate, postwar swell of believers who yearned for a new Italy. Feltrinelli was a disciplined and earnest young recruit. “I learned to control, at least in part, my impulsiveness and my impetuosity; I learned method in debate, in the work of persuasion and clarification that I had to carry out among the comrades.”

  At the age of twenty-one, Feltrinelli came into his inheritance, including substantial holdings in construction, lumber, and banking, and he became a significant financial supporter of the Italian Communist Party. One activis
t recalled, “We had dreams.… Giangiacomo could make them come true, and it seemed miraculous to have him on our side.” The house at Lake Garda was used as a summer camp for young party members. Feltrinelli drove around in his smoky-blue Buick convertible to put up party posters. At home with his new wife—dubbed the “Muscovite Pasionaria” by her mother-in-law—he hung a portrait of Stalin among the old masters on the wall.

  In the late 1940s, Feltrinelli began his formal entry into the world of books. He and Giuseppe Del Bo, a Marxist academic and writer, began to create a library devoted to a history of the working classes and social movements. The Italian police called it a “little university of Marxism,” but with Feltrinelli’s wealth and his passion for the pursuit of rare books and materials across Europe, it became a treasure house holding tens of thousands of pieces of radical literature—-a first edition of The Communist Manifesto, original working notes of both Marx and Engels, a first edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, Victor Hugo’s letters to Garibaldi, and a rare copy of Thomas More’s Utopia. The collection brought Feltrinelli to the attention of the Soviet Union. In 1953, he was invited to Moscow to discuss cooperation between the Biblioteca Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Little came of the meeting; it would be his only visit to Moscow.

  Feltrinelli also ran his businesses, proving himself an able, sometimes hard-nosed, manager and capitalist. The party drew on his financial acumen as well as his cash. In 1950, Feltrinelli became involved in a publishing house tied to the Communist Party and brought some management systems and financial controls to the floundering entity. Eventually, in 1955, the house was dissolved, and it gave way to a new business, Feltrinelli Editore.

  The twenty-nine-year-old was now an independent Milanese publisher, and he looked the part: hair already slightly receding, a wingspan moustache, dark horn-rimmed glasses, and an arched, feline quality to his face. He was nicknamed “the Jaguar.” Feltrinelli Editore’s first two books came off the presses in June 1955—An Autobiography: Jawaharlal Nehru and The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool. The publisher wanted books that were fresh, progressive, dissonant, and influential. He wanted intellectual excitement, discoveries.

  On February 25, 1956, at a secret session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev launched an astonishing and devastating attack on Stalin entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” He said the former, hallowed Leader was guilty of the gravest abuse of power, and that during Stalin’s rule “mass arrests and deportation of thousands and thousands of people, executions without trial or normal investigations, created insecurity, fear and desperation.” Khrushchev spoke of torture, even of former members of the Politburo. He said Lenin wanted to fire Stalin as general secretary of the party. He said Stalin was confused and essentially missing in action when the Nazis invaded. The delegates in the Great Hall of the Kremlin sat in stupefied silence.

  The CIA, which obtained a copy of what became known as the “Secret Speech,” leaked it to The New York Times. For all the shock among many Communists worldwide, there was also a desire for renewal, as if the movement had passed from one age into another. The sense of change was short-lived; it would die with the Soviet invasion of Hungary. But it was in this brief clearing that Feltrinelli received Doctor Zhivago. Cooperation with Soviet writers and publishers seemed particularly opportune now that reform was gusting through the Kremlin. Feltrinelli had no sense yet that his possession of the novel would infuriate the Soviet leadership.

  The week after he left Pasternak’s dacha in Peredelkino in May 1956, D’Angelo flew to Berlin. He wasn’t searched as he left Moscow, probably because he was a fraternal comrade, and he also had no thought that there was anything untoward about carrying the novel out. He landed in Berlin, a city not yet divided by the wall, and went from Schönefeld Airport in the East to a hotel just off West Berlin’s showcase shopping avenue, the Kurfürstendamm. D’Angelo called Milan, and Feltrinelli decided to fly to Berlin himself to pick up the manuscript. It was passed the following day from one suitcase to another at a small hotel on Joachimstaler Strasse. Doctor Zhivago had found a publisher.

  Feltrinelli didn’t read Russian, so after he returned from Berlin with the manuscript, he sent it to Pietro Zveteremich, an Italian Slavist, for review. Judgment was swift: “Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture.”

  Pasternak seemed quite pleased with himself after giving the book to D’Angelo, but he also realized that those close to him might think him reckless. When he informed his stepson and daughter-in-law that Sunday in May, Pasternak asked them not to tell his wife. At a dinner with friends that week, Pasternak brought up the subject anyway. “What kind of nonsense is that?” scoffed Zinaida. The table fell silent.

  Ivinskaya was in Moscow when Pasternak met with D’Angelo, and returned to Peredelkino only later that evening. Pasternak met her on the road near his dacha, and told her he had had a visit from two charming young people, an Italian Communist and an official in the Soviet embassy in Rome. D’Angelo’s companion was no diplomat, and Pasternak was dissembling to cushion the fact that he had handed over his manuscript to strangers, one of them a foreigner. Ivinskaya was furious; she realized that no post-Stalinist glow would shield a writer who defied the system by consorting with Westerners.

  Ivinskaya was returning from negotiations with the state publishing house on a one-volume collection of poetry, which was being overseen by a sympathetic young editor, Nikolai Bannikov. “This may put an end to the poetry volume!” she shouted. She was also afraid for her own safety. “I’ve been in prison once, remember, and already then, in the Lubyanka, they questioned me endlessly about what the novel would say.… I’m really amazed you could do this.”

  Pasternak was a little sheepish, but unapologetic. “Really, now, Olya, you’re overstating things, it’s nothing at all. Just let them read it. If they like it, let them do what they want with it—I said I didn’t mind.” To assuage his lover, Pasternak said Ivinskaya could try to get it back from the Italian if she was so upset. Or perhaps, he suggested, she could sound out any official reaction to what he had done.

  Ivinskaya turned on her heels and went back to Moscow to see Bannikov. The poetry editor was familiar with the novel. The manuscript had been gathering dust at the state publishing house for several months, and Pasternak had referred to it in the introductory essay for his collections of poems: “Quite recently I have completed my main and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and for which I answer without a qualm—a novel in prose with additions in verse, Doctor Zhivago. The poems assembled in this book, which are scattered across all the years of my life, constitute preparatory stages to the novel. Indeed, I view their republication as a preparation for the novel.”

  The state publisher had been notably silent about Pasternak’s manuscript—almost certainly because the senior editors viewed the novel as objectionable. Bannikov was frightened by Ivinskaya’s news. After she left, he wrote her a note, which was delivered to her apartment on Potapov Street: “How can anyone love his country so little? One may have one’s differences with it, but what he has done is treachery—how can he fail to understand what he is bringing on himself and us as well?”

  Feltrinelli moved quickly to secure his rights. In mid-June, he wrote to Pasternak to thank him for the opportunity to publish Doctor Zhivago, which he described as a work of enormous literary importance. He then got down to business, discussing royalties and foreign rights. Feltrinelli had a trusted courier hand-deliver the letter and two copies of an enclosed contract. If Pasternak had any real desire to get the novel back, this was the moment. But he had no second thoughts. A couple of weeks after meeting D’Angelo, Pasternak was visited by the Italian scholar Ettore Lo Gatto and told him he was willing to face “any kind of trouble” as long as the novel was published. After consulting with his sons, Pasternak decided to sign the contract with
Feltrinelli. In a letter to the publisher at the end of June, Pasternak told him that, while he wasn’t completely uninterested in money, he realized that geography and politics could make it impossible to receive his royalties. The writer made Feltrinelli aware of the risks to Pasternak of first publication in the West but did not bar him from bringing the novel out: “If its publication here, promised by several of our magazines, were to be delayed and your version were to come before it, I would find myself in a tragically difficult situation. But this is not your concern. In the name of God, feel free to go with the translation and the printing of the book, and good luck! Ideas are not born to be hidden or smothered at birth, but to be communicated to others.”

  The Kremlin leadership quickly learned about Pasternak’s contact with Feltrinelli. On August 24, 1956, KGB general Ivan Serov, the head of the secret police and a longtime enforcer of the Kremlin’s will, including in Eastern Europe, wrote to the Politburo, the country’s small ruling group. The Politburo, led by the general secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, oversaw the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its various departments, including culture. In a long memo, Serov informed the Communist leadership of the manuscript’s delivery to Feltrinelli and how Pasternak had requested the rights be assigned to publishers in England and France. After noting that permission to publish Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union had not been granted, Serov quoted from a note Pasternak had recently mailed with an essay to a French journalist, Daniil Reznikov, in Paris. The parcel was intercepted by the KGB: “I realize perfectly well that [the novel] cannot be published now, and that this is how it is going to be for some time, perhaps forever,” Pasternak wrote. Noting the likelihood of foreign publication, Pasternak continued: “Now they will tear me limb from limb: I have this foreboding, and you shall be a distant and sorrowful witness to this event.” Pasternak, however, seemed willing to countenance even more danger: He included a biographical essay that he had written for the state literary publishing house, which was planning to bring out a collection of his poems. Pasternak told Reznikov, who had visited him earlier in the year, to do as he wished with the essay.