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

  Serov noted that Pasternak was a Jew and did not have a party card, and said his work was typified by “estrangement from Soviet life.”

  A week later, the Central Committee’s culture department prepared a detailed report on Doctor Zhivago for the leadership with a series of tendentious but damning quotations from the novel. The book was described as a hostile attack on the October Revolution and a malicious libel of the Bolshevik revolutionaries by an author who was labeled a “bourgeois individualist.” Publication of this novel is impossible, the report concluded. In an accompanying note, the deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union said officials would use their contacts with the Italian Communist Party to prevent publication abroad. Feltrinelli, after all, was a Communist.

  It is unclear exactly how the KGB learned the details of Pasternak’s communications with Feltrinelli, including his wish to assign the rights to English and French publishers. That fact must have come directly from an account of Pasternak’s meeting with D’Angelo. Both the Italian scout and his companion, Vladimirsky, talked openly at their workplace in Radio Moscow about getting the manuscript and delivering it to Feltrinelli.

  Ivinskaya’s contacts with various editors about Pasternak’s involvement with an Italian publisher and how to salvage the situation also raised an alarm within the system. A senior editor at the state literary publishing house told her that she would show the novel to Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Politburo member, and seek his advice on how to proceed. The editor of Znamya, the magazine that had published some of Pasternak’s Zhivago poems, said he would inform an official at the Central Committee.

  For the next two years, Ivinskaya became the authorities’ favored conduit to the writer. It was a difficult and controversial role. The author’s well-being, Ivinskaya’s fears for her own safety, and the state’s interests were tangled up in her sometimes-frantic mediation efforts. “She relieves me from the vexing negotiations with the authorities, she takes the blows of such conflicts on herself,” Pasternak told his sister. She was his chosen emissary, but her contacts with the bureaucrats were watched with suspicion by some of Pasternak’s circle. She was in a hopeless position. Ivinskaya was not the informer some would label her many decades later. In a contemporaneous judgment in a top-secret memo, the chairman of the KGB labeled her “very anti-Soviet.” She tried to please the officials she dealt with, and they tried to make her their semi-witting instrument but, in the end, her influence on Pasternak was limited. Pasternak was a self-aware and intuitive actor in the unfolding drama, and the key decisions in the matter, from the day he handed the manuscript to D’Angelo, remained his.

  Ivinskaya was soon summoned to meet Dmitri Polikarpov, the head of the Central Committee’s culture department. The haggard, bleary-eyed Polikarpov said it was imperative that Ivinskaya get the novel back from D’Angelo. Ivinskaya suggested that the Italians might not be willing to return the manuscript and the ideal solution would be to publish Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union as quickly as possible, preempting any foreign edition.

  “No,” said Polikarpov, “we must get the manuscript back, because it will be very awkward if we cut out some chapters and they print them.”

  Polikarpov was known in the literary community as dyadya Mitya—“Uncle Mitya”—an unapologetic enforcer of orthodoxy who confronted writers about their errors. Polikarpov once told the deputy editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta: “Your newspaper I read with a pencil in my hand.” The poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko said that “for him the Party came before everything, before people, including himself.”

  Polikarpov, in front of Ivinskaya, phoned the director of the state literary publishing house, Anatoli Kotov, to tell him to draw up a contract with Pasternak and appoint an editor. “The editor should think about passages to change or cut out, and what can be left unchanged.” Pasternak was unimpressed with Ivinskaya’s efforts: “I am by no means intent on the novel being published at the moment when it cannot be brought out in its original form.” He nonetheless agreed to meet Kotov, who assured him Doctor Zhivago was a magnificent work but said that “we will have to shorten a few things, and perhaps add some.” Pasternak thought Kotov’s proposal was absurd.

  The writer Varlam Shalamov wrote to Pasternak to tell him that “without any doubt, this great [publication] battle will be won by you.” He told Pasternak that he was “the conscience of our age like Lev Tolstoy was of his” and that “our time will only be justified because you lived in it.”

  Pasternak continued that summer to hand over copies of the manuscript to various foreign visitors to Peredelkino, including the French scholar Hélène Peltier, who would work on the French translation of Doctor Zhivago. The daughter of a French diplomat, she had studied Russian literature at Moscow University in 1947—a remarkable opportunity just as the Cold War was intensifying and the regime was intent on preventing any spontaneous contact between foreigners and ordinary Russians. She returned to Moscow in 1956 and got to know Pasternak, who gave her a copy of his manuscript to read. During a visit to Peredelkino that September or another trip to the village at the end of the year, Pasternak entrusted Peltier with a note for Feltrinelli. It was undated and typed on a narrow strip of paper torn from some copybook: “If ever you receive a letter in any language other than French, you absolutely must not do what is requested of you—the only valid letters shall be those written in French.” This would prove to be a prescient and critical security measure that would allow Feltrinelli to distinguish between coerced messages and freely written ones from a writer who would soon feel the intense displeasure of the state.

  Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford don who first met Pasternak in late 1945, also returned to Russia that summer of 1956, another in a long line of scholars enjoying the liberal, post-Stalin visa regime. Berlin traveled out to Peredelkino with Neigauz, the first husband of Pasternak’s wife. Neigauz told the Briton of his concern for Pasternak’s safety because the writer was so fixed on getting his novel published. Neigauz said if Berlin got a chance he should urge Pasternak to halt or at least delay foreign publication. Neigauz said that “it was important—more than important—perhaps a matter of life and death.” Berlin agreed that “Pasternak probably did need to be physically protected from himself.” Berlin was especially cautious because he feared that his meeting with Akhmatova in 1946 was a major factor in her persecution.

  Pasternak took Berlin to his study and pressed a thick envelope into his hands. “My book, it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.” Berlin plunged into the novel as soon as he returned to Moscow, and finished it the next day. “Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the West, I thought it was a work of genius. It seemed—and seems—to me to convey an entire range of human experience, and to create a world, even if it contains only one genuine inhabitant, in language of unexampled imaginative power.” Berlin saw Pasternak a few days later, and the writer told him he had assigned world rights to Feltrinelli. Pasternak “wished his work to travel over the entire world,” and he quoted Pushkin to hope that it would “lay waste with fire the hearts of men.”

  When she got a chance, Zinaida pulled Berlin aside and, weeping, she begged him to ask Pasternak not to have the novel published abroad without official permission. She told Berlin she did not want her children to suffer. Zinaida believed that their son Leonid was deliberately failed on the exam for entry to the Higher Technical Institute simply because he was Pasternak’s son. In May 1950, during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign, Pasternak’s eldest son, Yevgeni, was prevented from finishing his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Military Academy and sent to Ukraine and then near the border with Mongolia for his compulsory military service. Berlin asked Pasternak to consider the consequences of defying the authorities. He assured Pasternak that his novel would endure and that he would have microfilms of it made and buried in all four corners of the globe so that Doctor Zhivago would survive even nuclear war. Pasternak was incensed and, with a dash of sarcasm, thanked Berlin for his conc
ern. He said he had spoken to his sons and “they were prepared to suffer.” He told Berlin not to mention the matter again. Surely, Pasternak said, Berlin realized that the dissemination of Doctor Zhivago was paramount. Berlin said he was shamed into silence. He later concluded that Pasternak “chose open-eyed” to pursue publication “fully realizing the danger to himself and his family.” When he returned to Britain, Berlin brought back a manuscript for Pasternak’s sisters in Oxford. And he included the first letter Pasternak had sent his English relatives since 1948. He told them about the novel with his usual preamble of caveats: “You may not even like it, finding its philosophy tedious and alien, some passages boring and long-drawn-out, the first book diffuse, and the transitional passages grey, pallid and ineffectual. And yet—it’s an important work, a book of enormous, universal importance, whose destiny cannot be subordinated to my own destiny, or to any question of my well-being.” He told them that he had asked Berlin to make up to twelve copies of the manuscript and circulate them among the leading Russians in Britain. And he asked his sisters to ensure that the book found a very good translator—“an Englishman who is a gifted writer with a perfect command of Russian.”

  Pasternak was visited in mid-September by another Oxford professor, George Katkov, a Moscow-born émigré, philosopher, and historian. An “original,” according to a friend, he was a “tall, mustachioed, hugely impressive ancient regime Russian intelligent.” The KGB referred to him contemptuously as a “White émigré.” Katkov was a friend of the Pasternak sisters and a colleague of Berlin’s. He was much more enthusiastic about publication. Pasternak also gave a manuscript to Katkov and asked him as well to ensure its translation and publication in England. Katkov said that the Zhivago cycle of poems would present a special challenge for a translator. He suggested the novelist Vladimir Nabokov to handle the verse. “That won’t work; he’s too jealous of my position in this country to do it properly,” said Pasternak. As early as 1927, Nabokov had expressed his deep irritation with Pasternak’s style. “His verse is convex, goitrous and goggle-eyed, as though his muse suffered from Basedow’s disease. He is crazy about clumsy imagery, sonorous but literal rhymes, and clattering metre.” When he finally read Doctor Zhivago, Nabokov was no less derisive, not least because Pasternak’s novel would knock Lolita off the top of the best-seller list—“Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences.” Nabokov said Pasternak’s mistress must have written it.

  Katkov promised Pasternak with a kiss that Doctor Zhivago would be well-translated into English. He eventually settled on his protégé Max Hayward, a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a gifted linguist who famously taught himself Hungarian in six weeks. Russians who met Hayward insisted that he must be a native speaker, or at least the son of émigrés. He was neither. Hayward was a Londoner, the son of a mechanic, who sometimes called himself a Cockney. In the interests of speed, Hayward was joined in the translation effort by Manya Harari, the cofounder of the small publishing house the Harvill Press, a division of Collins in London. An émigré, from a wealthy Saint Petersburg family, Harari had moved to England with her family during World War I. The pair alternated chapters and then checked each other’s work. Katkov supervised both of them, “going over everything for accuracy and nuance.”

  Katkov and Berlin would clash bitterly over the novel in 1958. Berlin continued to be concerned about Pasternak’s safety and was skeptical of any push for swift publication. “That’s all nonsense,” Berlin said. “It’s an interesting novel, but whether it’s published now, or fifteen years from now, doesn’t matter.” Katkov took a very different view. He advocated for the widest possible dissemination and later argued that, since Pasternak “obviously wished to be a martyr,” he “had to be sacrificed to the ‘cause.’ ” The cause was the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.

  First, however, Feltrinelli had to help Doctor Zhivago make its way around the world, and to do so, he had to face down his comrades—Russian and Italian.

  Chapter 7

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

  In mid-September, the editorial board of Novy Mir formally rejected Doctor Zhivago in a long, detailed review. The critique was written mostly by Konstantin Simonov, the celebrated wartime poet. Four other board members, including Pasternak’s next-door neighbor, Konstantin Fedin, offered editorial suggestions and additions. All five men signed the document.

  The letter, along with the manuscript, was hand-delivered to Pasternak, who barely acknowledged its contents: “The thing that has disturbed us about your novel is something that neither the editors nor the author can change by cuts or alterations. We are referring to the spirit of the novel, its general tenor, the author’s view on life.… The spirit of your novel is one of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution. The general tenor of your novel is that the October Revolution, the Civil War and the social transformation involved did not give the people anything but suffering, and destroyed the Russian intelligentsia, either physically or morally.” The writers continued with a scene-by-scene dissection of the novel’s ideological failings, the “viciousness” of its hero’s conclusions about the revolution, and Yuri Zhivago’s “hypertrophied individualism”—code for Pasternak’s fundamental personal flaw.

  After a backhanded compliment, they attacked the novel’s artistry: “There are quite a few first-rate pages, especially where you describe Russian natural scenery with remarkable truth and poetic power. There are many clearly inferior pages, lifeless and didactically dry. They are especially rife in the second half of the novel.” Fedin, in particular, smarted from Zhivago’s judgment of his contemporaries, seeing Pasternak’s sentiments in Zhivago’s words, and all the arrogance of the supremely talented: “Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.”

  One of Pasternak’s biographers noted that the authors of the letter either missed or did not articulate the novel’s “most heretical insinuation: by artistically conflating the Stalinist period with early revolutionary history, Pasternak implied (many years before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago) that the tyranny of the last twenty-five years was a direct outcome of Bolshevism.” For Pasternak, Stalinism and the purges were not a terrible aberration—the accepted Soviet explanation under Khrushchev—but a natural outgrowth of the system created by Lenin. This was an idea that could not be broached even in a rejection letter.

  Fedin’s signature was particularly difficult for Pasternak to accept, as he regarded his neighbor as a friend. Only two weeks earlier, Fedin, pacing the room and waving his arms in enthusiasm, had told Chukovsky that the novel was “brilliant, extremely egocentric, satanically arrogant, elegantly simple yet literary through and through.” He may have spoken before he had read the entire novel and was bruised by the implication of Zhivago’s words. Or duty may have led him to bury his actual assessment of the work.

  Pasternak held no open grudge, and may even have understood the hopelessness of his colleagues’ position. He invited Fedin to Sunday lunch a week after getting the letter and told some other guests, “I have also asked Konstantin Aleksandrovich—as wholeheartedly and unreservedly as in previous years—so don’t be surprised.” He asked Fedin not to mention the rejection and when he arrived the two men embraced. At dinner, Pasternak was in good spirits.

  Pasternak didn’t bring himself to read the long letter carefully until a week later. He told a neighbor that the critique was “composed very courteously and gently, painstakingly thought out from a viewpoint that has become traditional and seemingly irrefutable.” He said, with perhaps a touch of irony, that he was “pained and regretful at having caused my comrades such work.”


  There was now little reason to believe that even an unexpurgated Doctor Zhivago would be published in the Soviet Union; Simonov and the others had pronounced it irredeemably flawed. Still, Pasternak told Katkov that Western publication might yet prompt a Soviet edition, and said he might countenance some changes to make the novel palatable for the Soviet audience. This was his own private logic. The Soviet authorities did not want the book published—anywhere.

  In August, a group of senior Italian Communists, including the party’s vice secretary, Pietro Secchia, were guests at the exclusive Barvikha sanatorium just west of Moscow. D’Angelo and his wife visited two old friends there—Ambrogio Donini, a university professor, and Paolo Robotti, an old-school Communist activist.

  International Communists in the Soviet Union were also targeted during the purges. Robotti’s faith in the cause had survived his arrest and torture by Stalin’s secret police when he was living in exile in Moscow before the war; when D’Angelo mentioned that he had handed the manuscript of a Russian novel to Feltrinelli, Robotti was visibly upset. He said the transfer was probably illegal under Soviet law. Secchia and Robotti were subsequently visited by an official from the Central Committee’s section on relations with foreign Communist parties. They were told of the Kremlin’s concerns about an Italian edition. Secchia and Robotti assured the official they would get the novel back from Feltrinelli. On October 24, the Central Committee was informed through the Soviet embassy in Rome that Robotti had reported, “The issue with Pasternak’s manuscript has been settled and it will be returned to you in the nearest future.” Robotti was mistaken. The pressure divided editors at the publishing house. Zveteremich was asked to return the manuscript, and the translation was interrupted for several months, while Feltrinelli, undecided about how to proceed, considered his options. He had not, however, abandoned publication.