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

  That a new unforgiving period of cultural repression had begun was driven home in a shrill, vulgar speech by Andrei Zhdanov, a member of Stalin’s inner circle since the 1930s, a colossal boozer, and the piano player when the Leader sang on drunken evenings. Zhdanov spoke in the Great Hall of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad before an invited audience of writers, journalists, publishers, and bureaucrats. The location was well chosen; Lenin announced the Soviet takeover of power in the same hall in 1917. One attendee later wrote that the meeting, which began at five p.m. and lasted almost until midnight, was marked by “sycophantic contributions from the floor and hysterical self-criticism from writers taking part.”

  “Anna Akhmatova’s subject-matter is thoroughly individualistic,” said Zhdanov. “The range of her poetry is pitifully limited—this is the poetry of a feral lady from the salons, moving between the boudoir and the prayer stool. It is based on erotic motifs linked with motifs of mourning, melancholy, death, mysticism and isolation … she is half nun, half whore, or rather both whore and nun, fornication and prayer being intermingled in her world.”

  Zhdanov’s campaign for conformity, which was infused with a chauvinistic hostility to all things Western, spread to the theater, cinema, music, the university, and eventually the sciences. Pasternak’s cousin Olga, who taught at Leningrad University, wrote in her diary that the new academic year began with the rector appearing before the faculty in a peasant shirt to symbolize a shift in ideology towards the “great Russian people.” She rued that “anyone who in any way shows respect for European culture is dubbed a toady.” New grounds for arrest included “Praising American Democracy” or “Abasement before the West.”

  It was inevitable that Pasternak would become a target, and the new head of the writers’ union, Alexander Fadeyev, accused him of being out of touch with the people—“not one of us.” When it was suggested that Pasternak should condemn Akhmatova in print, he refused and said he loved her too much; to help Akhmatova, who had been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and left with no way to earn a living, Pasternak would slip a thousand rubles under her pillow when she came to Moscow and stayed with mutual friends. Pasternak was removed from the board of the Union of Soviet Writers in August 1946 when he failed to attend a meeting called to denounce Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. Pasternak was warned that he was no less suspect as an aesthete than Akhmatova, but he replied with characteristic insouciance: “Yes, yes, [out of touch with] the people, modern times … you know, your Trotsky once told me the same thing.”

  On September 9, 1946, Pravda reported that the Union of Soviet Writers had passed a resolution stating that Pasternak was “an author lacking in ideology and remote from Soviet reality.” On the same evening, Pasternak had scheduled one of his first readings of the early part of the novel at his home in Peredelkino. He didn’t read the newspapers and his wife didn’t tell him about the attack, so the reading went ahead. It was attended by his neighbor Chukovsky and his son Nikolai; the literary scholar Korneli Zelinsky, who would, in time, launch a vicious attack on Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago; and about ten or eleven other listeners.

  Chukovsky found himself perplexed by Doctor Zhivago. “For all the charm of certain passages,” he wrote in his diary, “it struck me as alien, confusing and removed from my life, and much of it failed to involve me.” The novel bewildered others who were close to Pasternak and steeped in the lyrical beauty of his poetry. When Akhmatova first heard an excerpt at a reading in a flat in Moscow, she “was acutely unhappy with the novel.” She told the physicist Mikhail Polivanov, a friend of Pasternak’s, that “it is a failure of genius.” When Polivanov protested that the novel captures “the spirit and people of that age,” Akhmatova replied, “It is my time, my society, but I don’t recognize it.” His neighbor Vsevolod Ivanov complained after a reading that he had heard none of the exquisite craft he would expect from Pasternak and that the writing seemed hurried and rough.

  Pasternak was unmoved by those who complained of the admixture of styles, the reliance on coincidence, slackened writing, and a torrent of characters even compared with the bounteous peopling of the standard Russian novel. Pasternak responded that every aspect of the novel, including its “failings,” was, to him, conscious. Writing much later, in his idiosyncratic English to the poet Stephen Spender, he explained that there is “an effort in the novel to represent the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and versions.” He said he didn’t so much delineate characters as efface them, and coincidence showed “the liberty of being, its verisimilitude touching, adjoining improbability.” Pasternak was no longer interested in stylistic experiment but “understandability.” He said he wanted the novel “gobbled down” by everyone, “even a seamstress or a dishwasher.”

  Other listeners were enthusiastic, and moved by the passages they heard. Emma Gerstein, who heard Pasternak read the first three chapters of the novel to a small audience in April 1947, came away feeling that she had “heard Russia,” adding, “With my eyes, my ears and my nose I sensed the era.” Pasternak’s friend the Leningrad poet Sergei Spassky said, “A spring of pristine, creative energy has gushed forth from inside you.”

  Pasternak continued to read drafts to small gatherings at apartments in Moscow, and those evenings formed a kind of dialogue with his audience and led him to make some adjustments to the text. At a reading in May 1947, the audience included Genrikh Neigauz, the first husband of his wife and long since reconciled to Pasternak, and Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter, among others. Pasternak arrived with the pages rolled in his hand. He kissed the hand of his hostess and embraced and firmly kissed Neigauz before sitting behind a table and saying, without any ceremony, “Let’s start.” He told the audience he hadn’t yet decided on a title and for now was simply subtitling the novel Scenes of Half a Century of Daily Life. The following year, with four chapters completed, he would settle on the title Doctor Zhivago. While sounding like a Siberian name, Zhivago was derived from an Orthodox prayer. Pasternak told the Gulag survivor and writer Varlam Shalamov, who was the son of a priest, that as a child while saying the prayer lines “Ty est’ voistinu Khristos, Syn Boga zhivago” (You truly are the Christ, the living God), he used to pause after Boga (God) before saying zhivago (the living).

  “I did not think of the living God, but of a new one, who was only accessible to me through the name Zhivago,” Pasternak said. “It took me a whole life to make this childish sensation real by granting the hero of my novel this name.”

  For Pasternakians, invitations to these literary evenings were cherished. On February 6, 1947, the home of the pianist Maria Yudina was packed despite the raging blizzard outside. Yudina told Pasternak that she and her friends were looking forward to the reading “as to a feast.”

  “They will all squeeze into my luxurious single-celled palazzo,” she told the poet in a note. Pasternak almost didn’t make it because he was uncertain of the address and snow drifts were making it increasingly difficult to maneuver the car carrying him and his companions to the event. Finally, a candle in a window drew the group to the right location. Yudina’s house was stiflingly hot because of the number of people inside, and it reeked of kerosene from a vain attempt to kill bugs earlier in the day; they still visibly scuttled across the wall. Yudina was dressed in her best black velvet dress and moved among the guests passing out sandwiches and wine. She played Chopin for a long time. Pasternak seemed nervous, or perhaps he was just uncomfortable from the heat, wiping sweat off his face. He read about the young student Zhivago dancing with his fiancée, Tonya, and the Christmas tree lights at the Sventitskys’ house. When he stopped reading he was bombarded with questions about how the story would unfold. As Pasternak left at first light, he told his mistress that the evening, almost lost because of the snow, had inspired a poem, which would become Yu
ri Zhivago’s “A Winter Night”:

  It snowed, it snowed over all the world

  From end to end.

  A candle burned on the table,

  A candle burned.

  The gatherings were also attracting some unwelcome attention. The deputy editor of Novy Mir described them as the “underground readings of a counter-revolutionary novel.” The secret police were also monitoring the soirees and noting the book’s contents for the moment when they would strike.

  The attacks on Pasternak continued into 1947. Among those who singled him out for criticism was Fadeyev, the head of the writers’ union. But Fadeyev also embodied the establishment’s duality toward Pasternak. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled meeting Fadeyev after he had publicly inveighed against the “aloofness from life” of writers like Pasternak. Fadeyev took Ehrenburg to a café where, after ordering brandy, he asked Ehrenburg if he would like to hear some real poetry. “And he began to recite from memory verses by Pasternak, going on and on, and only interrupting himself from time to time to say: ‘Wonderful stuff, isn’t it?’ ” Pasternak had once remarked that Fadeyev was “well-disposed to me personally but if he received orders to have me hung, drawn and quartered he would carry them out conscientiously and make his report without batting an eyelid—though the next time he got drunk he would say how sorry he was for me and what a splendid fellow I had been.” Fadeyev shot himself in 1956. As Pasternak bowed before his open coffin in the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions, he said in a loud voice, “Alexander Alexandrovich has rehabilitated himself.”

  Official criticism of Pasternak in 1947 reached a pitch in a virulent signed piece by Surkov in the newspaper Kultura i Zhizn (Culture and Life), a principal mouthpiece for enforcing Zhdanov’s line and labeled the “Mass Grave” by some of the intelligentsia. Surkov charged that Pasternak had a “reactionary backward-looking ideology,” that he “speaks with obvious hostility and even hatred about the Soviet Revolution,” and that his poetry was a “direct slander” of Soviet reality. He also said that Pasternak had “meager spiritual resources,” which were incapable of “giving birth to major poetry.”

  On the totem of denunciation, which had its own semiotics in the Soviet Union, this was a couple of notches below a call for Pasternak’s isolation and ruin—because if the article was signed, it was less menacing. Gladkov, who had anticipated the official censure and feared for his friend, said he could breathe easily again after reading it. “With all its dishonesty and deliberate obtuseness it did not amount to a definite ‘excommunication.’ ” An anonymous piece in a major newspaper would have signaled ruin. “At least they are not going to let me starve,” quipped Pasternak after getting a commission to translate Faust.

  The times, however, demanded some punishment. The journal Novy Mir rejected some of his poems. The publication of his translated Shakespeare compendium was put on hold. And 25,000 printed copies of his selected lyric poetry were destroyed “on orders from above,” on the eve of distribution in the spring of 1948. The readings stopped and he noted that “public appearances by me are regarded as undesirable.”

  Pasternak was able to exact some sly revenge. In a revision of his translation of Hamlet, he introduced lines that bear little if any fidelity to the original. Even allowing for Pasternak’s belief that a translation should never be an attempt at “literal exactitude,” the lines from Hamlet, when translated back into English again, were a biting commentary on the politics of the hour. Where Shakespeare wrote of the “whips and scorns of time,” Pasternak had Hamlet say: “Who would bear the phony greatness of the rulers, the ignorance of the bigwigs, the common hypocrisy, the impossibility to express oneself, the unrequited love and illusoriness of merits in the eyes of mediocrities.”

  The renewed sterility of cultural life after a flush of postwar optimism was both dismaying to Pasternak and a prompt to burrow further into his new project. “I started to work again on my novel when I saw that all our rosy expectations of the changes the end of the war was supposed to bring to Russia were not being fulfilled. The war itself was like a cleansing storm, like a breeze blowing through an unventilated room. Its sorrows and hardships were not as bad as the inhuman lie—they shook to its core the power of everything specious and unorganic to the nature of man and society, which has gained such a hold over us. But the dead weight of the past was too strong. The novel is absolutely essential for me as a way of expressing my feelings.” His attitude to the state, which had fluctuated between ambivalence and cautious embrace, was now consistently if quietly hostile. He told his cousin that he was as cheerful as ever despite the changed atmosphere in Moscow. “I write no protests and say nothing when addressed. It’s no use. I never try to justify myself or get involved in explanations.” He had other reasons for ignoring the deadening hand of the authorities.

  Pasternak had fallen in love.

  Chapter 4

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

  When World War II ended, Pasternak’s marriage to his second wife, Zinaida, had long since settled into an arid routine. Zinaida ran the household with stern efficiency, and he appreciated her for it. “My wife’s passionate love of work, her skill in everything—in washing, cooking, cleaning, bringing up the children—has created domestic comfort, a garden, a way of life and daily routine, the calm and quiet needed for work.” He told a friend he loved her for her “big hands.” But there was an air of deep regret in the home—“a divided family, lacerated by suffering and constantly looking over our shoulders at that other family, the first ones.” When Zinaida got pregnant in 1937, Pasternak wrote his parents that “her present condition is entirely unexpected, and if abortion weren’t illegal, we’d have been dismayed by our insufficiently joyful response to the event, and she’d have had the pregnancy terminated.” Zinaida later wrote that she very much wanted “Borya’s child,” but her raw fear that her husband could be arrested at any moment—this was the height of the Terror and he was refusing to sign petitions—made it hard to carry the pregnancy.

  Zinaida had little interest in Pasternak’s writing, confessing that she didn’t understand his poetry. Her principal diversion was sitting at the kitchen table chain-smoking and playing cards or mah-jongg with her female friends. Hard-edged and frequently ill-humored, Zinaida was described by Akhmatova as “a dragon on eight feet.” But she had earned her unhappiness. In 1937, Adrian, the older of her two sons with her first husband, Genrikh Neigauz, was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, a discovery that began a long and agonizing decline in his health. In 1942, in an effort to arrest the spread of the disease, one of the boy’s legs was amputated, above the knee, and the previously active seventeen-year-old was inconsolable. Adrian died in April 1945 from tubercular meningitis after being infected by the boy next to him in a sanatorium; his mother was by his side there. After his death, his body was held in the morgue for four days for research. When Zinaida saw him again he had been embalmed. She cradled Adrian’s head and was horrified that it was light “as a matchbox.” His brain had been removed. Zinaida remained haunted by the sensation of holding him. She was suicidal for days after the death, and Pasternak remained close, doing chores with her, to distract and comfort her. Adrian’s ashes were buried in the garden in Peredelkino. Zinaida said she neglected her husband and felt old. Intimacy seemed a “curse” to her and she said she could not always “fulfill my duty as a wife.”

  On an October 1946 day, just as winter announced itself with a driving snow, Pasternak walked into Novy Mir’s cavernous reception area, a converted former ballroom where Pushkin had once danced, now painted the dark red of Soviet gaud. After he had crossed the long carpet to the back of the room where the junior editors sat, Pasternak encountered two women about to go to lunch. The older of the pair held out her hand to be kissed and said to Pasternak. “Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce one of your most ardent admirers.” The devotee was Olga Ivinskaya, a blond, in an old squirrel-fur coat and an editor at Novy Mir.
She was more than twenty years Pasternak’s junior, and later was a source of inspiration for the character Lara in Doctor Zhivago. Pretty, voluptuous, and sexually self-confident despite the prudish mores of Soviet society, the thirty-four-year-old Ivinskaya immediately felt his lingering stare—“so much a man’s appraising gaze that there could be no doubt about it.” As he bowed and took Ivinskaya’s hand, Pasternak inquired as to which of his books she possessed. Just the one, she confessed. Pasternak promised to return with some volumes. “How interesting that I still have admirers.” The next day, five books appeared on Ivinskaya’s desk.

  Ivinskaya had recently attended a Pasternak recital at the Historical Museum. It was the first time she had seen him at such close range, and she described him as “tall and trim, extraordinarily youthful, with the strong neck of a young man, and he spoke in a deep low voice, conversing with the audience as one talks with an intimate friend.” When she returned to her flat after midnight, her mother complained about having to get up to let her in. “Leave me alone,” said Ivinskaya, “I’ve just been talking to God.”

  Pasternak was typically self-deprecating about his own charms and described the “few women who have had an affair with me” as “magnanimous martyrs so unbearable and uninteresting am I ‘as a man.’ ” He adored and idealized women and described himself as forever stunned and stupefied by their beauty. Among his fellow writers, Pasternak was known for his flings; women were drawn to him. Zinaida said that after the war Pasternak was showered by notes and unexpected visits from young women she chased out of the yard. Pasternak called them “the ballerinas.” One of them sent him a note that she wanted to give birth to a Christ fathered by Pasternak.

  Ivinskaya was twice married and had, by her own account, many passing relationships. Her first husband hanged himself in 1940 when he was thirty-two, after she had an affair with the man who would become her second husband. “Poor Mama mourned,” remarked Olga’s daughter, Irina, but her sorrow did not last very long; the forty-day mourning period had scarcely passed when “a guy in a leather coat turned up at the doorstep.” Ivinskaya’s second husband died of an illness during the war but not before informing on his mother-in-law (possibly to get her out of the crowded apartment), who then spent three years in the Gulag for making a slanderous remark about Stalin.