The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
“Finn and Couvee distill the dozens of intrigues and murky political aspects of this coda to Boris Pasternak’s life and legacy in a driving narrative of a major literary figure against the backdrop of the Cold War.”
Even though Russian writer Boris Pasternak was part of the Union of Soviet Writers, by WWII his disillusionments with the Soviet state were known, but oddly he had not been fingered by Stalin who made it his business to keep writers, composers, and artists of all stripes agents of state propaganda or suffer the consequences.
Pasternak lived at Peredelkino, the writer’s colony set up by Stalin, where the walls had ears. There he was able to finish his novel Dr. Zhivago, which had been in the works for years and immediately viewed as anti-Soviet. An Italian publisher visited Pasternak and smuggled a draft of the book out of the country for a limited printing and shortly after it became an international bestseller.
Dr. Zhivago’s publication involved smuggling manuscripts around Europe, political brokering in Europe, backstabbing antics by publishers, and the startling involvement of the CIA—all which facilitated its printing. The spy vs. literary spy saga is now chronicled in The Zhivago Affair by Washington Post National Security editor Peter Finn and St. Petersburg State University professor Petra Couvee.
Pasternak started Dr. Zhivago in the 40s, and he was even giving public readings of chapter in parlors in Moscow and at Peredelkino. By that time Pasternak was married and a father but carrying on an open affair with Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak‘s inspiration for the character Lara. The complications brought him to the point of suicide, downing a bottle of iodine, but he was convinced Olga and he should be together. He also sought to stay on good terms with his wife, who, their son said, stayed devoted to him for the rest of her life. Dr. Zhivago is, in part, a dramatized account of his own life.
After WWII Pasternak wrote “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 . . .” Pasternak asserts compared to the new realities of a Stalinist state “Its sorrow and hardships were not as bad as the inhuman lie . . .”
The CIA became interested in publishing Dr. Zhivago as part of their elaborate program to disseminate western literature to Soviet citizens and Eastern Bloc countries. For his part, Pasternak realized the risk to himself and his family of a Russian edition originating from a country hostile to the USSR. The plot thickens when the CIA seizes on an opportunity to smuggle copies of the book at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
The English language edition of Dr. Zhivago sold 850,000 copies in its initial release, and Pasternak became rich from the book, but the Soviets prevented him from receiving any western-generated royalties. Meanwhile, The Nobel Prize committee was also about to award Pasternak despite behind the scenes Soviet attempts to strong-arm the Nobel Prize committee not to give Pasternak the award. Pasternak was vindicated with the award, but the backlash from his country from then Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev to hundreds of writers who willingly or were forced to denounce him publicly was devastating enough for him to refuse the prize. Writers from around the world gave their public support of Pasternak, and Earnest Hemmingway even offered him a permanent home in the west.
Finn and Couvee distill the dozens of intrigues and murky political aspects of this coda to Boris Pasternak’s life and legacy in a driving narrative of a major literary figure against the backdrop of the Cold War. It is quite simply a remarkable story and fully sourced book, the scholarship peerless but never eclipsing one amazingly humanist story of a towering figure of 20th century Russian literature.