{"id":4539,"date":"2014-07-09T16:53:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T14:53:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=4539"},"modified":"2014-07-09T17:46:22","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T15:46:22","slug":"the-cias-zhivago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2014\/07\/the-cias-zhivago\/","title":{"rendered":"The CIA\u2019s \u2018Zhivago\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Review of Books<\/a>
\nMichael Scammell<\/p>\n

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book<\/strong>
\nby Peter Finn and Petra Couv\u00e9e
\nPantheon, 352 pp., $26.95<\/p>\n

Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak\u2019s Masterpiece<\/strong>
\nby Paolo Mancosu
\nMilan: Feltrinelli, 402 pp., \u20ac40.00<\/p>\n

Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya at his dacha in Peredelkino, late 1950s
\nIn its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA has a museum that\u2019s not generally open to the public. The museum\u2019s function, according to its website, is to \u201cinform, instruct and inspire\u201d members of the CIA as they practice the craft of intelligence.1 Among its prize exhibits, alongside the Enigma encryption machine, a semi-submersible submarine, and Osama bin Laden\u2019s AK-47, is an unassuming paperback book measuring five-and-a-half inches high, three-and-a-half inches wide, and three quarters of an inch thick. It\u2019s a pocket edition of Boris Pasternak\u2019s Doctor Zhivago, six hundred pages printed on bible paper for smuggling purposes. The caption reads: \u201cCopy of the original Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago, covertly published by the CIA. The front cover and the binding identify the book in Russian; the back of the book states that it was printed in France.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mondadori\/Getty<\/a>

Mondadori\/Getty Images
Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya at his dacha in Peredelkino, late 1950s<\/p><\/div>\n

So far as I know, it\u2019s the only literary exhibit in the museum and its presence in such incongruous surroundings indicates the importance the CIA once placed on \u201csoft\u201d warfare and propaganda, though when exactly the book was put there and information about it released online is not clear. For over half a century the CIA kept totally quiet about its involvement with Doctor Zhivago and only very recently admitted to it. Perhaps it was in 2009, when the Russian journalist and broadcaster Ivan Tolstoy published The Laundered Novel: Doctor Zhivago between the KGB and the CIA, the first serious investigation of the subject for many years. The museum\u2019s caption refers to Tolstoy\u2019s book as \u201calleging that the CIA had secretly arranged for the publication of a limited-run, Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago,\u201d but coyly adds (as if the museum had no connection with its bosses), \u201cthe CIA officially declined to comment on Tolstoy\u2019s conclusions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps that will change now, with the publication of two new books, Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak\u2019s Masterpiece by Paolo Mancosu, and especially The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couv\u00e9e. The authors of both books describe in great detail the way the CIA successfully covered its tracks and the mechanisms it used to get a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago published in Europe with great speed, but Finn and Couv\u00e9e have a trump card in the form of a collection of \u201capproximately 135\u201d declassified CIA documents that reveal the thinking behind the operation and the many missteps in carrying out what was till then a completely unfamiliar enterprise. There is a vast literature about Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago, and much of it has referred to the CIA\u2019s involvement in the novel\u2019s publication either in passing or at length, but no one has previously had access to firsthand material of this nature.2 Fortunately, Finn and Couv\u00e9e\u2019s book is about far more than the CIA. They cover every aspect of the Zhivago affair in detail, from Pasternak\u2019s early life and the origins of his novel to the bombshell of its first publication in 1957, the nature of the CIA\u2019s intervention, and the aftermath for Pasternak and his associates.<\/p>\n

It took Pasternak half a lifetime to write Doctor Zhivago. A poet of genius in his youth, he had less facility with prose, yet decided early in his career that he wanted to write a \u201cbig,\u201d nineteenth-century style novel \u201cwith a love intrigue and a heroine in it\u2014like Balzac.\u201d His subject would be the February and October revolutions and the civil war between Reds and Whites, all of which he had lived through and experienced personally. He made a start on the novel in 1932, when he was still sanguine about the revolution\u2019s outcome, but destroyed most of what he had written when Stalin\u2019s Great Terror and the purges put an end to his optimism and made it too dangerous to write down his true thoughts at all.<\/p>\n

Pasternak had two brushes with Stalin during the next few years, the first in 1934, when Stalin phoned him out of the blue to ask his opinion of Osip Mandelstam, newly arrested for composing a biting epigram about the dictator. Pasternak knew the epigram, but waffled so much in his reply that Stalin apparently accused him of not sufficiently sticking up for a friend. As news of their conversation raced around the grapevine, some accused him of cowardice, though Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, didn\u2019t agree. Later, when Pasternak\u2019s name appeared on a list of people to be executed, Stalin apparently said contemptuously, \u201cLeave the \u2018holy fool\u2019 [a sobriquet that has also been translated as \u2018cloud-dweller\u2019] alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pasternak deliberately cultivated an image of modesty and otherworldliness (\u201cwhat century is it outside?\u201d was an oft-quoted line from one of his poems) and played possum throughout the purges, surviving while preserving his integrity, a rare feat in those times. It seemed unlikely that the cloud-dweller would toss a bomb as explosive as Doctor Zhivago into the stagnant Soviet pool a couple of decades later, but his experiences with Stalin, especially the Mandelstam affair, and other compromises he made during the Terror left a residue of guilt and remorse that certainly figured among his motives.<\/p>\n

Pasternak returned to his novel in 1946, encouraged by the brief easing of Soviet repression during World War II and a deep patriotism that impelled him to speak out. Another powerful stimulus that year was his encounter in the offices of the literary magazine Novy Mir with a young editor and translator named Olga Ivinskaya. Pasternak, fifty-six and married to his second wife, Zinaida, with two sons at home, was completely dazzled by Olga\u2019s movie star looks and smoldering sensuality. She was ardent, talented, energetic, and\u2014unlike his wife\u2014passionate about literature. \u201cMy life, my angel, I love you truly,\u201d he wrote soon after meeting her, showering her with books and letters and extravagant compliments. Olga, twenty-two years his junior and a single mother, with two young children of her own, was awed and flattered by the famous poet\u2019s attentions. Encountering Pasternak, she wrote in her memoir, was like meeting a god.<\/p>\n

Soon they were taking long walks together, then they were lovers, and before long, Olga became Pasternak\u2019s unofficial secretary and personal assistant as well, for which she was to pay dearly. In 1949 she was arrested for \u201canti-Soviet political activities\u201d (Pasternak himself was too famous to be touched) and sentenced to five years in the Gulag\u2014reduced to four as the result of the Stalin amnesty in 1953. Many thought she and Pasternak would split up after that, but Olga had apparently miscarried Pasternak\u2019s child in prison, and in addition to feeling guilty about her incarceration, he felt she had saved his life by refusing to betray him during lengthy interrogations by the KGB. He wrote their relationship into Doctor Zhivago, and included many of the poems he dedicated to her in the twenty-six he appended to the novel.<\/p>\n

\"Itar<\/a>

Itar Tass
Anna Akhmatova with Boris Pasternak just after he began writing Doctor Zhivago, 1946<\/p><\/div>\n

By 1954 the novel was finished. Its plot, too convoluted to summarize in any detail, follows the life and wanderings of Yuri Zhivago, a dreamy young doctor swept up in World War I, then the revolution, then the civil war, while moving back and forth between European Russia and western Siberia. Through a series of coincidences he has repeated encounters with a young nurse, Larissa (Lara) Guichard, and though both are married, they embark on a passionate affair. They are separated when Zhivago is kidnapped by Red partisans during the civil war and forced to serve as their medical officer. Released at the end of the war, Yuri spends some idyllic months with Lara, before persuading her to travel to eastern Siberia, while he returns to Moscow and has two children with another woman before dying of a heart attack. Lara manages to attend the funeral and is then arrested and flung into the Gulag. The novel ends with two family friends meeting an orphaned laundry girl during World War II and concluding that she is the daughter of Yuri and Lara.<\/p>\n

Pasternak submitted Doctor Zhivago to Novy Mir and the journal Znamya in early 1956, and it was months before a reply came back, partly because the KGB had to be given time to investigate Pasternak\u2019s counterrevolutionary views and partly because discussions of the novel had gone all the way up to the Presidium of the Party\u2019s Central Committee, where it was characterized as \u201ca malicious libel.\u201d In September 1956 Pasternak received a formal letter signed by five members of Novy Mir\u2019s editorial board offering a detailed analysis of the plot and explaining what was wrong with it. Pasternak was judged to be alienated from the society he lived in and anti-Soviet in his views, and there could be no question of publishing his novel.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, rumors of the novel\u2019s existence had spread far and wide among literary circles, and soon a young Italian journalist, Sergio d\u2019Angelo, came calling at Pasternak\u2019s dacha to ask if he would consider having it published in Italy. The proposed publisher was a Communist, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, which would make it more palatable, in d\u2019Angelo\u2019s view. Pasternak wasn\u2019t convinced by the argument, but eventually handed the young man a typescript, adding with a grim laugh, \u201cYou are hereby invited to my execution\u201d (translated by d\u2019Angelo as \u201cface the firing squad\u201d).<\/p>\n

D\u2019Angelo carried off the prized text, setting off a months-long correspondence between Pasternak and Feltrinelli, carried on clandestinely through a variety of intermediaries, with the active participation of Ivinskaya. Much, but not all of it, was intercepted and copied by the KGB. The Soviet authorities, through the Writers\u2019 Union, brought immense pressure on Pasternak to get the novel back, and the Italian Communist Party put pressure on Feltrinelli. There were even promises of a suitably toned-down version being published in the Soviet Union, but it was too late. Pasternak told Isaiah Berlin, who was appalled by his action and tried to dissuade him, that he was ready to sacrifice his life if necessary. He was so determined that he gave Berlin a copy to take back to England with him, secretly smuggled another copy to Jacqueline de Proyart, a Russian-speaking friend in France, and gave a fourth to George Katkov (a prominent \u00e9migr\u00e9 historian also based in England). By now Pasternak almost didn\u2019t care who published his novel, as long as it appeared in print somewhere.<\/p>\n

The nature of Pasternak\u2019s anguish, frustration, and joy over the complex negotiations needed to realize his dream can be seen in Paolo Mancosu\u2019s Inside the Zhivago Storm, which gives us the complete correspondence between Pasternak and Feltrinelli for the first time. Pasternak\u2019s torments are paralleled by the young Feltrinelli\u2019s less mortal but still stormy combat with the Italian Communist Party, and their emotional letters add up to a nonfictional epistolary novel that is a treasure house for Pasternak scholars. Feltrinelli rushed the Italian translation of Doctor Zhivago to market in November 1957, and translations into English, French, German, and other languages followed in the spring of 1958.<\/p>\n

Anna Akhmatova with Boris Pasternak just after he began writing Doctor Zhivago, 1946
\nWhile the Soviet authorities maintained a tightlipped silence on the subject, Doctor Zhivago spent the next six months on the New York Times best-seller list and was an international sensation. It seemed to have everything: peace, war, revolution, civil war, a wide variety of settings, and a huge cast of characters, just like the books of Pasternak\u2019s literary hero, Lev Tolstoy. With an illicit love affair at its center, the novel appeared to roll War and Peace and Anna Karenina into one, but it presented critics with a quandary. Even before it was published, Kornei Chukovsky called it \u201calien, confusing and removed from my life,\u201d and Akhmatova echoed his verdict. \u201cIt is my time, my society, but I don\u2019t recognize it,\u201d she said, \u201cIt is a failure of genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the few critics in the West to agree with them, notoriously derided Doctor Zhivago as \u201ca sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences,\u201d3 and from the literary point of view he was right.4 But that wasn\u2019t really the point of the novel\u2019s fame or success. Nabokov\u2019s old friend and literary sparring partner, Edmund Wilson, put his finger on the matter (and had the pleasure of contradicting Nabokov once again) when he emphasized Doctor Zhivago\u2019s political and historical importance, and the symbolic significance of Pasternak writing such a book inside the Soviet Union, publishing it abroad, and surviving. \u201cDoctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man\u2019s literary and moral history,\u201d wrote Wilson. \u201cNobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

Content, rather than art, is the key to Doctor Zhivago\u2019s importance. \u201cRevolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines that have gotten out of control, like a runaway train,\u201d says the autobiographically rooted Zhivago to Lara at one point, and when Lara remarks, \u201cYou\u2019ve changed, you know. You used to speak more calmly about the revolution,\u201d he rejoins, \u201cThose who inspired the revolution aren\u2019t at home in anything except change and turmoil\u2026because they haven\u2019t any real capacities, they are ungifted.\u201d Still later he comments:<\/p>\n

Revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days\u2026but for decades thereafter, for centuries, the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s main action ends in 1929, suggesting that the decades of narrowness started then, and it reads like a requiem for Russian politics and Russian culture. Nothing like it had been seen in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s and it\u2019s no wonder the authorities regarded Pasternak and his novel as anti-Soviet.<\/p>\n

The CIA quickly came to a similar conclusion. Less than a month after Doctor Zhivago\u2019s appearance in Italy in November 1957, a CIA memo cited an expert\u2019s view that it was \u201cmore important than any other literature which has yet come out of the Soviet Bloc,\u201d and that care should be taken not to harm Pasternak in taking advantage of its publication. In early January the agency received two rolls of microfilm from British intelligence, a photographic replica of Feltrinelli\u2019s original manuscript, and began to ponder how to use them.5<\/p>\n

The timing was propitious, for as Finn and Couv\u00e9e point out, the CIA had a large number of officials who had strong literary credentials and loved books. They believed in the power of ideas, and agreed with the CIA\u2019s chief of covert action that \u201cbooks differ from all other propaganda media primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader\u2019s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium.\u201d Crass and reductive as the sentiment may be, it acknowledges an important aspect of literature that cannot be denied. Ironically, the idea seems to have been borrowed from the Soviets themselves, who were guided by Maxim Gorky\u2019s 1934 dictum (itself reflecting centuries of Russian attitudes) that books are weapons, \u201cthe most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture.\u201d The Soviets were already masters of propaganda and the manipulation of culture in the 1930s, as George Kennan, author of containment and the intellectual father of the cold war, well knew.<\/p>\n

Kennan\u2019s ideas had led to the foundation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, and in 1956, just before the appearance of Doctor Zhivago, the device of mailing American books and magazines across the iron curtain was beginning to be tried. The next step was a small program to translate Western books into Russian, which functioned alongside a multimillion-dollar enterprise to publish and or distribute thousands of titles in Soviet-controlled countries. Finn and Couv\u00e9e estimate that up to ten million books and magazines were clandestinely smuggled into the Soviet bloc in this way. It was an effort much less known to the public and much less controversial than cold war cultural activities in the West, although some argue that the problem was the CIA and secrecy itself the offense. The authors respond that in 1950s America no other agency could have done it, for it would have been impossible to get Congress to openly appropriate money for the support of art and culture, especially when most of the money went to institutions and publications with a liberal profile.<\/p>\n

The appearance of Doctor Zhivago presented the CIA with a new kind of challenge. It was certain of the book\u2019s \u201cgreat propaganda value,\u201d but mailing an English translation of the novel into the Soviet Union didn\u2019t seem to promise many dividends, and since it had not yet appeared in Russian, it couldn\u2019t simply be reprinted. It decided to publish its own \u201cblack\u201d edition, but that presented problems too. The British asked the CIA not to print the book in America in order not to harm Pasternak, and Pasternak had sent word that no Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s should be involved either.<\/p>\n

The chosen solution was to farm out the job to a New York publisher named Felix Morrow, a former Trotskyite, journalist, and author, passionately anti-Communist, who also had a security clearance. On June 23, 1958, a contract was signed with Morrow requiring him to prepare the Russian manuscript of Doctor Zhivago for typesetting and to produce two sets of photo-offset proofs by July 31. The goal was to have copies of the book printed in Europe in time to distribute them to Soviet visitors to the Brussels International World Fair in September, and also to give copies to sailors on ships bound for the Soviet Union.6<\/p>\n

It was a harebrained scheme and it ran into numerous problems. Morrow welcomed the assignment as \u201can astonishing and attractive task,\u201d but drove an extremely hard bargain over his fee, blabbed about what he was up to, and couldn\u2019t find a European printer. Failing to blackmail the CIA into buying a large number of printed copies at inflated prices, he sent a copy of the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to an old friend at the University of Michigan Press with a suggestion that they publish it instead. He was convinced, he later wrote, that \u201cthe Russian desk at the CIA was, at the least, not much interested in the success of this task\u201d and was dragging its feet.7 Before long, Michigan was offering copies of a planned edition to members of the US government and to the CIA itself, and officials had to scramble to get the university to hold off.<\/p>\n

The reason for the delays was problems in finding a European publisher, where another comedy of errors unfolded. The CIA turned for help to the Dutch intelligence service, BVD. Feltrinelli was rumored to be bringing out a Russian edition with the Dutch academic publishing company Mouton, and when it turned out that Feltrinelli was in no hurry to act, the CIA and BVD decided to go ahead without him. The director of the local branch of Paix et Libert\u00e9, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist, was asked to bring the proofs to Mouton, and a deal was struck to print a rush edition of Doctor Zhivago of just over a thousand copies (1,160, to be precise). At the last moment a Mouton employee, under the impression that this was the Feltrinelli project, pasted on a slip identifying Feltrinelli as the publisher.<\/p>\n

The books were ready by early September, just in time for the Brussels Universal and International Exposition, and about a third were distributed through the Vatican pavilion:<\/p>\n

Soon the book\u2019s blue linen covers were found littering the fairgrounds. Some who got the novel were ripping off the cover, dividing the pages, and stuffing them in their pockets to make the book easier to hide.<\/p>\n

A CIA memo concluded that \u201cthis phase can be considered completed successfully,\u201d though its success was qualified. Feltrinelli was furious that his name had been used and suspected outright fraud, unable to imagine the cause as an innocent misunderstanding. The CIA kept mum, Mouton issued an abject apology and agreed to print an additional five thousand copies for Feltrinelli, and the University of Michigan Press went ahead with its own edition in early 1959.<\/p>\n

Pasternak won the Nobel Prize at the end of 1958 and was denounced by the head of the Komsomol, Vladimir Semichastny, as \u201ca pig fouling its own sty\u201d who should be kicked out of the Soviet Union to \u201cbreathe capitalist air.\u201d An ailing Pasternak, fearing deportation, rejected the prize, and a year later he died of lung cancer. Ivinskaya was arrested and sentenced for a second time (with her daughter, Irina) to eight years in the Gulag for \u201cforeign currency manipulations,\u201d but released after four. In 1965 David Lean released his blockbuster movie of Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, which far more people remember than the novel (on Google the movie comes before the book), and in 1978 Ivinskaya published a best-selling memoir of her years with Pasternak.<\/p>\n

Since then there has been an avalanche of books on one or another aspect of the Zhivago affair. Mancosu lists over 150 titles in his bibliography; Finn and Couv\u00e9e list 184. It was Tolstoy\u2019s flawed 2009 book, The Laundered Novel, that set off the subgenre devoted to the machinations of the CIA. The best and most accurate of those accounts before Finn and Couv\u00e9e is to be found in Mancosu\u2019s chapter two, a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes. I feel sorry for him over his timing, but the detail he offers, together with the Pasternak\u2013Feltrinelli correspondence, offers a different angle on the episode.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Finn and Couv\u00e9e have written a fascinating book that is thoroughly researched, extraordinarily accurate in its factual details, judicious in its judgments, and destined to remain the definitive work on the subject for a very long time to come. Though it will be advertised and sold on the basis of the declassified material from the CIA, only two of its sixteen chapters are devoted to that subject; the rest cover every aspect of the creation of Doctor Zhivago and its consequences in rich and convincing detail. I was particularly impressed by their fair treatment of Olga Ivinskaya, who after Pasternak\u2019s death was viciously attacked not only by the government but also by some members of Pasternak\u2019s family and friends. My only wish is that they had delved a little more deeply into the love affair between Pasternak and Ivinskaya and the details of Pasternak\u2019s strange m\u00e9nage-\u00e0-trois, but perhaps that calls for a novelist rather than a journalist.<\/p>\n

Also largely missing is an assessment of Pasternak\u2019s historic achievement. Finn and Couv\u00e9e refer briefly to literary successors such as Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, and Joseph Brodsky, but Pasternak\u2019s feat had epoch-making repercussions in ways that deserve more notice. In sending his book for publication abroad, for example, he deliberately broke Soviet law and acted in a way unthinkable since the punishment of Boris Pilnyak, the last person to do the same, in 1929. Pasternak thus punched a huge hole in the iron curtain and Soviet censorship. By surviving legally unscathed he also set a precedent for behavior that had not been seen since the late 1920s, and Doctor Zhivago became in essence the first serious example of samizdat. Solzhenitsyn once criticized Pasternak for rejecting the Nobel Prize, but it\u2019s likely that without Pasternak, he would have had a far harder time getting One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published, let alone surviving to win the Nobel Prize himself. Pasternak was the true father of the Soviet dissident movement and singlehandedly influenced the course of the cold war.<\/p>\n

As for the CIA, the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and the smuggling of copies into the Soviet Union contributed to the novel as a samizdat phenomenon, but it had nothing to do with Pasternak\u2019s fame or him winning the Nobel Prize. The KGB and the Soviet government\u2019s noisy campaign of repression did much more to help than the CIA. It was the CIA\u2019s future books program that gained most from the experiment. Meanwhile the CIA\u2019s error-prone approach to its publications hasn\u2019t entirely changed. The book on display in the CIA Museum is not a copy of \u201cthe original Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago,\u201d but a later edition, in paper rather than hard cover, and brought out by an entirely different publisher.<\/p>\n

1. The CIA does admit escorted groups of visitors to the museum from time to time, but not the public at large.<\/p>\n

2. Disclosure: I have a copy of the declassified CIA documents as well and was planning to write a book about \u201cthe Zhivago affair\u201d myself until Finn and Couv\u00e9e came along. I occasionally refer to these documents directly rather than via Finn and Couv\u00e9e\u2019s text.<\/p>\n

3. Nabokov, nine years Pasternak\u2019s junior, has been accused of envying the older writer, and there is probably something to that charge, for as early as 1927 he had criticized the older man\u2019s verse style as clumsy and convoluted. Ironically, when Doctor Zhivago was being translated into English, Nabokov was suggested as a possible translator of the poems, but Pasternak himself turned the notion down, referring to Nabokov\u2019s jealousy as the reason. Finn and Couv\u00e9e suggest that Nabokov feared Doctor Zhivago would knock Lolita off its perch at the top of the best-seller list, but there could be more to it than that. Lolita is about a pubescent heroine molested and seduced by a much older man, Humbert Humbert, who has married her mother to get access to the daughter. In the opening chapters of Doctor Zhivago, we find a pubescent Lara being molested and then seduced (at the age of fifteen) by a middle-aged lawyer, Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, who has access to her as her mother\u2019s lover. Another parallel is to be found between the poet, Yuri Zhivago, and another poet, Fyodor Cherdyntsev, in Nabokov\u2019s last Russian novel, The Gift. Is it too fanciful to suggest that Pasternak\u2019s \u201cinvitation\u201d to d\u2019Angelo to watch him face \u201cthe firing squad,\u201d may have been a subconscious reference to another of Nabokov\u2019s Russian novels, Invitation to a Beheading? The Russian word for \u201cfiring squad\u201d and \u201cbeheading\u201d is the same: kazn\u2019, which means \u201cexecution\u201d in its literal sense.<\/p>\n

4. Pasternak himself acknowledged the novel\u2019s deficiencies. \u201cI have lost my artistic coherence and let myself inwardly sag,\u201d he wrote to a young editor when sending him some chapters. \u201cI have written this novel in an unprofessional way\u2026with a dullness and naivet\u00e9 for which I gave myself both permission and indulgence.\u201d His disregard for form, he said, sprang from a desire to move away from the sophisticated modernism of his youth to a simpler form of realism, and to place a much greater emphasis on clarity of content than before.<\/p>\n

5. An entire mythology has grown up around these microfilms. Feltrinelli at various times complained about CIA \u201cinterference,\u201d and referred to a plane he was on being obliged to make an unscheduled landing. From this grew a story that British intelligence, at the request of the CIA, had forced Feltrinelli\u2019s plane from Moscow to Milan to land in Malta, and that agents had removed the typescript of Doctor Zhivago from Feltrinelli\u2019s suitcase and photographed it while Feltrinelli and his fellow passengers cooled their heels in the lounge for two hours (in another version, Feltrinelli was on his way from Italy to Holland).
\nRepeated at different times and by various individuals, the story received its greatest publicity after Tolstoy featured it in his book. Mancosu and others discount the story on the grounds that Feltrinelli never made the journey from Moscow to Milan, and that there were enough copies circulating in Britain for such derring-do not to be necessary. All agree, however, that the CIA got their copy from the British.<\/p>\n

6. Ivan Tolstoy speculated that the reason for the CIA \u2019s haste was the need to rush out a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago in order for it to be considered by the Nobel Prize committee, and that the CIA had also pressured the committee to give the award to Pasternak. He was wrong on both counts, but this couldn\u2019t be confirmed until the Nobel Foundation\u2019s fifty-year rule of confidentiality expired soon after Tolstoy wrote.<\/p>\n

7. From a letter to Carl R. Proffer, founding editor of Ardis Publishers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent by Morrow on October 6, 1980; see Mancosu, pp. 115\u2013116. In a later letter, dated October 20, 1980, Morrow added: \u201cThe Russian desk people at CIA were inimical to the project\u2026. They were either Russian agents or incredibly stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two books covering every aspect of the Zhivago affair in detail, from Pasternak\u2019s early life and the origins of his novel to the bombshell of its first publication in 1957, the nature of the CIA\u2019s intervention, and the aftermath for Pasternak and his associates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,91],"tags":[494,92,216],"class_list":["post-4539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-literature","category-new-book","tag-cia","tag-culture","tag-russia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4539"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4547,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4539\/revisions\/4547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}