by Peter Finn
Pilnyak tried to win his way back into the party’s good graces with some kowtowing pronouncements about Stalin’s greatness, but he couldn’t save himself. The charge of disloyalty was memorialized in a file. With the Great Terror at its height, he was tormented by the fear of imminent arrest. The country was in the grip of a mad, murderous purging of the ranks of the party, the bureaucracy, and the military as well as the intelligentsia and whole ethnic groups. Hundreds of thousands were killed or died in detention between 1936 and 1939; hundreds of writers were among the victims. Pasternak remembered Pilnyak constantly looking out the window. Acquaintances he ran into expressed amazement that he hadn’t already been picked up. “Is it really you?” they asked. And on October 28, 1937, the secret police came. Pasternak and his wife were at their neighbor’s house; it was the birthday of Pilnyak’s three-year-old son, also named Boris. That evening, a car pulled up and several men in uniform got out. It was all very polite. Pilnyak was needed on urgent business, said one officer.
He was charged with belonging to “anti-Soviet, Trotskyist, subversive and terrorist organizations,” preparing to assassinate Stalin, and spying for Japan; he had traveled to Japan and China in 1927 and written about his journey. He had also spent six months in the United States in 1931 with Stalin’s permission, traveling cross-country in a Ford and working briefly in Hollywood as a screenwriter for MGM. His travelogue novel Okay offered a harsh view of American life.
Pilnyak “confessed” to everything, but in a final word to a military tribunal he said he would like “to have paper” in front of him on which he “could write something of use to the Soviet people.” After a fifteen-minute trial, from 5:45 to 6:00 p.m. on April 20, 1938, Pilnyak was found guilty and sentenced to the “ultimate penalty,” which was carried out the next day—in the sinister language of the bureaucracy—by the “head of 1st special section’s 12th department.” Pilnyak’s wife spent nineteen years in the Gulag, and his child was raised in the Soviet republic of Georgia by a grandmother. All of Pilnyak’s works were withdrawn from libraries and bookstores, and destroyed. In 1938–39, according to a report by the state censor, 24,138,799 copies of “politically damaging” works or titles of “absolutely no value to the Soviet reader” were pulped.
In the wake of the arrest of Pilnyak and others, the Pasternaks, like many in the village, lived with fear. “It was awful,” said Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida, pregnant at the time with their first son. “Every minute we expected that Borya would be arrested.”
Even after the death of Stalin, no Soviet writer could entertain the idea of publication abroad without considering Pilnyak’s fate. And since 1929 no one had broken the unwritten but iron rule that unapproved foreign publication was forbidden.
As he continued his patter, D’Angelo suddenly realized that Pasternak was lost in thought. Chukovsky, Pasternak’s neighbor, thought he had a “somnambulistic quality”—“he listens but does not hear” while away in the world of his own thoughts and calculations. Pasternak had an uncompromising certainty about his writing, its genius, and his need to have it read by as wide an audience as possible. The writer was convinced that Doctor Zhivago was the culmination of his life’s work, a deeply authentic expression of his vision, and superior to all of the celebrated poetry he had produced over many decades. “My final happiness and madness,” he called it.
Both epic and autobiographical, the novel revolves around the doctor-poet Yuri Zhivago, his art, loves, and losses in the decades surrounding the 1917 Russian Revolution. After the death of his parents, Zhivago is adopted into a family of the bourgeois Moscow intelligentsia. In this genteel and enlightened setting, he discovers his talents for poetry and healing. He finishes medical school and marries Tonya, the daughter of his foster parents. During World War I, while serving in a field hospital in southern Russia, he meets the nurse Lara Antipova and falls in love with her.
Upon his return to his family in 1917, Zhivago finds a changed city. Controlled by the Reds, Moscow is wracked by the chaos of revolution and its citizens are starving. The old world of art, leisure, and intellectual contemplation has been erased. Zhivago’s initial enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks soon fades. Fleeing typhus, Zhivago and his family travel to Varykino, their estate in the Urals. Nearby, in the town of Yuryatin, Zhivago and Lara meet again. Lara’s husband is away with the Red Army. Zhivago’s desire for her is rekindled, but he is troubled by his infidelity.
Captured by a band of peasant soldiers who press-gang him into serving as a field doctor, Zhivago witnesses the atrocities of the Russian Civil War, committed by both the Red Army and its enemy, a coalition of anti-Bolshevik forces known as the Whites. Zhivago eventually “deserts” the revolutionary fight and returns home to find that his family, believing him dead, has fled the country. He moves in with Lara. As the war draws near, they take refuge in the country house in Varykino. For a brief moment, the world is shut out, and Zhivago’s muse returns to inspire a burst of poetry writing. The howling of the wolves outside is a portent of the relationship’s doom. With the end of the war, and the consolidation of Bolshevik power, fate forces the couple apart forever. Lara leaves for the Russian Far East. Zhivago returns to Moscow and dies there in 1929. He leaves behind a collection of poetry, which forms the novel’s last chapter and serves as Zhivago’s artistic legacy and life credo.
Zhivago is Pasternak’s sometime alter ego. Both character and writer are from a lost past, the cultured milieu of the Moscow intelligentsia. In Soviet letters, this was a world to be disdained, if summoned at all. Pasternak knew that the Soviet publishing world would recoil from Doctor Zhivago’s alien tone, its overt religiosity, its sprawling indifference to the demands of socialist realism and the obligation to genuflect before the October Revolution. The novel’s heresies were manifold and undisguised, and for the Soviet faithful, particular sentences and thoughts carried the shock of an unexpected slap. A “zoological apostasy” was the reaction in an early official critique of the novel. The revolution was not shown as “the cake with cream on top,” Pasternak acknowledged, as the writing neared completion. The manuscript “should be given to anyone who asks for it,” he said, “because I do not believe it will ever appear in print.”
Pasternak had not considered Western publication, but by the time D’Angelo arrived at his gate, he had endured five months of complete silence from Goslitizdat, the state literary publisher, to which he had submitted the novel. Two leading journals, Znamya (The Banner) and Novy Mir (New World), which he hoped might excerpt parts of Doctor Zhivago, had also not responded. For D’Angelo, the timing of his pitch was the height of good fortune; Pasternak, when presented with this unexpected offer, was ready to act. In a totalitarian society he had long displayed an unusual fearlessness—visiting and giving money to the relatives of people who had been sent to the Gulag when the fear of taint scared so many others away; intervening with the authorities to ask for mercy for those accused of political crimes; and refusing to sign drummed-up petitions demanding execution for named enemies of the state. He recoiled from the group-think of many of his fellow writers. “Don’t yell at me,” he said to his peers at one public meeting, where he was heckled for asserting that writers should not be given orders. “But if you must yell, at least don’t do it in unison.” Pasternak felt no need to tailor his art to the political demands of the state; to sacrifice his novel, he believed, would be a sin against his own genius.
“Let’s not worry about whether or not the Soviet edition will eventually come out,” he said to D’Angelo. “I am willing to give you the novel so long as Feltrinelli promises to send a copy of it, shall we say in the next few months, to other publishers from important countries, first and foremost France and England. What do you think? Can you ask Milan?” D’Angelo replied that it was not only possible but inevitable because Feltrinelli would surely want to sell the foreign rights to the book.
Pasternak paused again for a moment before excusing himself and going into his house, where he w
orked in a Spartan study on the second floor. In winter it looked out over “a vast white expanse dominated by a little cemetery on a hill, like a bit of background out of a Chagall painting.” Pasternak emerged from the dacha a short time later with a large package wrapped in a covering of newspaper. The manuscript was 433 closely typed pages divided into five parts. Each part, bound in soft paper or cardboard, was held together by twine that was threaded through rough holes in the pages and then knotted. The first section was dated 1948, and the work was still littered with Pasternak’s handwritten corrections.
“This is Doctor Zhivago,” Pasternak said. “May it make its way around the world.”
With all that was to come, Pasternak never wavered from that wish.
D’Angelo explained that he would be able to get the manuscript to Feltrinelli within a matter of days because he was planning a trip to the West. It was just before noon, and the men chatted for a few more minutes.
As they stood at the garden gate saying their good-byes, the novel under D’Angelo’s arm, Pasternak had an odd expression—wry, ironic—playing on his face. He said to the Italian: “You are hereby invited to my execution.”
The publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West in 1957 and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Boris Pasternak the following year triggered one of the great cultural storms of the Cold War. Because of the enduring appeal of the novel, and the 1965 David Lean film based on it, Doctor Zhivago remains a landmark piece of fiction. Yet few readers know the trials of its birth and how the novel galvanized a world largely divided between the competing ideologies of two superpowers.
Doctor Zhivago was banned in the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin attempted to use the Italian Communist Party to suppress the first publication of the novel in translation in Italy. Officials in Moscow and leading Italian Communists threatened both Pasternak and his Milan publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The two men, who never met, resisted the pressure and forged one of the greatest partnerships in the history of publishing. Their secret correspondence, carried in and out of the Soviet Union by trusted couriers, is its own manifesto on artistic freedom.
The Soviet Union’s widely reported hostility to Doctor Zhivago ensured that a novel that might otherwise have had a small elite readership became an international best seller. Doctor Zhivago’s astonishing sales increased even more when Pasternak was honored by the Swedish Academy with the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature. The writer had been nominated several times before in acknowledgment of his poetry, but the appearance of the novel made Pasternak an almost inevitable choice. The Kremlin dismissed Pasternak’s Nobel Prize as an anti-Soviet provocation and orchestrated a relentless internal campaign to vilify the writer as a traitor. Pasternak was driven to the point of suicide. The scale and viciousness of the assault on the elderly writer shocked people around the world, including many writers sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Figures as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, rose to Pasternak’s defense.
Pasternak lived in a society where novels, poems, and plays were hugely significant forms of communication and entertainment. The themes, aesthetics, and political role of literature were the subjects of fierce ideological disputes, and sometimes the losers in these debates paid with their lives. After 1917, nearly 1,500 writers in the Soviet Union were executed or died in labor camps for various alleged infractions. Writers were to be either marshaled in the creation of a new “Soviet man” or isolated, and in some cases crushed; literature could either serve the revolution or the enemies of the state.
The Soviet leadership wrote extensively about revolutionary art; gave hours-long speeches about the purpose of fiction and poetry; and summoned writers to the Kremlin to lecture them about their responsibilities. The men in the Kremlin cared about writing all the more because they had experienced its capacity to transform. The revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was radicalized by a novel, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? “Art belongs to the people,” Lenin said. “It should be understood and loved by the masses. It must unite and elevate their feelings, thoughts and will. It must stir them to activity and develop the artistic instincts within them. Should we serve exquisite sweet cake to a small minority while the worker and peasant masses are in need of black bread?”
As Stalin consolidated power in the early 1930s, he brought the country’s literary life under strict control. Literature was no longer the party’s ally, but its servant. The artistic vitality of the 1920s withered. Stalin, a poet in his youth, was a voracious reader of fiction, sometimes devouring hundreds of pages in a day. He red-lined passages that displeased him. He weighed in on what plays should be staged. He once telephoned Pasternak to discuss whether a particular poet, Osip Mandelstam, was a master of his art—a conversation that was really about Mandelstam’s fate. He decided which writers should receive the country’s premier literary award, inevitably named the Stalin Prize.
The Soviet public longed for great writing with a desire that was rarely sated. The country’s shelves groaned under the dry, formulaic dreck produced to order. Isaiah Berlin found it all “irretrievably second-rate.” Those writers who held on to their individual voices—Pasternak and the poet Anna Akhmatova, among a few others—were rewarded with near adulation. Their readings could fill concert halls and their words, even when banned, found a way to their public’s lips. In the Obozerka forced-labor camp near the White Sea, some inmates amused and bolstered each other by trying to see who could recite the most Pasternak. The Russian émigré critic Victor Frank, explaining Pasternak’s appeal, said that in his poetry “the skies were deeper, the stars more radiant, the rains louder and the sun more savage.… No other poet in Russian literature—and, perhaps, in the world at large—is capable of charging with the same magic the humdrum objects of our humdrum lives as he. Nothing is too small, too insignificant for his piercing eye, the eye of a child, the eye of the first man on a new planet: rain puddles, window-sills, mirror stands, aprons, doors of railway carriages, the little hairlets standing off a wet overcoat—all this flotsam and jetsam of daily life is transformed by him into a joy for ever.”
The poet had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the Communist Party, its leaders, and the Soviet Union’s literary establishment. Before the Great Terror of the late 1930s, Pasternak had written poetry in praise of Lenin and Stalin, and he was for a time transfixed by Stalin’s guile and authority. But as the bloodletting of the purges swept the country, he became profoundly disillusioned with the Soviet state. That he survived the Terror when so many others were swallowed by its relentless, blind maw has no single explanation. The Terror could be bizarrely random—mowing down the loyal and leaving some of the suspect alive. Pasternak was protected by luck, by his international status, and, perhaps most critically, by Stalin’s interested observation of the poet’s unique and sometimes eccentric talent.
Pasternak did not seek to confront the authorities but lived in the purposeful isolation of his creativity and his country life. He began to write Doctor Zhivago in 1945 and it took him ten years to complete. The writing was slowed by periods of illness; by the need to set it aside to make money from commissioned translations of foreign works; and by Pasternak’s growing ambition and wonder at what was flowing from his pen.
It was, effectively, a first novel, and Pasternak was sixty-five when he finished it. He channeled much of his own experience and opinions into its pages. Doctor Zhivago was not a polemic, or an attack on the Soviet Union, or a defense of any other political system. Its power lay in its individual spirit, Pasternak’s wish to find some communion with the earth, some truth in life, some love. Like Dostoevsky, he wanted to settle with the past and express this period of Russia’s history through “fidelity to poetic truth.”
As the story evolved, Pasternak realized that Doctor Zhivago stood as a rebuke to the short history of the Soviet state. The plot, the characters, the atmosphere embodied much that was alien to Soviet literature. There was in its pages a
disdain for the “deadening and merciless” ideology that animated so many of his contemporaries. Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s final testament, a salute to an age and a sensibility he cherished but that had been destroyed. He was obsessively determined to get it published—unlike some of his generation who wrote in secret for the “drawer.”
Doctor Zhivago appeared in succession in Italian, French, German, and English, among numerous languages—but not, at first, in Russian.
In September 1958, at the World’s Fair in Brussels, a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago, handsomely bound in a blue linen hardcover, was handed out from the Vatican Pavilion to Soviet visitors. Rumors about the genesis of this mysterious edition began almost immediately; the CIA was first mentioned by name as its secret publisher in November 1958. Until now, the CIA has never acknowledged its role.
Over the years, a series of apocryphal stories have appeared about how the CIA obtained an original manuscript of Doctor Zhivago and its motivation in printing the novel in Russian. It was said that British intelligence had forced down a plane in Malta that was carrying Feltrinelli from Moscow and secretly photographed the novel, which they removed from his suitcase in the plane’s hold. It never happened. Some of Pasternak’s French friends believed, incorrectly, that an original-language printing of Doctor Zhivago was necessary to qualify for the Nobel Prize—a theory that has periodically resurfaced. The Nobel Prize was not a CIA goal, and an internal accounting of the agency’s distribution of the book shows that no copies were sent to Stockholm; the CIA simply wanted to get copies of Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union and into the hands of Soviet citizens.