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

by Peter Finn

  Pasternak seemed to realize the danger Ivinskaya and her family faced when he involved them in these secretive efforts to get money. He alerted his French translator, Jacqueline de Proyart, that if he wrote to her and told her he had scarlet fever, it meant that Ivinskaya had been arrested and she should raise the alarm in the West.

  In April, Pasternak asked Polikarpov if he could get permission to receive money held by his Norwegian publishers, and he offered to donate part of the royalties to a fund for writers in need. “You know that as of this moment, I have not received one single penny of what is owed to me in royalties from the foreign editions of my novel,” Pasternak said.

  The authorities, unmoved, warned him not to accept any money held in Western banks, and forced him to sign a letter renouncing the funds. When Ivinskaya complained that Pasternak and she had nothing to live on, Polikarpov replied ambiguously, “It wouldn’t be so bad if they even brought you your money in a sack as long as Pasternak quiets down.”

  Feltrinelli also sent in seven or eight packages, or “rolls” (Brötchen) as they called them, amounting to about 100,000 rubles with another German journalist, Heinz Schewe, who had become friends with Pasternak and Ivinskaya and worked for Die Welt. At the end of 1959, Pasternak asked Feltrinelli to turn over $100,000 to D’Angelo, who had written to the author to tell him he could purchase rubles in the West and safely smuggle the cash into the Soviet Union.

  The average annual income of a Soviet citizen at this time was about 12,000 rubles. Under the official exchange rate, which bore no relation to the black market, one dollar in early 1959 would buy ten rubles. This money smuggling was all well-intentioned but reckless. Pasternak and his circle were still being watched, as were all foreigners in touch with him. Pasternak’s Western friends, riven by their own interests and jealousies, wanted to please him. The KGB was monitoring the various streams of cash, and biding its time.

  In 1959, Pasternak was caught in another imbroglio, partly of his own making—a bitter business dispute between Feltrinelli and Jacqueline de Proyart. A Radcliffe College graduate who had traveled to Moscow in late 1956 to perfect her Russian at Moscow State University, de Proyart happened to read a manuscript copy of Doctor Zhivago, and some Russian friends brought her to see Pasternak on the evening of January 1, 1957. Pasternak had invited them to share leftovers from the New Year’s feast; earlier he had had dinner with Akhmatova, Voznesensky, the Neigauzes, and Ariadna Efron, among other friends. Pasternak was thrilled at the presence of a young Frenchwoman—de Proyart was just shy of thirty—and the evening stretched out pleasantly. Pasternak talked about Paris, which he had visited in 1935 for the Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture; about Stalin and the Leader’s wife; and about Mandelstam.

  The conversation turned to Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak asked his guests if they had detected the influence of any Russian writers on his novel. “Leo Tolstoy,” said someone, but it was not the answer Pasternak was looking for. He turned to de Proyart, who risked, “Chekhov.”

  “Magnificent!” cried Pasternak. “You’ve guessed correctly.”

  It seemed to de Proyart that Pasternak’s willingness to trust her turned on that single answer. They met several more times in January and February. Pasternak showed her his contract with Feltrinelli, and de Proyart expressed reservations about allowing such a young publisher, who didn’t speak Russian, to control the novel’s destiny. Pasternak gave de Proyart a handwritten literary power of attorney—a decision that could only bewilder and infuriate Feltrinelli.

  De Proyart would eventually attempt to assert control over any Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago, the publication of some of Pasternak’s earlier works, and, armed with a fresh letter from Pasternak, the management of all of his royalties. Feltrinelli felt betrayed. “To find myself bereft of your trust, of the support of your authority, is an unexpected surprise, and an extremely painful one.” Pasternak envisioned de Proyart as an aesthetic companion to Feltrinelli’s publishing acumen, but the two despised each other and much of 1959 was spent in painful correspondence, disentangling the mess. “I have confused the issue beyond measure,” he told them in a joint letter. “Forgive me, therefore, both of you.” The confusion was compounded by the difficulty of getting letters in and out of Peredelkino. To discuss publishing and financial matters both Pasternak and his closest Western friends often used trusted couriers to communicate, and letters often took weeks or months to reach their destination. “Conducting business, making decisions, and coming to agreement by means of a mail service that is so uncertain, slow and ill disposed, over such distances, with such tight deadlines—it is a torment, an unsolvable problem, a wretched misfortune,” Pasternak wrote.

  The novel was the subject of continued attention and acclaim in the West. The premier American critic Edmund Wilson wrote a long and glowing review in The New Yorker in November, although he was unhappy with the quality of the translation into English: “Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.”

  When Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, visited the United States in early 1959, he went out for a sightseeing stroll and was famously photographed outside a bookstore window full of copies of Doctor Zhivago. He gazed into the window as if a little perplexed. Later, outside the venue where a private steak dinner was hosted by the Motion Picture Association, Mikoyan was confronted by protesters carrying placards that read: “Suffering from delusions about Communism? Consult Dr. Zhivago.”

  By March 1959, 850,000 copies of the novel had been sold in the United States. The Sunday Times in London declared Doctor Zhivago the novel of the year. When an Uruguayan journalist visited Pasternak, he told his Soviet minder, “Pasternak is so fashionable in Uruguay that girls from aristocratic families believe it is a must and good manners to have copies of Doctor Zhivago in your hand when you go out to parties.” At an anti-Communist rally held by Roman Catholic youth in Vienna, a massive photograph of Pasternak was raised above the speakers’ platform. The New York Times reported that “a photomontage made [Pasternak] appear to be standing behind barbed wire. From a distance he seemed to be wearing a crown of thorns.”

  Not everyone regarded Pasternak as a religious hero, and one of the strongest objections to Doctor Zhivago came from David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, who was appalled by the novel’s position on assimilation and said it was “one of the most despicable books about Jews ever written by a man of Jewish origin.” He added that it was “a pity that such a book came from the pen of a man who had the courage to defy his own government.”

  The Nobel awards ceremony took place on December 10, 1958, at Stockholm Concert Hall, which was packed with two thousand dignitaries, including Gustaf VI, the Swedish king, and the Soviet ambassador. The Soviet science laureates, along with the other winners, sat in a row of plush red chairs; Igor Tamm, wearing a broad grin, bowed so deeply before the king that his medal almost fell off. Toward the end of the ceremony, Österling simply noted of Pasternak that “the laureate has, as is known, announced that he does not wish to accept the prize. This renunciation in no way changes the validity of the distinction. It remains only for the Swedish Academy to state with regret that it was not possible for the acceptance to take place.” The audience listened in complete silence.

  In the weeks after the Pravda letter, Pasternak was circumspect with journalists, and the public hysteria of late October and early November began to fade. “Tempest not yet over do not grieve be firm and quiet. Tired loving believing in the future,” Pasternak said in a telegram to his sisters in mid-November. He was worn out. The following day he wrote to a cousin, “It would be best of all to die right now, but probably I shall not lay hands on myself.”

  His spirit slowly rekindled, however, inflamed by the pettiness of the authorities and disgust at the
continuing abuse of old foes like Surkov. At the Congress of Writers in December, Surkov spoke of Pasternak’s “putrid internal émigré position” and said he was an “apostate our righteous wrath has driven from the honorable family of Soviet writers.” Surkov also was forced to admit that Pasternak’s expulsion from the writers’ union had “disoriented progressive writers and put in their hearts some doubt about the rightness of our decision.”

  In a draft letter to the Central Committee, which was obtained by the KGB, Pasternak railed against the “supreme power”: “I realize that I can’t demand anything, that I have no rights, that I can be crushed like a small insect.… I was so stupid to expect generosity after those two letters.”

  His anger rising, Pasternak told the British journalist Alan Moray Williams in January 1959, “The technocrats want writers to be a sort of power for them. They want us to produce work which can be used for all kinds of social purposes, like so many radioactive isotopes.… The Union of Soviet Writers would like me to go on my knees to them—but they will never make me.” He told another journalist that “in every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.”

  In a letter to Feltrinelli, he displayed some of his old heightened vigor, describing his life as “distressing, deadly dangerous, but full of significance and responsibility, dizzyingly enthralling, and worthy of being accepted and lived in glad and grateful obedience to God.”

  Pasternak was also enervated by strains in his relationship with Ivinskaya. He had talked about making a break with his wife and spending the winter in Tarusa, about ninety miles south of Moscow, with his lover. The writer Konstantin Paustovsky had offered them his home. Ivinskaya more than ever wanted to marry. But Pasternak changed his mind at the last minute. He said he didn’t want to hurt people who “wanted only to preserve the appearance of the life they were used to.” He told Ivinskaya that she was his “right hand” and he was entirely with her.

  “What more do you need?” he asked.

  “I was very angry indeed,” recalled Ivinskaya. “I felt intuitively that I needed the protection of Pasternak’s name more than anyone else.” She stormed back to Moscow.

  In the following days, Pasternak wrote several poems, including one called “The Nobel Prize.” It began:

  I am lost like a beast in an enclosure

  Somewhere are people, freedom, and light,

  Behind me is the noise of pursuit,

  And there is no way out.

  Pasternak showed it to Chukovsky, who thought it was a mood piece, written on impulse. Pasternak gave a copy of it to Anthony Brown, a correspondent for the Daily Mail who visited him for an interview on January 30. When it was published, “The Nobel Prize” created another global sensation. The Daily Mail declared that “Pasternak is an outcast” under the headline “Pasternak Surprise: His Agony Revealed in ‘The Nobel Prize.’ ”

  “I am a white cormorant,” Pasternak told the journalist. “As you know, Mr. Brown, there are only black cormorants. I am an oddity, an individual in a society which is not meant for the unit but for the masses.”

  Pasternak said he asked the journalist to give the poem to Jacqueline de Proyart, and never intended it for publication. He complained to other reporters who visited him on February 10, his birthday. “The poem should not have been published,” he told one correspondent. “It makes me look like a young girl who is admiring herself in the mirror. Besides, the translation is bad.” Pasternak said the poem was written in a pessimistic mood, which had passed. His wife was furious. “How many times did I tell you that you should not trust reporters?” she asked. “If this is going to continue, I’m leaving you.”

  Pasternak protested a little too much about Brown’s betrayal—perhaps in deference to the hidden microphones. In early 1959 he could no longer legitimately claim to be unaware of the consequences of passing his writing to unknown foreigners. To hand over such a personal and polemical piece of work so soon after the Nobel Prize trouble was perhaps foolish, but it was characteristically defiant. “Only a madman would do such a thing,” commented Chukovsky, “and I’m not sure there isn’t a glint of madness in his eyes.”

  Chapter 14

  “A college weekend with Russians”

  In the West, there was no longer any doubt that Pasternak’s renunciation of the Nobel Prize, and the letters of apology to Khrushchev and Pravda, were coerced. The authorities reacted with predictable fury to the Daily Mail article. Polikarpov told Ivinskaya that Pasternak was to cut off all contact with the foreign press. The writer was also “advised” to get out of Moscow during a visit by British prime minister Harold Macmillan so the inevitable retinue of reporters would not make their way to Peredelkino.

  In the face of Ivinskaya’s outrage, Pasternak took up an invitation to visit Nina Tabidze in Tbilisi with Zinaida. Ivinskaya took off for Leningrad “in a cold fury.”

  Georgia was a wonderful escape. Tabidze’s house looked out over the city with views of the distant Daryal Gorge and Mount Kazbek. Tabidze told Pasternak that he was the third disgraced Russian poet, after Pushkin and Lermontov, to be sheltered by Georgia. She prepared a private room for him. Pasternak spent his days reading Proust, thinking about a possible new work to be set, in part, in Georgia, and walking the cold, cobblestone streets of the Old Town. In the evening, actors and writers crowded into Tabidze’s apartment to eat and drink with Pasternak.

  The painter Lado Gudiashvili held a reception in his honor, despite official warnings that Pasternak was not to be celebrated in any way. The poet recited by candlelight, amid the artist’s vivid, colorful works, which crowded the walls. Pasternak inscribed Gudiashvili’s scrapbook with lines from the poem “After the Storm”:

  The artist’s hand is more powerful still.

  It washes all the dust and dirt away

  So life, reality, the simple truth

  Come freshly colored from his dye works.

  Pasternak wrote frequently to Ivinskaya and spoke of the need to move beyond the “scares and scandals.” “I really should draw in my horns, calm down and write for the future.” He reproached himself for involving Ivinskaya so deeply “in all these terrible affairs.”

  “I am casting a large shadow on you and putting you in awful danger,” he wrote. “It’s unmanly and contemptible.” He doted on her in his fashion: “Olyusha, my precious girl, I give you a big kiss. I am bound to you by life, by the sun shining through my window, by a feeling of remorse and sadness, by a feeling of guilt (oh, not toward you of course, but toward everyone), by the knowledge of my weakness and the inadequacy of everything I have done so far, by my certainty of the need to bend every effort and move mountains if I am not to let down my friends and prove an imposter.… I hold you to me terribly, terribly tight and almost faint from tenderness, and almost cry.”

  He was also a little smitten with Gudiashvili’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Chukurtma, a dark-haired ballet student. Pasternak fell to his knees and read her his poetry, and she went out walking with him, taking him to the excavation of a tenth-century site outside Tbilisi; Pasternak considered writing a novel about geologists discovering their links to early Christianity in Georgia. Lado Gudiashvili thought his daughter, prone to depression, bloomed under the poet’s attention. In a letter to Chukurtma after he returned to Moscow, Pasternak told her that she had moved him. “I don’t want to talk nonsense to you, don’t want to offend your seriousness or my life with something ridiculous or inappropriate, but I have to tell you this. If by the time I die you have not forgotten me, and you, somehow, will still be in need of me, remember that I counted you among my very best friends and gave you the right to mourn for me and to think of me as someone very close.”

  The trip also brought a reminder of the state’s cruelty. The elderly Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze, a cousin of Nina’s murdered husband who had survived Stalin’s purges, was pressured by the authorities to write a letter to the newspaper condemning Pasternak. His mental health was
already fragile, and Tabidze found the latest official harassment unbearable. He jumped to his death from a hospital window.

  On March 14, shortly after he returned to Russia, Pasternak was hauled into Moscow for a meeting with the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, Roman Rudenko, who had also led the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials of the leading Nazi war criminals. After the appearance of the poem “Nobel Prize,” Rudenko recommended that Pasternak be stripped of his citizenship and deported, but the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which had the power to do so, did not approve the measure.

  Rudenko was, however, authorized to interrogate the writer. He accused Pasternak of “double-dealing” when he turned over his poem to Brown. He threatened Pasternak with a charge of treason. Pasternak said it was an act of “fatal carelessness,” but said he never intended the poem to be published, according to Rudenko’s report of the interrogation, which was countersigned by Pasternak. “I denounce those actions of mine and I am well aware that I may be criminally liable in accordance with the law,” Pasternak admitted, according to the report. Rudenko told his colleagues that Pasternak “behaved like a coward.”

  Pasternak’s own report to Ivinskaya was somewhat different. “Do you know I’ve been talking to a man without a neck?” Pasternak told her that Rudenko had asked him to sign a statement saying he would not meet foreigners, but he had refused.

  “Cordon me off and don’t let foreigners through, if you want,” said Pasternak, “but all I can say in writing is that I’ve read your piece of paper. I can’t make any promises.” No further action was taken by Rudenko. The state appeared unwilling to draw further attention to Pasternak by openly persecuting him. In England, Isaiah Berlin thought that Pasternak seemed “like Tolstoy in 1903 or so, when all the disseminators of his gospel were punished by the government but the old man himself was too eminent & odd to be touched by the police.”