by Peter Finn
“a beauty”: Yevgeni Yevtushenko, “Bog stanovitsya chelovekom” (God Becomes Man), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 721.
Zinaida found out about the affair: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 340–42.
tried to poison herself: Yemelyanova, Legendy Potapovskogo pereulka, 21.
“formed a deep new attachment”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, August 7, 1949, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 292.
He imagined at one point: Interview with Lyusya Popova, Komsomol’skaya Pravda, August 19, 1999.
nominated Pasternak for the Nobel Prize: Pamela Davidson, “C. M. Bowra’s ‘Overestimation’ of Pasternak and the Genesis of Doctor Zhivago,” in Fleishman, The Life of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, 42.
“the greatest of Russian poets”: Conquest, Courage of Genius, 86.
“It appears to us beyond all doubt”: International Conference of Professors of English, The National Archives, London, 1950, FO 954/881.
“Leave him, he’s a cloud dweller”: Livanov, Mezhdu dvumya Zhivago, vospominaniya i vpechatleniya, p’esy, 177.
Nearly a dozen uniformed agents: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 86. Some authors have suggested that Ivinskaya was arrested because of a fraud investigation into an editor she worked under and have also suggested that she might have been involved. There is no evidence for such claims. The almost exclusive focus of her long interrogations was Pasternak, and she was not charged with any kind of fraud but with a political crime.
she was strip-searched: For the detention at the Lubyanka, see ibid., 91–110, unless another source is cited.
known to unroll a bloodstained carpet: Montefiore, Stalin, 539.
The KGB’s accounting: Yemelyanova, Pasternak i Ivinskaya: provoda pod tokom, 97–107.
“Everything is finished”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 86.
“About the gown with the tassels”: Lydia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2,173.
“I have pondered for a long time”: Nikiforov letter, in Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 113–14. Ivinskaya said she forgave him, and her mother helped him to find English lessons when he was released and returned to Moscow. Nikiforov’s real name was Yepishkin. A former merchant and therefore suspect, he took his wife’s name after he returned to Russia from Australia following the 1917 Revolution.
“Here Borya’s and my child”: One biographer has cast doubt on whether Ivinskaya was pregnant. The tempestuous nature of the romance, and the fact that the couple appeared to have broken and repaired their relations several times, makes it plausible that Pasternak and Ivinskaya were again intimate before her arrest—as does his persistent unhappiness with aspects of his home life. A prison document cited by Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, in her book does not conclusively confirm a pregnancy, but it does support her mother’s account. A doctor’s note stated that Ivinskaya was in the prison clinic “due to bleeding from womb” and that the arrested person said she was pregnant. (See Yemelyanova, Pasternak i Ivinskaya: provoda pod tokom 103.) There is no further medical documentation in the public record.
“I have told [Zinaida]”: Account of Lyusya Popova, in Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 107–8.
Chapter 5
“with a miscellany of mortals”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, January 20, 1953, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Friedenberg, Correspondence, 309.
“Lord, I thank you”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nina Tabidze, January 17, 1953, in Boris Pasternak, Letters to Georgian Friends, 149–59.
Pasternak suffered constantly from toothache: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 347.
a new “distinguished” look: Lydia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 57.
“It’s the disease of our time”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 430.
“My dear Olya, my joy!”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 118.
“Without him my children”: Ibid., 119.
“I am burying myself in work”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, December 9, 1949, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 298.
“When they print it”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 273.
Lydia Chukovskaya wrote to him: Lydia Chukovskaya, letter to Boris Pasternak, August 28, 1952, in Lydia Chukovskaya, Sochineniya, vol. 2, 438–39.
Often attending were Boris Livanov: Voznesensky, An Arrow in the Wall, 258–61.
Krotkov was present: Testimony of Yuri Krotkov, aka George Karlin, before the U.S. Senate subcommittee to investigate the administration of the Internal Security Act. November 3, Committee on the Judiciary, Karlin Testimony, at 6, U.S. Government Printing Office, pt. 1 (1969).
a stew made of game: Olga Carlisle described a typical meal in “Boris Pasternak: The Art of Fiction No. 25,” interview by Olga Carlisle, The Paris Review 24 (1960): 61–66.
“Of those who have read”: Boris Pasternak, letter to S. I. and M. N. Chikovani, June 14, 1952, in Boris Pasternak, Letters to Georgian Friends, 142–43.
Vovsi confessed to being the inspiration: Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, 212.
“I am now happy and free”: Boris Pasternak, letter to V. F. Asmus, March 3, 1953, in Boris Pasternak, Selected Writings and Letters, 409.
her sons loved Stalin: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 10.
the killer of the intelligentsia: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 351.
“mixture of candor”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 24.
“turned into a palace”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, July 12, 1954, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 328.
She put a large bed: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 37.
a ritual of lunch: Matthews, Stalin’s Children, 157.
“her debauchery, irresponsibility”: For Chukovskaya’s and Adol’f-Nadezhdina’s accounts of this dispute see Lydia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi vol. 2, 658–61; and Adol’f-Nadezhdina, letter to Chukovskaya in Mansurov, Lara Moego Romana, 266–68.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing”: Reeder, Anna Akhmatova, 357.
“painful moral trauma”: Yesipov, Shalamov, 226–29.
“Pasternak was her bet”: Varlam Shalamov, letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam, September 1965, in http://shalamov.ru/library/24/36.html.
And everything looks real enough: Frankel, Novy Mir: A Case Study, 22.
“a writer is not an apparatus”: Ibid., 30.
“A new age is beginning”: Chukovsky, Diary, entry October 20, 1953, 379.
“It is anticipated that the novel”: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 207.
“manically unfree man”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, March 20, 1954, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 320.
“The party has always reminded”: Quoting Surkov. See “The Official Intervention in the Literary Battle,” Soviet Studies 6, no. 2 (October 1954): 179–86.
“rich and indolent”: Ruge, Pasternak: A Pictorial Biography, 90–91.
“I personally do not keep heirlooms”: Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, xii.
Pasternak as half ill, half detained: Lydia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 105.
“her lips pursed”: Voznesensky, An Arrow in the Wall, 260.
“Surely Brecht realizes”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 296; Ruge, Pasternak: A Pictorial Biography, 88–89.
“heavy and complicated passages”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 298.
“You mark my words”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 195.
“You cannot imagine”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nina Tabidze in Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 1.
Chapter 6
His entrepreneurial ancestors: For family background, see Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 1–36.
“he was just as prepared to abandon”: Ibid.,
65.
a mass movement: De Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century, 100.
the feminist Unione Donne Italiane: Ibid.
“little big world”: Calvino, Hermit in Paris, 128.
“I learned to control”: Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 52.
“We had dreams”: Anna Del Bo Boffino, L’Unità, March 1992, quoted in Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 45.
“Muscovite Pasionaria”: Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 38.
“a portrait of Stalin among the old masters”: Ibid, 55.
“little university of Marxism”: Ibid., 61.
“the Jaguar”: Ibid., 78.
“mass arrests and deportation”: Taubman, Khrushchev, 271.
the delegates in the great hall of the Kremlin: Medvedev, Khrushchev, 86–88.
D’Angelo called Milan: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 5–6.
“Not to publish a novel like this”: Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 101.
“What kind of nonsense is that?”: Vyacheslav Ivanov in Zvezda 1 (2010): 152.
“This may put an end to the poetry volume!”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 197.
“Quite recently I have completed my main”: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 215.
“How can anyone love his country so little?”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 201.
“If its publication here”: Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 102–3.
In a long memo, Serov informed: Ibid., 103–5.
The book was described as a hostile attack: August 31, 1956, note of the deputy foreign minister, and appendix with Central Committee’s culture department report in Afiani and Tomilina, Boris Pasternak i Vlast’, 63.
talked openly at their workplace: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 13.
she would show the novel to Vyacheslav Molotov: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 200.
“She relieves me from the vexing negotiations”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Lydia Pasternak Slater, November 1, 1957, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 389.
not the informer some would label her: In 1997, the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets published a number of quotations from a letter Ivinskaya wrote to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on March 10, 1961, from a labor camp in Siberia where she had been re-imprisoned. (See also Alessandra Stanley, “Model for Dr. Zhivago’s Lara Betrayed Pasternak to KGB,” The New York Times, September 27, 1997.) Selective quotation from the letter, which was not published in full, led to charges that Ivinskaya was a KGB informer. Ivinskaya, to bolster her plea for mercy, told Khrushchev that she had tried to cancel Pasternak’s meetings with foreigners and had worked with the Central Committee to prevent publication in the West of Doctor Zhivago. She said Pasternak was not an “innocent lamb” in all that happened. Read in full, Ivinskaya’s letter is the desperate cry of a mother and breadwinner (Her own mother was still alive.) There is nothing in it that would justify labeling her a KGB informer (See afterword for a fuller treatment). And in fact much of her dealing with the Soviet authorities was at Pasternak’s urging. The KGB may have regarded her as malleable but did not see her as reliable. (See next note.) The full letter is available at Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) Col.: 8131, I.: 31, F.: 89398, S.: 51–58. The authors also have a copy.
“very anti-Soviet”: KGB to the Council of Ministers, memo on Pasternak’s connections with Soviet and foreign individuals, February 16, 1959, in Afiani and Tomilina, Boris Pasternak i Vlast’, 181.
“we must get the manuscript back”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 219.
Polikarpov was known in the literary community: Benedikt Sarnov, “Tragicheskaya figura” (A Tragic Figure), in Lekhaim (October 2003), http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/138/sarnov.htm; Yevtushenko, Shestidesantnik, memuarnaya proza, 162–92.
Kotov’s proposal was absurd: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 31.
“this great [publication] battle will be won by you”: Varlam Shalamov, letter to Boris Pasternak, August 12, 1956, in http://shalamov.ru/library/24/1.html.
gave her a copy of his manuscript to read: Boris Pasternak, letter to Hélène Peltier, September 14, 1956, in Boris Pasternak, Lettres à mes amies françaises (1956–1960), 58.
“If ever you receive a letter”: The scrap of paper is held at La Biblioteca della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan.
“it was important—more than important”: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 227.
Zinaida believed that their son Leonid: Boris Pasternak, letter to sisters, August 14, 1956, Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 380.
Yevgeni, was prevented: Mikhail Polivanov, “Tainaya Svoboda” (Silent Freedom), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 469.
Pasternak was incensed: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 229.
“chose open-eyed”: Isaiah Berlin, letter to David Astor, October 27, 1958, in Berlin, Enlightening: Letters, 1946–1960, 652–53.
“You may not even like it”: Boris Pasternak, letter to sisters, August 14, 1956, in Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 380.
“tall, mustachioed, hugely impressive”: Patricia Blake, introduction to Hayward, Writers in Russia, 1917–1978, xlvii.
The KGB referred to him contemptuously as a “White émigré”: KGB to the Council of Ministers, memo on Pasternak’s connections with Soviet and foreign individuals, February 18, 1959, Afiani and Tomilina, Boris Pasternak i Vlast’, 183.
“he’s too jealous of my position”: Patricia Blake, introduction to Hayward, Writers in Russia, 1917–1978, l.
“His verse is convex”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 308.
“Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing”: Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 372.
Pasternak’s mistress must have written it: Schiff, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), 243.
Katkov promised Pasternak with a kiss: Patricia Blake, introduction to Hayward, Writers in Russia, 1917–1978, l.
taught himself Hungarian in six weeks: Ibid., xlix.
“going over everything for accuracy”: Ibid., li.
“obviously wished to be a martyr”: Isaiah Berlin, letter to James Joll, November 25, 1958, in Berlin, Enlightening: Letters, 1946–1960, 658.
Chapter 7
“The thing that has disturbed us”: The letter was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) on October 25, 1958. It is reproduced in full in Conquest, Courage of Genius, Appendix II, 136–63.
“Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 429.
“most heretical insinuation”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak,vol. 2, 316.
“brilliant, extremely egocentric”: Chukovsky, Diary, entry September 1, 1956, 408.
“I have also asked Konstantin Aleksandrovich”: Tamara Ivanova, “Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 286–87.
He asked Fedin not to mention the rejection: Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 221.
“composed very courteously and gently”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 2, 317.
D’Angelo and his wife visited: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 23.
his arrest and torture: Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party, 139.
“The issue with Pasternak’s manuscript”: October 24, 1956, note of the department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for relations with foreign Communist parties, in Afiani and Tomilina, Pasternak i Vlast’, 71.
pressure divided editors: Mancosu, Inside the Zhivago Storm, 44; Valerio Riva, “La vera storia del dottor Zivago” (The true story of Dr. Zhivago), Corriere della Sera, cultural supplement, January 14, 1987, in Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 108.
Khrushchev would eventually argue: McLean and Vickery, The Year of Protest 1956, 25.
a quarter of a million rank-and-file members abandoned the movement: De Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century, 125.
“a strong plea for socialist demo
cracy”: Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 89.
“the loss of small fringe groups”: Giorgio Amendola, quoted in ibid., 94.
“brought luster to the party”: Ibid., 95.
“phantasmagoria”: Puzikov, Budni i prazdniki, 202.
“He assures me”: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 75.
“His is a perfect portrayal”: Carlo Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 110–11.
“Here in Russia, the novel will never appear”: Ibid., 112.
“seldom, periodically and only faintly shared”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Andrei Sinyavsky, June 29, 1957, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 10, 235.
Khrushchev spoke for nearly two hours: Taubman, Khrushchev, 307–8.
“a broad intricate story”: Conquest, Courage of Genius, 54.
“choice of stories in the first issue”: August 30, 1957, and September 18, 1957, Central Committee culture department notes on Opinie, in Afiani and Tomilina, Pasternak i Vlast’, 81–82 and 83–84.
there was a blonde in an hour before: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 364.
Khrushchev himself: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 95.
“a selection of the most unacceptable parts”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nina Tabidze, August 21, 1957, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 10, 249–50.
“the consequences it could have on me”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Pietro Zveteremich, July 1957, in Valerio Riva, Corriere della Sera, January 14, 1987.
Letters to his sister Lydia: Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 388. One of the letters is quoted in a KGB memo, February 18, 1959, in Afiani and Tomilina, Pasternak i Vlast’, 184.
“with the spontaneity of a child”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 216. Ivinskaya mistakes the date of this meeting by a year in her memoirs, placing it in 1958.
“We all left beaten”: Alexander Puzikov in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 10, 249; and Puzikov, Budni i prazdniki, 206.
a “ ’37 type of meeting”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Nina Tabidze, August 21, 1957, in Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 228–29.