“To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.” Even in English this line sounds Russian. It is in fact one of the most famous lines of 20th-century Russian poetry—the final line of the poem “Hamlet,” which was attributed by its author, Boris Pasternak, to the hero of his 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago. The line is a rueful witticism intended to resonate with those who are all too familiar with this world of sorrows. So is the voice of experience addressing innocence, a parent offering instruction to an adolescent who will probably understand it only after he has suffered from the consequences of his own ignorance. And it is the voice of a Russian speaking to Russians, who he knows will take his meaning implicitly. And it is also the voice of a Russian who hopes to educate free men elsewhere who are unschooled in the deceit and terror of Soviet tyranny and stand in need of a stiff dose of reality.
“[War’s] real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of a real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie.” This, too, is Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago, one of the greatest novels written in the Soviet Union. Edmund Wilson, who was not given to intemperate transports, wrote at the time, “Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.” Robert Conquest, the great English historian of Soviet tyranny, appropriated that ringing final phrase of Wilson’s for the title of his own invaluable 1961 book, which was re-titled The Pasternak Affair in its American edition. And now we are reminded of how much can be at stake in the writing of a mere novel, with The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon, 368 pages), by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, the national-security editor for the Washington Post and a teacher at St. Petersburg State University, respectively.
Finn and Couvée provide telling background for Pasternak’s heroism and suffering. Among the tens of millions eliminated in the Soviet sewage-disposal system, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the state apparatus of torture, enslavement, and murder, there were some 1,500 writers killed off as unworthy of the destined role for literature in reshaping civilization. The state censor kept records of “politically damaging” works that were rendered defunct, often along with their imprudent makers: In 1938 and 1939, exactly 24,138,799 volumes were said to have been pulped. Russian books disappeared, as unnecessary men and women disappeared, so that no one would dare to notice they were gone.
Pasternak was one who dared to notice. He registered everything his masters intended for the memory hole. Long before Pasternak wrote the novel that would make him world-famous, he was known as perhaps the foremost poet in the Soviet Union. On the appearance of Pasternak’s first lyric collection in 1922, Leon Trotsky, then commander of the Red Army, summoned him for a talk, thinking he might agree to be molded into a heroic spokesman for the young regime. Pressed to explain why he avoided the social themes that ought to occupy every righteous artist and thinker, Pasternak professed his allegiance to “true individualism, as a new social cell in a new social organism.” At the time, Pasternak hoped that his singularity might find room for its free development within the brave new world of Soviet Man. In due course he would recognize that the obliteration of true individualism was essential to the survival of the new social organism, diseased and misshapen as it was from its conception.
Communist tyranny was the brainchild of the most seductive modern philosophers, and rulers notoriously murderous were passionately bookish. As Nadezhda Mandelstam observed in her harrowing memoirs, there was “one remarkable feature of our leaders: their boundless, almost superstitious respect for poetry.” They were so aware of the power that poetry exercised over the Russian soul that misguided and misleading versifying was deemed a capital offense. Already by 1921 the powers were shooting refractory poets as distinguished as Nikolai Gumilev. The no less distinguished Sergey Yesenin and Marina Tsvetayeva were made to understand that suicide was the safest recourse for artists of their wayward integrity. In 1934, Osip Mandelstam immortalized the “cockroach whiskers” of “the murderer and peasant slayer” Stalin, in a poem that circulated solely by word of mouth among trusted companions. When Mandelstam recited his poem to Pasternak in a Moscow street—an act of terrorism, under Soviet law—the flummoxed listener begged his friend never to repeat such a suicidal indiscretion. But Mandelstam would not keep silent, and every wall had ears. Finn and Couvée relate the surreal conversation that ensued when Stalin himself telephoned Pasternak about Mandelstam’s case, assuring him that “everything will be all right,” proceeding with diabolical suavity to taunt the poet for not having tried to help his friend, and clearly angling to discover if Pasternak had heard the fatal poem. When Pasternak told Stalin that Mandelstam was not his concern, but that he had long wanted to meet the dictator “for a serious discussion, about life and death,” Stalin hung up on him. However, after Mandelstam died of starvation somewhere in the Gulag Archipelago, “consumed in [its] flames,” in Pasternak’s phrase, the surviving poet was the only person who dared to visit the widowed Nadezhda.
Pasternak dared a great deal. He was the guardian angel of many prison-camp survivors, helping to support financially and morally men and women irreparably broken. And in time Pasternak became an avenging angel: “He began to write Doctor Zhivago on a block of watermarked paper from the desk of a dead man,” in 1945, Finn and Couvée write. “The paper was a gift from the widow of Titsian Tabidze, the Georgian poet who was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1937.” For eight years after the murder, Nina Tabidze had been officially shunned as a “former person,” but when Pasternak came to Tbilisi for a literary festival, he insisted to the organizers that she take part beside him. Hence her gift to this protector.
Finn and Couvée write that after the Second World War crimes against the Soviet state came to include “praising American democracy” and “abasement before the West.” Literary toadies could not grovel obsequiously enough to prove their subservience to the authorities. In 1946, after Pasternak declined to join the official outcry against the literary “nun-and-whore” Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, the Union of Soviet Writers removed Pasternak from its board and passed a resolution declaring him “an author lacking in ideology and remote from Soviet reality.” Impious audacity like Pasternak’s could only too readily trigger expulsion from the Union and mean absolute refusal of the right to publish. Nevertheless, Pasternak began giving readings of his novel-in-progress to select private gatherings in 1946. Displeasure from on high came crashing down. In 1947 and 1948, publication of his Shakespeare translations, a principal source of income, was unaccountably delayed, and a 25,000-copy print run of his selected poems was pulped just before the date set for publication. Hard years followed, but Pasternak persevered in his chosen and appointed task.
When Stalin died in 1953, Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida, urged him to write an elegy. He refused with extreme heat, telling her that the Great Leader had been “the killer of the intelligentsia and drenched in blood.” With Stalin gone, the cultural death grip relaxed and many took hope. In 1954, a leading journal published 10 poems that Pasternak intended for the coda to Doctor Zhivago along with his brief description of the novel that was nearing completion. But to hope too much of Nikita Khrushchev and his apparatchiks proved a costly mistake: In 1956, the finished novel was rejected for Soviet publication, judged guilty of “hypertrophied individualism” and “non-acceptance of the socialist revolution” and further derided as “zoological apostasy,” a coinage of sinister perfection, which sounds all the more dire for being unintelligible.
The enterprising Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Communist heir to a preposterous capitalist fortune, dispatched a courier in May 1956 to try to acquire Pasternak’s manuscript for the novel’s original publication in an Italian translation. The author agreed, but spoke these parting words: “You are hereby invited to my execution.” There was notorious precedent for his premonition. Boris Pilnyak, Pasternak’s sometime next-door neighbor in the exclusive writers’ colony of Peredelkino—which Stalin reportedly founded to reward literary personages loyal to the regime—published an anti-Soviet novel abroad in 1929, and this zoological apostasy had ensured his execution nine years later, as well as a 19-year stretch in the Gulag for his widow. No one else had dared to seek unauthorized foreign publication of his work until Pasternak did.
The Kremlin displayed the instruments of torture to Pasternak, who knew only too well what they looked like, and it enlisted the Italian Communist Party to lean on Feltrinelli. The two men remained steadfast. Translations in Italian, French, German, English, and 14 other languages appeared in 1957 and 1958 and made Pasternak a literary celebrity and, more important, a moral colossus in much of the world. The first edition in Russian was printed in the Netherlands and the elegant hardcover copies distributed to Soviet visitors at the Vatican Pavilion of the Brussels World’s Fair in September 1958—an admirably cosmopolitan undertaking financed and directed by the CIA. Finn and Couvée note that the CIA admitted its handiwork only recently:
The operation to print and distribute Doctor Zhivago was run by the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, monitored by CIA director Allen Dulles, and sanctioned by President Eisenhower’s Operations Coordinating Board, which reported to the National Security Council at the White House.
The Cold War had to be kept at a manageable temperature, because the release of thermonuclear heat would be disagreeable to all concerned; so “covert propaganda operations” were doable while military intervention in support of anti-Soviet uprisings in Hungary and East Germany was not. As the authors explain: “The agency believed the power of ideas—in news, art, music, and literature—could slowly corrode the authority of the Soviet state with its own people and in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. The agency was in a long game.”
Over some 35 years the CIA scattered the intellectual seeds of freedom throughout the Soviet bloc, in the form of some 10 million books and journals. The chief of covert action averred that books were “the most important weapon of strategic [long-range] propaganda.” Finn and Couvée note the signal similarity to Maxim Gorky’s profession of faith in literature at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, when he preached, “Books are the most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture.”
Finn and Couvée state that the CIA did not specifically promote Pasternak’s candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the agency was certainly not displeased when in October 1958 he was announced as that year’s laureate. The battle of the books heated up rapidly. Straightaway the Literaturnaya Gazeta ran a novella-length editorial of florid scurrility, headlined “A Provocative Sortie of International Reaction.” The op-ed included the entire rejection letter sent to Pasternak in 1956 that certified the official worthlessness and downright malignancy of the work and its author. The gazette had a circulation of almost 900,000 readers, and this issue sold out in a few hours. The epithet of choice for Pasternak in the Soviet press and in the mouths of the faithful soon became “Judas,” for while propagating belief in Christ might be anti-Soviet slander, everyone understood how aptly the biblical allusion fit the arch-betrayer of the Socialist Motherland, especially when the offender was a Jew. (Pasternak was a convert to Orthodox Christianity, which he observed in his own unorthodox way; and Isaiah Berlin, who met with
Pasternak in 1945 and 1956, wrote that Pasternak “wished the Jews to assimilate, to disappear as a people,” but a traitor’s Jewishness was always a bonus to the defenders of Soviet virtue.)
The customary two minutes of hate extended its hours of business. Pasternak was every decent citizen’s preferred enemy, the eager accomplice to the imperialists’ untiring assault on truth and justice. The Union of Soviet Writers extruded him from its warm nurturing body. The Kremlin ordered him to decline the Nobel Prize; to save his skin and the lives of those he loved, Pasternak did as he was told. He died in 1960, a martyr or a pariah, depending on who was asking. Doctor Zhivago was not allowed publication in the Soviet Union until 1988.
Soviet authority was right to regard Pasternak as a renegade and mortal foe. Yuri Zhivago, physician, poet, stalwart of a bourgeois family dispossessed by Bolshevik justice, a loving husband and father but also an adulterer of such radiant passion that even Tolstoy might have forgiven him, spectacularly alight with wonder at the beauty and frightfulness of nature, intimate with the moral rot of the Tsarist regime and the hell-bent acceleration of decay after the October Revolution, is the sort of man marked for extinction by every Communist imperative: He is encumbered by a soul, that relic of ancient delusion that must be eliminated so that the socialist idea may blossom.
Waylaid and held captive for over a year by a band of Communist partisans in need of a doctor, Zhivago addresses the guerrilla commander with unflinching boldness: He scorns “the ideas of general improvement” the Bolsheviks promote, condemns the “seas of blood” that have produced negligible gains and that not even a worthy end could justify, and plunges into despair at the insane project for “the remaking of life” in accordance with a theory inimical to life itself. Finn and Couvée point out that Stalin used the same word remaking in his renowned 1932 address to Soviet writers, extolling them as “engineers of the human soul,” who “will assist in remaking the soul.”
In Pasternak’s view, the soul was being so comprehensively remade as to be extinguished for good. Finn and Couvée remark that Pasternak’s defiance was religious through and through. “While sounding like a Siberian name, Zhivago was derived from an Orthodox prayer. Pasternak told the Gulag survivor and writer Varlam Shalamov, who was the son of a priest, that as a child while saying the prayer lines ‘Ty est’ voistinu Khristos, Syn Boga zhivago’ (“You truly are the Christ, the living God”), he used to pause after Boga (God), before saying, zhivago (the living).” Pasternak went on to say that his childish imagination gave the divinity a quite unorthodox coloring and that the full-grown novelist’s imagination endowed it with numerous unexampled and resplendent hues: “I did not think of the living God, but of a new one, who was only accessible to me through the name Zhivago. It took me a whole life to make this childish sensation real by granting the hero of my novel this name.”
This flagrant godliness was not Pasternak’s worst sin against Soviet reality. Finn and Couvée observe that the literary powers who condemned Pasternak’s novel could not dare to mention his most glaring heresy: “For Pasternak, Stalinism and the purges were not a terrible aberration—the accepted Soviet explanation under Khrushchev—but a natural outgrowth of the system created by Lenin. This was an idea that could not be broached even in a rejection letter.”
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 but was charged with treason and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for that searing history, would shred for every honest man any vestigial illusion that the evils of Communism had been the work of a single unhinged tyrant and the unfortunate “cult of personality” that deformed honorable Soviet statecraft.
The Zhivago Affair, co-authored by a journalist with an unimpeachably liberal resumé, is the sort of book that repairs the tattered received idea and might even replace it with something nearer the truth. Yet that the CIA should admit, nearly a half-century after the fact, the role it played in the Zhivago affair is simply not enough: It ought to celebrate this operation and spread the word as widely as possible. The blackguardy of the CIA on one hand, and its incompetence on the other, are surefire crowd-pleasers and taken as gospel: No Hollywood director or liberal pundit can go wrong by squeezing the last drop of moral horror from some CIA fiasco or, better yet, from some successful application of black ops. So let this episode of white-on-white spycraft, in which political triumph is also undeniable moral victory, be known among the nations, beginning here at home, where the need is perhaps the most urgent.
But above all one must remember and revere Boris Pasternak, for whom “the courage of genius” falls just short of being adequate praise. Varlam Shalamov, Gulag veteran and author of Kolyma Tales, who might have considered himself a worthy peer of Pasternak’s, states the case even more emphatically for Pasternak’s unquestioned moral and intellectual superiority, calling him in a letter “the conscience of our age like Lev Tolstoy was in his,” and declaring that “our time will only be justified because you lived in it.” Pasternak did the work he was born to do, and he paid the price, in loneliness, official disgrace, and fear. Of course for him official disgrace was the surest badge of honor, but to be widely reviled, even by those he had considered almost friends, lacerates the soul all the same; and fear really never quits, especially because a man such as Pasternak feared not only for himself but for those he loved. Pasternak’s health did suffer from his persecution, but he lived to 70 and died of lung cancer, not from murderous slave labor in the Siberian Arctic or a bullet to the back of the skull in some Lubyanka sub-basement.
After his death, however, Olga Ivinskaya—the woman Pasternak loved above all, as Zhivago loved Lara Antipova—and Olga’s daughter Irina were hounded by the KGB. The most ludicrous charge was that Olga had in fact written Doctor Zhivago, and while not even a Soviet court was willing to convict her of that, the two women were convicted of smuggling and currency trading, in connection with Pasternak’s foreign royalties, which no one could legally receive in the Soviet Union. Olga was sentenced to eight years of forced labor, Irina to three. Mother and daughter wound up serving only half of their respective sentences—though “only” in this case was far more than enough.
The truth will come out, provided sufficient force is applied to get it out. Finn and Couvée write: “In 1988 and 1989, as he rode the subway in Moscow, the journalist David Remnick was arrested by an incredible sight: ‘ordinary people reading Pasternak in their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir [New World].’” Those were spectacularly hopeful days; but today ordinary Muscovites have urgent need of Pasternak once again, and so do ordinary New Yorkers who have tired of hearing about the suffering of backward peoples only too hospitable to tyrants. There are some truths that demand repeating, over and over, until at last persons of good will begin to understand and to make things right.
