Publishing Pasternak: a gripping account

Decades ago I read Boris Pasternak's celebrated novel, Doctor Zhivago, along with several other Russian literary classics from the 19th and 20th centuries. Years earlier I had seen David Lean's sprawling cinematic version, which won five Academy Awards and contributed a memorable musical theme to the popular repertoire. The plot follows the life of physician and poet Yuri Zhivago from 1902 until his death sometime after the Russian Revolutions and the ensuing civil war. As a typical Russian novel, its plot is complicated, brings in numerous characters with triple-barrelled names and less-than-obvious nicknames, and has dark overtones. For those unfamiliar with the twists and turns of recent Russian history, the novel can be confusing because Pasternak focusses so completely on the lives of Zhivago and the people around him that the historical events forming the backdrop often go without explicit reference in the text. Thus a preliminary acquaintance with the history is arguably a prerequisite for a satisfying read of the novel.

What I had not known until recently is the controversy surrounding the publication of the book, as laid out in Peter Finn and Petra Couvée's book, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (New York: Random House/Vintage, 2014). I read this book last month and can report that its plot is as absorbing as that of the novel at its centre.

Pasternak was born in 1890 and in his youth had already been recognized as a gifted poet. During the Soviet era, writers were a privileged caste and were given dachas, or country cottages boasting more space and amenities than the crowded urban flats in which ordinary Russians were compelled to live. Gathering so many writers in one community allowed party officials to keep a close eye on the literary guild to ensure that its members remained within the constraints of the ideology. One of these communities was Peredelkino, located southwest of Moscow. Here Pasternak lived alongside his fellow writers, some of whom would fall afoul of the regime and disappear into the bowels of the Soviet prison system or worse. While Pasternak was continually in peril during Stalin's purges, his fame managed to protect him from the whims of an autocratic leader, but it could not guarantee the publication of his only novel in his own country.

Decades in the making, Doctor Zhivago was not published until 1957, three years before the author's death. Already near the end of the Second World War, Pasternak was reading drafts of his developing story aloud to small groups to gauge the response of his anticipated audience. In so doing, he engendered considerable excitement among Russians eager to read the finished product. However, the Soviet regime would not allow it to be published because it failed to conform to the canons of socialist realism and was not obviously extolling the Bolshevik Revolution. From the Communist Party's perspective, it focussed too much on one man and his subjective responses to the pivotal events of the early 20th century. When the book was finally published, initially in Italy and eventually elsewhere, Pasternak was in principle a wealthy man but without a source of income because his wealth lay outside the Soviet Union, whose leaders prohibited him from accessing it. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the following year, he was forced to decline.

The character of Yuri Zhivago was based in many respects on Pasternak himself, his name coming from the Russian translation of Matthew 16:16: Ты — Христос, Сын Бога Живаго: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Zhivago means "living" and found its way into an Orthodox prayer which Pasternak recalled from his childhood. "It took me a whole life to make this childish sensation real by granting the hero of my novel this name" (57).

I will not recount in full the authors' story of the novel's publication. Indeed its tortuous path is as convoluted as Doctor Zhivago itself. During the tensest period of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency took an active role in facilitating its publication, going so far as to distribute copies in Russian to Soviet visitors to the 1958 Brussels world's fair through the Vatican pavilion. I was surprised to learn of the number of prominent American literary figures quite actively working with the CIA to sow clandestinely the seeds of literary freedom in a country in the grip of a totalitarian regime. While the CIA's reputation would later be sullied through its support of the military regimes in Greece, Chile, and elsewhere, in the first decade and a half of the Cold War, it readily supported socialist literary efforts to counter the appeal of Marxism-Leninism, much to the annoyance of American conservatives.

Pasternak home in Peredelkino

One element of Finn and Couvée's account I found remarkable. During the middle years of the last century, Soviet audiences turned out in droves to hear famous poets read their works in public. This, of course, was before the age of television, the internet, and the ready-to-hand entertainments now at our fingertips. Yet now it stretches credulity to imagine hundreds of people crowding into an auditorium to hear poetry. During my student years at Notre Dame, James Earl Jones came to campus to read Shakespeare. I was in my late twenties at the time and was suitably impressed. But few attended. If the publicists had advertised Jones as the voice of Darth Vader, the numbers would almost certainly have been much higher. (In retrospect, I rather think that Jones himself wanted the connection played down.) In light of this experience, I feel some wonderment at a country whose people, despite suffering so much under various tyrannical regimes, have (or once had) an insatiable taste for public poetry readings. Does affliction perhaps stimulate the thirst for poetry?

Although Russia is by no means a democracy and is suffering under yet another autocratic ruler, it has rehabilitated Pasternak's reputation. In fact, Nikita Khrushchev himself, following his overthrow in 1964, later read the book and expressed regret at his treatment of the author. Since 2003 Russian schools have assigned Doctor Zhivago to grade 11 students.