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

Chapter 5

“Until it is finished, I am a fantastically, manically unfree man.”

In October 1952, Pasternak suffered a serious heart attack and was rushed to Moscow’s Botkin Hospital, where he spent his first night “with a miscellany of mortals at death’s door.” As he drifted in and out of consciousness, lying on a gurney in a corridor because the hospital was so crowded, he said, he whispered: “Lord, I thank you for having laid on the paints so thickly and for having made life and death the same as your language—majestic and musical, for having made me a creative artist, for having made creative work your school, and for having prepared me all my life for this night.”

Death had brushed very close, and Pasternak, who was treated by some of the city’s best cardiologists, spent a week in the emergency department and another two and a half months in a general ward. Before the hospitalization, Pasternak suffered constantly from toothache and boils on his gums. His heart condition was discovered when he fainted while coming home from the dentist. He also had dental surgery while in the hospital, and his uneven equine teeth were replaced with a gleaming set of American dentures, which, Akhmatova said, gave him a new “distinguished” look.

His doctors warned him to be careful. His heart problems had begun two years earlier, after Ivinskaya’s arrest and his visit to the Lubyanka. As with so much else, he explored his condition through Yuri Zhivago, who was bestowed with similar cardiac problems: “It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order. A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune.… Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity.”

Ivinskaya had been sent by train to Mordovia, about three hundred miles southeast of Moscow, sleeping on a luggage rack above the crush of prisoners. The rural camp was reached after a forced march from the train station. Prison life alternated between long, buggy summer days digging fields with a pick and the bitter cold of winter in bare barracks. Only immediate family were allowed to write to prisoners, so Pasternak, in his distinctive flowing script, sent postcards under the name of Ivinskaya’s mother: “May 31, 1951. My dear Olya, my joy! You are quite right to be cross at us. Our letters to you should pour straight from the heart in floods of tenderness and sorrow. But it is not always possible to give way to this most natural impulse. Everything must be tempered with caution and concern. B. saw you in a dream the other day dressed in something long and white. He kept getting into all kinds of awkward situations but every time you appeared at his right side, light-hearted and encouraging.… God be with you, my darling. It is all like a dream. I kiss you endless times. Your Mama.”

With Ivinskaya away, Pasternak continued to support her family, making arrangements for her mother to get direct payments from one publisher for his work. “Without him my children would not have survived,” said Ivinskaya.

Pasternak alternated between paid translation commissions and Doctor Zhivago. “I am burying myself in work,” he told his cousin. He had little expectation that his novel would be published. “When they print it, in ten months or fifty years, is unknown to me and just as immaterial.”

Friends continued to encourage him. Lydia Chukovskaya wrote to him in August 1952 after reading Part 3: “Already for a day I don’t eat, sleep, exist, I am reading the novel. From beginning to end, and again from the end, and in parts.… I read your novel like a letter addressed to me. I feel like carrying it in my bag all the time so that at any moment I can take it out, convince myself it is still there, and reread my favorite passages.”

Pasternak continued to read Doctor Zhivago to small groups, but his life was now largely confined to Peredelkino in summer, his apartment in Moscow in winter, and a small circle of trusted friends and young writers. At the dacha he read in his upstairs study to groups of up to twenty guests for a couple of hours on Sundays, and the gatherings formed an alternative to the events at the Union of Soviet Writers. Often attending were Boris Livanov, the great actor from the Moscow Art Theatre Company, and the young poet Andrei Voznesensky, slouching in his chair. The pianist Svyatoslav Richter, his eyes half-closed in contemplation, and his life partner, the soprano Nina Dorliak, were also regulars.

On some weekends, Yuri Krotkov was present. Krotkov, a playwright, had a room in the nearby House of Creative Artists in Peredelkino. He was a familiar face among some diplomats and journalists in the city. A card player, he had endeared himself to Zinaida, earning a seat at her table. He was also a KGB informer who had been involved in a number of stings, including setting up the French ambassador in a “honey-trap” operation with a Russian actress.

When the reading was over, everyone carried their chairs and stools back downstairs and crowded around the feast Zinaida had prepared: often wine and vodka and kvass, a homemade fermented drink, with caviar, marinated herring, and pickles, sometimes followed by a stew made of game. Pasternak sat at the head of the table, Livanov at the other end, a hint of rivalry in their exchanges, both players to the boisterous crowd.

“I have a question for Slava!” said Pasternak, looking at Richter. “Slava! Tell me, does art exist?”

“Let’s drink to poetry!” shouted Livanov.

Some reactions to the novel continued to be mixed, but Pasternak was unshaken. “Of those who have read my novel the majority are dissatisfied. They say it is a failure, and they expected more from me, that it is colorless, that it is not worthy of me, but I, acknowledging all this, just grin as though this abuse and condemnation were praise.”

The anti-Semitic character of the long campaign against “cosmopolitans” became hysterical and brutal in 1952 and 1953. All of the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish writers were shot in August 1952 after a secret trial on treason charges. In January 1953, Pravda announced a “Doctors’ Plot” in which Jewish physicians were accused of the medical murder of prominent figures, including Zhdanov. The persecutor of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko had died in August 1948 from a heart attack brought on by his prodigious drinking. But his death was characterized as part of an American-Zionist conspiracy. Among those caught up in the purge and savagely tortured was Dr. Miron Vovsi, the former surgeon general of the Red Army and one of the cardiologists who had recently helped to save Pasternak. Vovsi confessed to being the inspiration for a terrorist group of Kremlin doctors. Prominent Jewish cultural figures, including the journalist Vasili Grossman and the violinist David Oistrakh, were forced to sign an appeal to Stalin asking him to resettle all Jews in the East to protect them from the “wrath of the people.”

Pasternak was probably saved from the danger of refusing to sign this petition by his heart attack. After his release from the hospital he went to a sanatorium in Bolshevo, just northeast of the city, to continue his recovery and write. “I am now happy and free, in good health and cheerful spirits, and it is with a light heart that I sit down to work on Zhivago, that although of no use to anyone is an integral part of me.” Pasternak was in Bolshevo on March 5, 1953, when Stalin’s death was announced. Zinaida, who once said her sons loved Stalin before their mother, reacted like many Soviet citizens and mourned his death. She suggested Pasternak write a memorial poem. He refused, telling her that Stalin was the killer of the intelligentsia and drenched in blood.

On March 27, in the wake of Stalin’s death, the new leadership announced a broad amnesty for prisoners, including women with children and those sentenced to five years or less. Ivinskaya, thinner and ruddily tanned from long days in the fields, returned to Moscow. Pasternak initially had qualms about rekindling the affair. Zinaida had nursed him back to health and he felt he owed her his life. He also was unable to tell Ivinskaya the relationship was over, and he blundered about like a child. He arranged to meet Ivinskaya’s daughter Irina before her mother reached the capital. He asked the fifteen-year-old to tell her mother that while he still loved Olga, the relationship could not continue. Thinking it ridiculous that she should be his messenger, Irina said nothing to her mother. For Ivinskaya, informed of the conversation only years later, it revealed a “mixture of candor, guileless charm, and undeniable heartlessness.” Her lover could be gauche and cruel.

The dacha in Peredelkino was winterized in 1953 and “turned into a palace” with a gas supply, running water, a bath, and three new rooms. Pasternak said he was ashamed of the grandeur of his large study and its parquet floor. His father’s drawings were hung on the pink-washed walls, including some original illustrations for Tolstoy’s Resurrection. He started to live year-round in the village, the wish of his doctors, who wanted him in more restful surroundings than Moscow. Pasternak kept some emotional distance from Ivinskaya for several months after her return to Moscow. But the affair had resumed by 1954, and that summer she was a frequent visitor to the village, especially when Zinaida and Leonid went on vacation to Yalta on the Black Sea. Ivinskaya became pregnant again, but in August, after a very bumpy ride in a small truck, she was taken ill. The child was stillborn in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The following summer, in 1955, Ivinskaya rented part of a dacha on Izmalkovo Pond, across a wooden footbridge from Peredelkino. She put a large bed in a glassed–in veranda and some dark-blue chintz curtains to create some privacy. When summer ended Ivinskaya rented an insulated room in a nearby house so she could be near Pasternak year-round. He commuted between his wife in what he called the “Big House” and his lover’s pad—a ritual of lunch and lazy afternoons with Ivinskaya before returning home for dinner. Mornings were reserved for writing.

Ivinskaya now began to act as Pasternak’s agent, managing his affairs in Moscow so he rarely had to go into the city. The role brought renewed questions about Ivinskaya’s trustworthiness, allegations that, in various forms, would continue to shadow her. Lydia Chukovskaya said she ended her friendship with Olga in 1949 because of “her debauchery, irresponsibility, her inability to do any sort of work, her greed that generates lies.” After Ivinskaya’s release, Chukovskaya nonetheless said she entrusted her with cash to buy and mail a monthly package of food, clothes, and books to Nadezhda Adolf-Nadezhdina, a mutual friend who was still held in a camp. Chukovskaya said Ivinskaya insisted on assuming responsibility for the mailings because of Lydia’s heart condition; it was necessary to travel to a post office outside of Moscow to mail a package to the camps. No goods ever reached Nadezhdina, and Chukovskaya accused Ivinskaya of the unforgivable theft of gifts intended to help keep an inmate alive. Chukovskaya told Akhmatova and others about the betrayal, but said she never told Pasternak because she didn’t want to upset him. “I’ve never heard of such a thing even among gangsters,” said Akhmatova. Nadezhdina, however, strongly objected to Chukovskaya’s account when she later read it, and said there was no proof that Ivinskaya stole gifts intended for her and there were other plausible explanations why she might not have received the packages.

Ivinskaya later wrote, “It pains me to think that even Lydia Chukovskaya took one of these slanders at its face value,” but she said she followed Pasternak’s advice to ignore “filthy insinuations.”

“Those who know you will never believe you capable of theft or murder, or whatever it is,” she wrote. “If some slander is going the rounds, say nothing.… And so I simply kept my peace.”

The charge nonetheless deeply colored the attitude of some of Pasternak’s closest friends toward Ivinskaya. And it led some to believe that Ivinskaya, already seen as demanding and manipulative, was capable of any kind of treachery, including selling out Pasternak himself.

There is some evidence she was not always faithful to him. Varlam Shalamov, a Gulag survivor and one of Pasternak’s most ardent admirers, wrote a pair of passionate letters to Ivinskaya in 1956 and seemed to believe they had a future together. Shalamov, who spent sixteen years in the camps and was not allowed to live in Moscow when he was released in 1953, apparently did not know of Ivinskaya’s relationship with Pasternak. He later recalled the whole episode as a “painful moral trauma.”

“For Mrs. Ivinskaya, Pasternak was just the subject of the most cynical trade, a sale, which Pasternak of course knew,” wrote Shalamov in a letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam. “Pasternak was her bet, a bet she used when she could.”

Stalin’s death led to some searing criticism of the ideological straitjacket suffocating artists and created the expectation of greater imaginative freedom. In the summer of 1953, the editor of Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, published a provocative poem that dwelled on the sad state of writing:

And everything looks real enough, everything resembles

That which is or which could be

But as a whole it is so indigestible

That you want to howl out in pain.

In the October issue of Znamya, Ilya Ehrenburg wrote a piece, “Concerning the Writer’s Work,” and argued that “a writer is not an apparatus mechanically recording events” but writes “to tell people something he personally feels, because he has ‘begun to ache’ from his book.” There were calls for “sincerity” in literature. Shouting over the fence at Chukovsky that month, Pasternak declared, “A new age is beginning: they want to publish me!”

In early 1954, Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet was performed at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad. In April, Znamya published ten poems from the set planned for the end of Doctor Zhivago—the first publication of original material by Pasternak since the war. The more religious verse from among the poems was excluded, but Pasternak was allowed to write an introductory note describing Doctor Zhivago: “It is anticipated that the novel will be completed by the summer. It covers the period from 1903 to 1929, with an epilogue relating to the Great Patriotic War. Its hero, Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, a doctor, a thinker, a seeker after truth with a creative and artistic cast of mind, dies in 1929. After his death there remain his notebooks and, among other papers written in his youth, poems in finished form, part of which are presented here and which, taken all together, form the last, concluding chapter of the novel.”

Pasternak was elated: “The words ‘Doctor Zhivago’ have made their appearance on a contemporary page—like a hideous blot!” He told his cousin that “I have to and want to finish the novel, and until it is finished I am a fantastically, manically unfree man.”

The guardians of ideological rigidity may have been staggered by the changes, but they were not in retreat. As new, unsettling fiction and poetry began to appear, Surkov took to the pages of Pravda to warn against such experiments and instruct writers where their duty lay. “The party has always reminded Soviet writers that the strength of literature lies in intimacy with the life of the people, from which it cannot be estranged.… We have fought against succumbing to literary influences that are not ours, or are no longer ours—against bourgeois nationalism, against great power chauvinism, against the anti-patriotic activity of the cosmopolitans.” The following month, another conservative critic singled out Pasternak’s poem “The Wedding Party” as representative of this pervasive and false sincerity. Others continued to act as if Pasternak were irrelevant. Boris Polevoi, the head of the foreign branch of the Union of Soviet Writers, said on a visit to New York that he had never heard of any novel by Pasternak. And an accompanying Soviet journalist said Pasternak was unable to finish the novel because he had become “rich and indolent” from translation work.

Pasternak spent much of the winter of 1954 in Peredelkino working intensively on the novel’s last chapters. His study looked out on the garden and across a broad meadow to the small church that the poet occasionally attended. He wrote in a room with a cot, a wardrobe, two desks, including one to stand at, and a narrow, dark-stained bookshelf that included a large Russian-English dictionary and a Russian Bible among a small collection of books. “I personally do not keep heirlooms, archives, collections of any kind, including books and furniture. I do not save letters or draft copies of my work. Nothing piles up in my room; it is easier to clean than a hotel room. My life resembles a student’s.”

He was a man of routine. He rose early and washed outside at a pump, even on harsh winter mornings, steam rising off his face and chest. When he was younger he regularly bathed in the river, and he still dipped his head in its waters when the ice broke in the spring. Each day, he liked a long, briskly taken walk, and he always took candy for children he might meet around the village.

Pasternak wrote in his upstairs study, and Zinaida was protective of his privacy, refusing to allow visitors to disturb him. She was particularly watchful that winter, having learned that her husband had rekindled relations with Ivinskaya. Akhmatova described Pasternak as half ill, half detained and noted that Zinaida was rude to him. A visitor described “her lips pursed in an injured Cupid’s bow.” Pasternak himself was occasionally irritated by distractions from his rush to get Zhivago finished. He reluctantly translated the speech of the German poet Bertolt Brecht, who was in Moscow to receive the Stalin Prize, but when the Union of Soviet Writers suggested he translate some of Brecht’s poems he was openly irritated: “Surely Brecht realizes that engaging in translations is a disgrace. I am busy with important work, for which the time has not yet come—unlike Brecht’s old junk.” He refused to go into Moscow for the reception for the visiting German.

Through the summer of 1955, Pasternak continued to edit the manuscript as it neared completion. After reading a newly typed version, he said that several “heavy and complicated passages will have to be simplified and lightened.” Even amid the relative relaxation of the “thaw,” he was not optimistic about publication. As Pasternak and Ivinskaya walked over the footbridge across Izmalkovo Pond one evening that fall, he said: “You mark my words—they will not publish this novel for anything in the world. I don’t believe they will ever publish it. I have come to the conclusion that I should pass it around to be read by all and sundry.”

A final revision took place in November, and on December 10, 1955, he said the novel was complete: “You cannot imagine what I have achieved! I have found and given names to all this sorcery that has been the cause of suffering, bafflement, amazement, and dispute for several decades. Everything is named in simple, transparent, and sad words. I also once again renewed and redefined the dearest and most important things: land and sky, great passion, creative spirit, life and death.”