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

Chapter 6

“Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture.”

The publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was an unlikely Communist. His entrepreneurial ancestors, stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century, had over several generations built a great fortune. These businessmen, with multinational interests across numerous sectors, had made Feltrinelli one of those names—like Agnelli, Motta, and Pirelli—synonymous with the industrial development of northern Italy. Feltrinelli was born on June 19, 1926, into a cocooned life of nannies and tutors that shifted, depending on the season, between various villas and hotels—Lake Como, Lake Garda, the Baur au Lac in Zurich, and the Excelsior at the Venice Lido. The family, much like some of Italy’s other great industrial concerns, coexisted—sometimes uneasily, sometimes profitably—with Mussolini’s Fascist government, which had come to power in 1922. Feltrinelli’s father, Carlo, died in 1935 of a heart attack while in the middle of a financial dispute with the regime over assets held abroad by his mother. He was fifty-four. The parenting of Giangiacomo and his sister Antonella now fell to his mother, Giannalisa, insofar as she devoted time to it. She “would punish and then repent. She would mortify and then shower them with kisses and hugs.” Feltrinelli was enrolled by his mother in the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, the Italian Fascist youth movement. A substantial check from Giannalisa also induced Mussolini to bestow the title Marquess of Gargnano on the boy.

Feltrinelli later described himself as a teenage mass of contradictions, urging on the Fascist armies but also opposing the Germans while listening to Radio London, as some called the BBC World Service during the war. Ignored at home, he befriended the workers and farmhands who took care of his mother’s property, and they opened up a previously invisible world of hard labor and injustice. The allied bombing raids and the arrival of the Germans in Italy to prop up Mussolini added to the radicalization of a young man who was searching for a set of ideas to cling to.

Feltrinelli was a man of great enthusiasms, whether for politics or literature. He didn’t hold his loyalties and ideas lightly, but when they clashed, as they would over Doctor Zhivago, he followed his conscience, not a party line. A friend said his passion was easily aroused and he was devoted to his principles, “but he was just as prepared to abandon a cause, without standing on ceremony, if he felt it was outdated or did not serve his way of thinking.” By 1944, after the liberation of Rome, and still only eighteen, Feltrinelli was reading The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution. That November, he enlisted with the Legnano combat unit which fought with the American Fifth Army, and he saw some action near Bologna.

Feltrinelli joined the Communist Party in March 1945. His mother, a royalist, was appalled. When Italy held a referendum in June 1946 on whether to keep the monarchy or adopt a republican form of government, Giannalisa Feltrinelli handed out leaflets in support of the House of Savoy in the streets of Rome—through the window of her Rolls-Royce. Feltrinelli had already skipped town after intelligence he gathered about pro-royalty meetings in his mother’s home ended up in the pages of L’Unità, the Communist newspaper. To wit: “On the basis of information received from an excellent source we are able to provide news of an important meeting held in the home of a family of big industrial sharks, the Feltrinellis.”

Between the fall of Mussolini (who briefly commandeered the Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda, where he was surrounded by a protective guard of crack Nazi troops) and the first postwar election, the Italian Communist Party was transformed from a small underground organization of fewer than 10,000 activists to a mass movement of 1.7 million members. The party benefited, above all, from its vanguard role in the Resistance, where two-thirds of all partisan bands were inspired by communism. After the war, under the leadership of the pragmatic Palmiro Togliatti, the party advocated “progressive democracy” and appeared more anti-Fascist than anti-capitalist. The Communists seemed open to innovation in the arts, literature, and the social sciences. They were allied with or controlled some of the most progressive forces in the country, from the feminist Unione Donne Italiane to the Movement for the Rebirth of the South to the Union for Popular Sport. The party had a glamorous air. And it attracted a couple of generations of intellectuals and idealists—those who had survived the long years of fascism and young people such as Feltrinelli who were seeking a political movement to champion their desire for social change. The party was the natural home for what the writer Italo Calvino called the “little big world” of anti-Fascists, that passionate, postwar swell of believers who yearned for a new Italy. Feltrinelli was a disciplined and earnest young recruit. “I learned to control, at least in part, my impulsiveness and my impetuosity; I learned method in debate, in the work of persuasion and clarification that I had to carry out among the comrades.”

At the age of twenty-one, Feltrinelli came into his inheritance, including substantial holdings in construction, lumber, and banking, and he became a significant financial supporter of the Italian Communist Party. One activist recalled, “We had dreams.… Giangiacomo could make them come true, and it seemed miraculous to have him on our side.” The house at Lake Garda was used as a summer camp for young party members. Feltrinelli drove around in his smoky-blue Buick convertible to put up party posters. At home with his new wife—dubbed the “Muscovite Pasionaria” by her mother-in-law—he hung a portrait of Stalin among the old masters on the wall.

In the late 1940s, Feltrinelli began his formal entry into the world of books. He and Giuseppe Del Bo, a Marxist academic and writer, began to create a library devoted to a history of the working classes and social movements. The Italian police called it a “little university of Marxism,” but with Feltrinelli’s wealth and his passion for the pursuit of rare books and materials across Europe, it became a treasure house holding tens of thousands of pieces of radical literature—-a first edition of The Communist Manifesto, original working notes of both Marx and Engels, a first edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, Victor Hugo’s letters to Garibaldi, and a rare copy of Thomas More’s Utopia. The collection brought Feltrinelli to the attention of the Soviet Union. In 1953, he was invited to Moscow to discuss cooperation between the Biblioteca Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Little came of the meeting; it would be his only visit to Moscow.

Feltrinelli also ran his businesses, proving himself an able, sometimes hard-nosed, manager and capitalist. The party drew on his financial acumen as well as his cash. In 1950, Feltrinelli became involved in a publishing house tied to the Communist Party and brought some management systems and financial controls to the floundering entity. Eventually, in 1955, the house was dissolved, and it gave way to a new business, Feltrinelli Editore.

The twenty-nine-year-old was now an independent Milanese publisher, and he looked the part: hair already slightly receding, a wingspan moustache, dark horn-rimmed glasses, and an arched, feline quality to his face. He was nicknamed “the Jaguar.” Feltrinelli Editore’s first two books came off the presses in June 1955—An Autobiography: Jawaharlal Nehru and The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool. The publisher wanted books that were fresh, progressive, dissonant, and influential. He wanted intellectual excitement, discoveries.

On February 25, 1956, at a secret session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev launched an astonishing and devastating attack on Stalin entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” He said the former, hallowed Leader was guilty of the gravest abuse of power, and that during Stalin’s rule “mass arrests and deportation of thousands and thousands of people, executions without trial or normal investigations, created insecurity, fear and desperation.” Khrushchev spoke of torture, even of former members of the Politburo. He said Lenin wanted to fire Stalin as general secretary of the party. He said Stalin was confused and essentially missing in action when the Nazis invaded. The delegates in the Great Hall of the Kremlin sat in stupefied silence.

The CIA, which obtained a copy of what became known as the “Secret Speech,” leaked it to The New York Times. For all the shock among many Communists worldwide, there was also a desire for renewal, as if the movement had passed from one age into another. The sense of change was short-lived; it would die with the Soviet invasion of Hungary. But it was in this brief clearing that Feltrinelli received Doctor Zhivago. Cooperation with Soviet writers and publishers seemed particularly opportune now that reform was gusting through the Kremlin. Feltrinelli had no sense yet that his possession of the novel would infuriate the Soviet leadership.

The week after he left Pasternak’s dacha in Peredelkino in May 1956, D’Angelo flew to Berlin. He wasn’t searched as he left Moscow, probably because he was a fraternal comrade, and he also had no thought that there was anything untoward about carrying the novel out. He landed in Berlin, a city not yet divided by the wall, and went from Schönefeld Airport in the East to a hotel just off West Berlin’s showcase shopping avenue, the Kurfürstendamm. D’Angelo called Milan, and Feltrinelli decided to fly to Berlin himself to pick up the manuscript. It was passed the following day from one suitcase to another at a small hotel on Joachimstaler Strasse. Doctor Zhivago had found a publisher.

Feltrinelli didn’t read Russian, so after he returned from Berlin with the manuscript, he sent it to Pietro Zveteremich, an Italian Slavist, for review. Judgment was swift: “Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture.”

Pasternak seemed quite pleased with himself after giving the book to D’Angelo, but he also realized that those close to him might think him reckless. When he informed his stepson and daughter-in-law that Sunday in May, Pasternak asked them not to tell his wife. At a dinner with friends that week, Pasternak brought up the subject anyway. “What kind of nonsense is that?” scoffed Zinaida. The table fell silent.

Ivinskaya was in Moscow when Pasternak met with D’Angelo, and returned to Peredelkino only later that evening. Pasternak met her on the road near his dacha, and told her he had had a visit from two charming young people, an Italian Communist and an official in the Soviet embassy in Rome. D’Angelo’s companion was no diplomat, and Pasternak was dissembling to cushion the fact that he had handed over his manuscript to strangers, one of them a foreigner. Ivinskaya was furious; she realized that no post-Stalinist glow would shield a writer who defied the system by consorting with Westerners.

Ivinskaya was returning from negotiations with the state publishing house on a one-volume collection of poetry, which was being overseen by a sympathetic young editor, Nikolai Bannikov. “This may put an end to the poetry volume!” she shouted. She was also afraid for her own safety. “I’ve been in prison once, remember, and already then, in the Lubyanka, they questioned me endlessly about what the novel would say.… I’m really amazed you could do this.”

Pasternak was a little sheepish, but unapologetic. “Really, now, Olya, you’re overstating things, it’s nothing at all. Just let them read it. If they like it, let them do what they want with it—I said I didn’t mind.” To assuage his lover, Pasternak said Ivinskaya could try to get it back from the Italian if she was so upset. Or perhaps, he suggested, she could sound out any official reaction to what he had done.

Ivinskaya turned on her heels and went back to Moscow to see Bannikov. The poetry editor was familiar with the novel. The manuscript had been gathering dust at the state publishing house for several months, and Pasternak had referred to it in the introductory essay for his collections of poems: “Quite recently I have completed my main and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and for which I answer without a qualm—a novel in prose with additions in verse, Doctor Zhivago. The poems assembled in this book, which are scattered across all the years of my life, constitute preparatory stages to the novel. Indeed, I view their republication as a preparation for the novel.”

The state publisher had been notably silent about Pasternak’s manuscript—almost certainly because the senior editors viewed the novel as objectionable. Bannikov was frightened by Ivinskaya’s news. After she left, he wrote her a note, which was delivered to her apartment on Potapov Street: “How can anyone love his country so little? One may have one’s differences with it, but what he has done is treachery—how can he fail to understand what he is bringing on himself and us as well?”

Feltrinelli moved quickly to secure his rights. In mid-June, he wrote to Pasternak to thank him for the opportunity to publish Doctor Zhivago, which he described as a work of enormous literary importance. He then got down to business, discussing royalties and foreign rights. Feltrinelli had a trusted courier hand-deliver the letter and two copies of an enclosed contract. If Pasternak had any real desire to get the novel back, this was the moment. But he had no second thoughts. A couple of weeks after meeting D’Angelo, Pasternak was visited by the Italian scholar Ettore Lo Gatto and told him he was willing to face “any kind of trouble” as long as the novel was published. After consulting with his sons, Pasternak decided to sign the contract with Feltrinelli. In a letter to the publisher at the end of June, Pasternak told him that, while he wasn’t completely uninterested in money, he realized that geography and politics could make it impossible to receive his royalties. The writer made Feltrinelli aware of the risks to Pasternak of first publication in the West but did not bar him from bringing the novel out: “If its publication here, promised by several of our magazines, were to be delayed and your version were to come before it, I would find myself in a tragically difficult situation. But this is not your concern. In the name of God, feel free to go with the translation and the printing of the book, and good luck! Ideas are not born to be hidden or smothered at birth, but to be communicated to others.”

The Kremlin leadership quickly learned about Pasternak’s contact with Feltrinelli. On August 24, 1956, KGB general Ivan Serov, the head of the secret police and a longtime enforcer of the Kremlin’s will, including in Eastern Europe, wrote to the Politburo, the country’s small ruling group. The Politburo, led by the general secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, oversaw the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its various departments, including culture. In a long memo, Serov informed the Communist leadership of the manuscript’s delivery to Feltrinelli and how Pasternak had requested the rights be assigned to publishers in England and France. After noting that permission to publish Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union had not been granted, Serov quoted from a note Pasternak had recently mailed with an essay to a French journalist, Daniil Reznikov, in Paris. The parcel was intercepted by the KGB: “I realize perfectly well that [the novel] cannot be published now, and that this is how it is going to be for some time, perhaps forever,” Pasternak wrote. Noting the likelihood of foreign publication, Pasternak continued: “Now they will tear me limb from limb: I have this foreboding, and you shall be a distant and sorrowful witness to this event.” Pasternak, however, seemed willing to countenance even more danger: He included a biographical essay that he had written for the state literary publishing house, which was planning to bring out a collection of his poems. Pasternak told Reznikov, who had visited him earlier in the year, to do as he wished with the essay.

Serov noted that Pasternak was a Jew and did not have a party card, and said his work was typified by “estrangement from Soviet life.”

A week later, the Central Committee’s culture department prepared a detailed report on Doctor Zhivago for the leadership with a series of tendentious but damning quotations from the novel. The book was described as a hostile attack on the October Revolution and a malicious libel of the Bolshevik revolutionaries by an author who was labeled a “bourgeois individualist.” Publication of this novel is impossible, the report concluded. In an accompanying note, the deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union said officials would use their contacts with the Italian Communist Party to prevent publication abroad. Feltrinelli, after all, was a Communist.

It is unclear exactly how the KGB learned the details of Pasternak’s communications with Feltrinelli, including his wish to assign the rights to English and French publishers. That fact must have come directly from an account of Pasternak’s meeting with D’Angelo. Both the Italian scout and his companion, Vladimirsky, talked openly at their workplace in Radio Moscow about getting the manuscript and delivering it to Feltrinelli.

Ivinskaya’s contacts with various editors about Pasternak’s involvement with an Italian publisher and how to salvage the situation also raised an alarm within the system. A senior editor at the state literary publishing house told her that she would show the novel to Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Politburo member, and seek his advice on how to proceed. The editor of Znamya, the magazine that had published some of Pasternak’s Zhivago poems, said he would inform an official at the Central Committee.

For the next two years, Ivinskaya became the authorities’ favored conduit to the writer. It was a difficult and controversial role. The author’s well-being, Ivinskaya’s fears for her own safety, and the state’s interests were tangled up in her sometimes-frantic mediation efforts. “She relieves me from the vexing negotiations with the authorities, she takes the blows of such conflicts on herself,” Pasternak told his sister. She was his chosen emissary, but her contacts with the bureaucrats were watched with suspicion by some of Pasternak’s circle. She was in a hopeless position. Ivinskaya was not the informer some would label her many decades later. In a contemporaneous judgment in a top-secret memo, the chairman of the KGB labeled her “very anti-Soviet.” She tried to please the officials she dealt with, and they tried to make her their semi-witting instrument but, in the end, her influence on Pasternak was limited. Pasternak was a self-aware and intuitive actor in the unfolding drama, and the key decisions in the matter, from the day he handed the manuscript to D’Angelo, remained his.

Ivinskaya was soon summoned to meet Dmitri Polikarpov, the head of the Central Committee’s culture department. The haggard, bleary-eyed Polikarpov said it was imperative that Ivinskaya get the novel back from D’Angelo. Ivinskaya suggested that the Italians might not be willing to return the manuscript and the ideal solution would be to publish Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union as quickly as possible, preempting any foreign edition.

“No,” said Polikarpov, “we must get the manuscript back, because it will be very awkward if we cut out some chapters and they print them.”

Polikarpov was known in the literary community as dyadya Mitya—“Uncle Mitya”—an unapologetic enforcer of orthodoxy who confronted writers about their errors. Polikarpov once told the deputy editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta: “Your newspaper I read with a pencil in my hand.” The poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko said that “for him the Party came before everything, before people, including himself.”

Polikarpov, in front of Ivinskaya, phoned the director of the state literary publishing house, Anatoli Kotov, to tell him to draw up a contract with Pasternak and appoint an editor. “The editor should think about passages to change or cut out, and what can be left unchanged.” Pasternak was unimpressed with Ivinskaya’s efforts: “I am by no means intent on the novel being published at the moment when it cannot be brought out in its original form.” He nonetheless agreed to meet Kotov, who assured him Doctor Zhivago was a magnificent work but said that “we will have to shorten a few things, and perhaps add some.” Pasternak thought Kotov’s proposal was absurd.

The writer Varlam Shalamov wrote to Pasternak to tell him that “without any doubt, this great [publication] battle will be won by you.” He told Pasternak that he was “the conscience of our age like Lev Tolstoy was of his” and that “our time will only be justified because you lived in it.”

Pasternak continued that summer to hand over copies of the manuscript to various foreign visitors to Peredelkino, including the French scholar Hélène Peltier, who would work on the French translation of Doctor Zhivago. The daughter of a French diplomat, she had studied Russian literature at Moscow University in 1947—a remarkable opportunity just as the Cold War was intensifying and the regime was intent on preventing any spontaneous contact between foreigners and ordinary Russians. She returned to Moscow in 1956 and got to know Pasternak, who gave her a copy of his manuscript to read. During a visit to Peredelkino that September or another trip to the village at the end of the year, Pasternak entrusted Peltier with a note for Feltrinelli. It was undated and typed on a narrow strip of paper torn from some copybook: “If ever you receive a letter in any language other than French, you absolutely must not do what is requested of you—the only valid letters shall be those written in French.” This would prove to be a prescient and critical security measure that would allow Feltrinelli to distinguish between coerced messages and freely written ones from a writer who would soon feel the intense displeasure of the state.

Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford don who first met Pasternak in late 1945, also returned to Russia that summer of 1956, another in a long line of scholars enjoying the liberal, post-Stalin visa regime. Berlin traveled out to Peredelkino with Neigauz, the first husband of Pasternak’s wife. Neigauz told the Briton of his concern for Pasternak’s safety because the writer was so fixed on getting his novel published. Neigauz said if Berlin got a chance he should urge Pasternak to halt or at least delay foreign publication. Neigauz said that “it was important—more than important—perhaps a matter of life and death.” Berlin agreed that “Pasternak probably did need to be physically protected from himself.” Berlin was especially cautious because he feared that his meeting with Akhmatova in 1946 was a major factor in her persecution.

Pasternak took Berlin to his study and pressed a thick envelope into his hands. “My book, it is all there. It is my last word. Please read it.” Berlin plunged into the novel as soon as he returned to Moscow, and finished it the next day. “Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the West, I thought it was a work of genius. It seemed—and seems—to me to convey an entire range of human experience, and to create a world, even if it contains only one genuine inhabitant, in language of unexampled imaginative power.” Berlin saw Pasternak a few days later, and the writer told him he had assigned world rights to Feltrinelli. Pasternak “wished his work to travel over the entire world,” and he quoted Pushkin to hope that it would “lay waste with fire the hearts of men.”

When she got a chance, Zinaida pulled Berlin aside and, weeping, she begged him to ask Pasternak not to have the novel published abroad without official permission. She told Berlin she did not want her children to suffer. Zinaida believed that their son Leonid was deliberately failed on the exam for entry to the Higher Technical Institute simply because he was Pasternak’s son. In May 1950, during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign, Pasternak’s eldest son, Yevgeni, was prevented from finishing his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Military Academy and sent to Ukraine and then near the border with Mongolia for his compulsory military service. Berlin asked Pasternak to consider the consequences of defying the authorities. He assured Pasternak that his novel would endure and that he would have microfilms of it made and buried in all four corners of the globe so that Doctor Zhivago would survive even nuclear war. Pasternak was incensed and, with a dash of sarcasm, thanked Berlin for his concern. He said he had spoken to his sons and “they were prepared to suffer.” He told Berlin not to mention the matter again. Surely, Pasternak said, Berlin realized that the dissemination of Doctor Zhivago was paramount. Berlin said he was shamed into silence. He later concluded that Pasternak “chose open-eyed” to pursue publication “fully realizing the danger to himself and his family.” When he returned to Britain, Berlin brought back a manuscript for Pasternak’s sisters in Oxford. And he included the first letter Pasternak had sent his English relatives since 1948. He told them about the novel with his usual preamble of caveats: “You may not even like it, finding its philosophy tedious and alien, some passages boring and long-drawn-out, the first book diffuse, and the transitional passages grey, pallid and ineffectual. And yet—it’s an important work, a book of enormous, universal importance, whose destiny cannot be subordinated to my own destiny, or to any question of my well-being.” He told them that he had asked Berlin to make up to twelve copies of the manuscript and circulate them among the leading Russians in Britain. And he asked his sisters to ensure that the book found a very good translator—“an Englishman who is a gifted writer with a perfect command of Russian.”

Pasternak was visited in mid-September by another Oxford professor, George Katkov, a Moscow-born émigré, philosopher, and historian. An “original,” according to a friend, he was a “tall, mustachioed, hugely impressive ancient regime Russian intelligent.” The KGB referred to him contemptuously as a “White émigré.” Katkov was a friend of the Pasternak sisters and a colleague of Berlin’s. He was much more enthusiastic about publication. Pasternak also gave a manuscript to Katkov and asked him as well to ensure its translation and publication in England. Katkov said that the Zhivago cycle of poems would present a special challenge for a translator. He suggested the novelist Vladimir Nabokov to handle the verse. “That won’t work; he’s too jealous of my position in this country to do it properly,” said Pasternak. As early as 1927, Nabokov had expressed his deep irritation with Pasternak’s style. “His verse is convex, goitrous and goggle-eyed, as though his muse suffered from Basedow’s disease. He is crazy about clumsy imagery, sonorous but literal rhymes, and clattering metre.” When he finally read Doctor Zhivago, Nabokov was no less derisive, not least because Pasternak’s novel would knock Lolita off the top of the best-seller list—“Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences.” Nabokov said Pasternak’s mistress must have written it.

Katkov promised Pasternak with a kiss that Doctor Zhivago would be well-translated into English. He eventually settled on his protégé Max Hayward, a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a gifted linguist who famously taught himself Hungarian in six weeks. Russians who met Hayward insisted that he must be a native speaker, or at least the son of émigrés. He was neither. Hayward was a Londoner, the son of a mechanic, who sometimes called himself a Cockney. In the interests of speed, Hayward was joined in the translation effort by Manya Harari, the cofounder of the small publishing house the Harvill Press, a division of Collins in London. An émigré, from a wealthy Saint Petersburg family, Harari had moved to England with her family during World War I. The pair alternated chapters and then checked each other’s work. Katkov supervised both of them, “going over everything for accuracy and nuance.”

Katkov and Berlin would clash bitterly over the novel in 1958. Berlin continued to be concerned about Pasternak’s safety and was skeptical of any push for swift publication. “That’s all nonsense,” Berlin said. “It’s an interesting novel, but whether it’s published now, or fifteen years from now, doesn’t matter.” Katkov took a very different view. He advocated for the widest possible dissemination and later argued that, since Pasternak “obviously wished to be a martyr,” he “had to be sacrificed to the ‘cause.’ ” The cause was the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.

First, however, Feltrinelli had to help Doctor Zhivago make its way around the world, and to do so, he had to face down his comrades—Russian and Italian.