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

Chapter 7

“If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well, I must say we have a different view of it.”

In mid-September, the editorial board of Novy Mir formally rejected Doctor Zhivago in a long, detailed review. The critique was written mostly by Konstantin Simonov, the celebrated wartime poet. Four other board members, including Pasternak’s next-door neighbor, Konstantin Fedin, offered editorial suggestions and additions. All five men signed the document.

The letter, along with the manuscript, was hand-delivered to Pasternak, who barely acknowledged its contents: “The thing that has disturbed us about your novel is something that neither the editors nor the author can change by cuts or alterations. We are referring to the spirit of the novel, its general tenor, the author’s view on life.… The spirit of your novel is one of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution. The general tenor of your novel is that the October Revolution, the Civil War and the social transformation involved did not give the people anything but suffering, and destroyed the Russian intelligentsia, either physically or morally.” The writers continued with a scene-by-scene dissection of the novel’s ideological failings, the “viciousness” of its hero’s conclusions about the revolution, and Yuri Zhivago’s “hypertrophied individualism”—code for Pasternak’s fundamental personal flaw.

After a backhanded compliment, they attacked the novel’s artistry: “There are quite a few first-rate pages, especially where you describe Russian natural scenery with remarkable truth and poetic power. There are many clearly inferior pages, lifeless and didactically dry. They are especially rife in the second half of the novel.” Fedin, in particular, smarted from Zhivago’s judgment of his contemporaries, seeing Pasternak’s sentiments in Zhivago’s words, and all the arrogance of the supremely talented: “Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.”

One of Pasternak’s biographers noted that the authors of the letter either missed or did not articulate the novel’s “most heretical insinuation: by artistically conflating the Stalinist period with early revolutionary history, Pasternak implied (many years before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago) that the tyranny of the last twenty-five years was a direct outcome of Bolshevism.” 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.

Fedin’s signature was particularly difficult for Pasternak to accept, as he regarded his neighbor as a friend. Only two weeks earlier, Fedin, pacing the room and waving his arms in enthusiasm, had told Chukovsky that the novel was “brilliant, extremely egocentric, satanically arrogant, elegantly simple yet literary through and through.” He may have spoken before he had read the entire novel and was bruised by the implication of Zhivago’s words. Or duty may have led him to bury his actual assessment of the work.

Pasternak held no open grudge, and may even have understood the hopelessness of his colleagues’ position. He invited Fedin to Sunday lunch a week after getting the letter and told some other guests, “I have also asked Konstantin Aleksandrovich—as wholeheartedly and unreservedly as in previous years—so don’t be surprised.” He asked Fedin not to mention the rejection and when he arrived the two men embraced. At dinner, Pasternak was in good spirits.

Pasternak didn’t bring himself to read the long letter carefully until a week later. He told a neighbor that the critique was “composed very courteously and gently, painstakingly thought out from a viewpoint that has become traditional and seemingly irrefutable.” He said, with perhaps a touch of irony, that he was “pained and regretful at having caused my comrades such work.”

There was now little reason to believe that even an unexpurgated Doctor Zhivago would be published in the Soviet Union; Simonov and the others had pronounced it irredeemably flawed. Still, Pasternak told Katkov that Western publication might yet prompt a Soviet edition, and said he might countenance some changes to make the novel palatable for the Soviet audience. This was his own private logic. The Soviet authorities did not want the book published—anywhere.

In August, a group of senior Italian Communists, including the party’s vice secretary, Pietro Secchia, were guests at the exclusive Barvikha sanatorium just west of Moscow. D’Angelo and his wife visited two old friends there—Ambrogio Donini, a university professor, and Paolo Robotti, an old-school Communist activist.

International Communists in the Soviet Union were also targeted during the purges. Robotti’s faith in the cause had survived his arrest and torture by Stalin’s secret police when he was living in exile in Moscow before the war; when D’Angelo mentioned that he had handed the manuscript of a Russian novel to Feltrinelli, Robotti was visibly upset. He said the transfer was probably illegal under Soviet law. Secchia and Robotti were subsequently visited by an official from the Central Committee’s section on relations with foreign Communist parties. They were told of the Kremlin’s concerns about an Italian edition. Secchia and Robotti assured the official they would get the novel back from Feltrinelli. On October 24, the Central Committee was informed through the Soviet embassy in Rome that Robotti had reported, “The issue with Pasternak’s manuscript has been settled and it will be returned to you in the nearest future.” Robotti was mistaken. The pressure divided editors at the publishing house. Zveteremich was asked to return the manuscript, and the translation was interrupted for several months, while Feltrinelli, undecided about how to proceed, considered his options. He had not, however, abandoned publication.

The diplomatic note from Rome came just a day after several hundred thousand people flowed onto the streets of Budapest to demand reform, and the Hungarian Revolution began. The popular revolt was eventually crushed by a large Soviet invasion force and some twenty thousand Hungarians lost their lives in often brutal street fighting—as the West, impotent and paralyzed, watched helplessly. The Kremlin and the conservative bureaucracy seized on the events in Budapest to reverse the “thaw” in Moscow. The liberal Literaturnaya Moskva (Literary Moscow), which had only recently published Pasternak’s “Notes on Translations of Shakespeare’s Dramas,” was closed; editors were fired across the major literary journals; and young, daring poets such as Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeni Yevtushenko came under attack. Khrushchev would eventually argue that “bourgeois” tendencies among Hungarian intellectuals had sparked insurrection.

The bloody suppression of the Hungarian revolution was also deeply traumatic for many Italian Communists. Most of the leadership of the party supported the Soviet invasion, but a quarter of a million rank-and-file members abandoned the movement, including significant numbers of artists, academics, and journalists. Even before the worst of the bloodshed in Budapest, Feltrinelli, along with a number of his colleagues at the Feltrinelli library and institute in Milan, signed a letter to the party leadership asserting that in the “fundamental nature of the Hungarian movement” there is “a strong plea for socialist democracy.” Feltrinelli watched with dismay the exodus of intellectuals from the party and bristled at the leadership’s attempt to argue that “the loss of small fringe groups of intellectuals is not an important phenomenon.”

“These comrades,” Feltrinelli replied, “have not only brought luster to the party, the working class and the socialist movement but they have enabled us, since the fall of Fascism, to undertake a wealth of politico-cultural projects.” Feltrinelli did not immediately turn in his party card, but his willingness to act as a financier began to fade. His desire to proceed with Pasternak’s book was only strengthened.

By January 1957, officials in the Central Committee’s departments on culture and relations with foreign Communist parties were wringing their hands. Despite the promise of the Italian comrades back in October, there was still no sign of the manuscript. Instead of hoping that Feltrinelli would bow to instructions from his party leadership, it was decided to use Pasternak himself to get the novel back. First, though, such a tactic had to be credible. On January 7, 1957, Pasternak signed a contract with Goslitizdat, the state literary publishing house. “I shall make this into something that will reflect the glory on the Russian people,” said his editor, Anatoli Starostin. He was a genuine admirer of Pasternak, but Starostin was no more than a pawn, and the contract a ruse. The document would simply give greater legal weight to the effort to compel Feltrinelli to return the novel.

The following month, Feltrinelli received a telegram from Pasternak. It was in Italian: “Per request from goslitizdat … please hold Italian publication of Doctor Zhivago for half year until September 1957 and the coming out of Soviet edition of novel send reply telegram to Goslitizdat—Pasternak.” But before he sent the telegram, Pasternak wrote a letter—in French—to his publisher in Milan. He explained that he sent the telegram under pressure and that the state was planning a modified version of Doctor Zhivago. He suggested that Feltrinelli agree to a six-month delay of the Italian edition. And then he pleaded with his publisher: “But the sorrow that, naturally, is caused me by the imminent alteration of my text would be far greater if I thought that you intended to base the Italian translation on it, despite my enduring desire that your edition be strictly faithful to the authentic manuscript.”

Feltrinelli, at this point, had no reason to doubt a Soviet edition was coming in September. He wrote to Pasternak to say he would agree to the delay and he urged Zveteremich, his translator, to hurry up so an Italian edition could go on sale immediately afterward. Under international publishing law, Feltrinelli needed to publish within thirty days after the appearance of the Soviet edition to establish his rights in the West.

In April, in a letter to one of his Soviet editors, Pasternak asked for an advance against an upcoming volume of his poetry, his translation of Faust, or even Doctor Zhivago—although he admitted he was unlikely to get any money for the novel, since everything surrounding it was pure “phantasmagoria.”

Feltrinelli met D’Angelo in Milan in May. Feltrinelli told him that Zveteremich was almost finished, and the poet Mario Socrate was polishing the last of the verse at the end of Doctor Zhivago. It seemed to D’Angelo that Feltrinelli was both satisfied and relieved. “He assures me that while he is still a man of the left, he will always fight for freedom and as a publisher, he will fight for freedom of thought and culture.”

In June, Feltrinelli wrote to Goslitizdat. He agreed not to publish Doctor Zhivago until September. He also offered his “dear comrades” his opinion of Pasternak’s novel, an assessment that while it invoked Soviet aesthetics no doubt caused some heartburn in Moscow. “His is a perfect portrayal of the nature, soul and history of Russia: characters, objects and events are rendered clearly and concretely in the finest spirit of realism, a realism that ceases to be merely fashion, and becomes art.” Feltrinelli noted that the book might give rise to some controversy, but that after the Twentieth Congress, and the exposure of Stalin’s crimes, “the revealing of certain facts no longer surprises or perturbs.

“Besides, Western readers will for the first time hear the voice of a great artist, a great poet who has made, in an artistic form, a detailed analysis of the October Revolution, the harbinger of a new epoch in which socialism became the only natural form of social life. For the Western public, the fact that this is a voice of a man alien to all political activity is a guarantee of the sincerity of his discourse, thus making him worthy of trust. Our readers cannot fail to appreciate this magnificent panorama of events from the history of the Russian people which transcends all ideological dogmatism, nor will they overlook its importance, or the positive outlook deriving from it. The conviction will thus grow that the path taken by your people has been for them a progressive one, that the history of capitalism is coming to an end, and that a new era has begun.”

Feltrinelli concluded by saying whatever suspicions might exist in Moscow, it was never his intention “to lend this publication a sensational character.”

Pasternak thanked Feltrinelli for agreeing to the delay but let him know that September publication in Moscow was a lie: “Here in Russia, the novel will never appear,” he wrote in a letter to Feltrinelli at the end of June. “The troubles and misfortunes that will perhaps befall me in the event of foreign publication, that is to say without an analogous publication in the Soviet Union, are matters that must not concern us, either me or you. The important thing is that the work sees the light of day. Do not withhold your help from me.”

Pasternak also wrote to Andrei Sinyavsky, another writer who was part of his trusted circle, that although others believed the “thaw” under Khrushchev would lead to more books being published, he “seldom, periodically and only faintly shared that belief.” The publication of Doctor Zhivago, he added, was “out of the question.”

The atmosphere in Moscow was becoming more hostile for writers and other artists. In May 1957, the party leadership, including Khrushchev, met with the board of the Union of Soviet Writers. Khrushchev spoke for nearly two hours. He described Vladimir Dudintsev’s recently published novel, Not by Bread Alone, as “false at its base.” The novel, which castigated the bureaucracy, had been read by its admirers as an audacious break with the past. The journal Literaturnaya Moskva was full of “ideologically fallacious” work, Khrushchev said. And the general secretary said that some writers seemed to have adopted an “indiscriminate rejection of the positive role of J. V. Stalin in the life of our party and country.”

In June, the state literary publishing house announced that the publication of the volume of Pasternak’s collected poems had been cancelled. That summer, the new Polish journal Opinie (Opinions) printed a thirty-five-page excerpt from Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak had given the manuscript to a Polish friend and translator shortly after D’Angelo had visited him in Peredelkino. The July/September issue of Opinie, which was devoted to Polish-Soviet friendship, introduced the excerpt with a note that said the novel was “a broad intricate story about the fate of the Russian intelligentsia and their ideological transformation which was frequently accompanied by tragic conflicts.”

A note on the magazine that was prepared for the Central Committee in Moscow said the “choice of stories in the first issue shows that this magazine has a hostile attitude towards us.” The Central Committee’s culture department said it was “necessary to authorize the Soviet ambassador to draw the attention of Polish comrades to the unfriendly character of the magazine.” The Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta was also instructed to attack the Polish magazine, but not in a manner that would “arouse an unhealthy interest abroad in Pasternak’s evil plot.” The Polish translators were summoned to Moscow and reprimanded. Opinie never appeared again. The authorities were also infuriated by the printing of some of Pasternak’s more spiritual Zhivago poems in the émigré magazine Grani (Borders), an organ of the militant National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), which was published in West Germany. Pasternak had not sanctioned this publication, and his name was not attached to the poems, but it was clear that they were his work.

Officials complained in memos that Pasternak had agreed to revise Doctor Zhivago based on the Novy Mir critique of the novel, but, one of the bureaucrats wrote, he “has done nothing in terms of editing his novel or making proper changes.” For much of the spring and early summer of 1957, Pasternak was hospitalized and in great pain with an inflamed meniscus in his right knee. (Zinaida visited him every day but was upset on one occasion when asked who she was. When she produced her identification, a hospital employee said there was a blonde in an hour before who had said she was the wife.)

The Central Committee official suggested another effort should be made to obtain the manuscript through the Italian Communists, since a delegation was in town for a World Youth Festival. The Italians were berated. Khrushchev himself complained to Velio Spano, the head of the Italian Communist Party’s foreign affairs section, that D’Angelo, supposedly a friend and guest, had created all this turmoil over Pasternak’s novel. Khrushchev had apparently been shown “a selection of the most unacceptable parts of the novel.”

Pasternak was also sending messages to Italy. In July, he wrote to Pietro Zveteremich, the Italian translator, to tell him that he wanted all the Western publishers to proceed regardless of “the consequences it could have on me.

“I wrote the novel to be published and read, and that remains my only wish.”

By August, Pasternak was under close watch. Letters to his sister Lydia in England were intercepted by the KGB and never reached her. That month, Pasternak was summoned to a meeting with the writers’ union leadership. Pasternak gave Ivinskaya a note to represent him at the meeting. She was accompanied by Starostin, the editor handling the purported Soviet edition of Doctor Zhivago. The meeting was chaired by Surkov, who had risen to become first secretary of the writers’ union. Surkov first met privately with Ivinskaya and asked her politely how the novel had ended up abroad. Ivinskaya said that Pasternak genuinely thought “with the spontaneity of a child” and he believed that in the case of art, borders were irrelevant.

“Yes, yes,” said Surkov. “It was quite in character. But it was so untimely. You should have prevented him—he does, after all, have a good angel like you.”

When the open session began, Surkov’s placid demeanor vanished as he became more and more worked up about Pasternak’s “treachery.” He accused Pasternak of being driven by greed, and said he was negotiating to get money from abroad. Ivinskaya tried to speak but was rudely told not to interrupt. The novelist and member of the board Valentin Katayev shouted at her: “There really is no point in your being here. Who do you think you’re representing? A poet or a traitor? Or doesn’t it bother you that he’s a traitor to his country?” When Starostin was introduced as the editor of the novel, Katayev continued, “Just fancy that—the editor, if you please. How can something like this be edited!”

Starostin was dejected and under no illusion about what the tongue-lashing augured for the novel. “We all left beaten, knowing that the road to publication of Doctor Zhivago was closed.”

Pasternak later described the event as a “ ’37 type of meeting, with infuriated yelling about this being an unprecedented occurrence, and demands for retribution.” The following day, Ivinskaya arranged for Pasternak to meet Polikarpov from the Central Committee. In advance of the meeting, Pasternak had Ivinskaya give him a letter. It seemed scripted to infuriate the bureaucrat: “People who are morally scrupulous are never happy with themselves; there are a lot of things they regret, a lot of things of which they repent. The only thing in my life for which I have no cause for repentance is the novel. I wrote what I think and to this day my thoughts remain the same. It may be a mistake not to have concealed it from others. I assure you I would have hidden it away had it been feebly written. But it proved to have more strength to it than I had dreamed possible—strength comes from on high, and thus its further fate was out of my hands.”

Polikarpov was so incensed he demanded that Ivinskaya tear up the note in front of him. He insisted on seeing Pasternak. Both Polikarpov and Surkov met with Pasternak in the following days. The conversations were strained but civil, and both men told Pasternak that he had to send a telegram to Feltrinelli demanding the return of the book. Pasternak was warned that failure to act could lead to “very unpleasant consequences.” The two men drew up a telegram for Feltrinelli and Pasternak was expected to send it: “I have started rewriting the manuscript of my novel Doctor Zhivago, and I am now convinced that the extant version can in no way be considered a finished work. The copy of the manuscript in your possession is a preliminary draft requiring thorough revision. In my view it is not possible to publish the book in its current form. This would go against my rule, which is that only the definitive draft of my work may be published. Please be so kind as to return, to my Moscow address, the manuscript of my novel Doctor Zhivago, which is indispensable for my work.”

Pasternak refused to send it. Ivinskaya asked D’Angelo to speak to Pasternak and persuade him otherwise. The Italian was unable to get a word out before an angry Pasternak spoke. “If you’re here to advise me to capitulate you should know that your charitable mission shows a lack of respect for me personally. You’re treating me like a man who has no dignity. The publication of Doctor Zhivago has become the most important thing in my life, and I don’t intend to do anything to prevent it. What would Feltrinelli think if he received a telegram that contradicted everything I have written and rewritten to him up to now? Would he take me for a crazy man, or a coward?”

D’Angelo recounted for Pasternak his conversation with Feltrinelli in Milan. Publication was inevitable. Moreover, numerous other Western publishers already had the manuscript and would go ahead on their own even if Feltrinelli were to follow the instructions in an obviously extorted telegram. D’Angelo told Pasternak there was no reason to resist this useless gesture, and it could save Pasternak and his loved ones. The Italian declared that the Soviet state had lost its ridiculous war against Doctor Zhivago.

The telegram—in Russian—was sent on August 21, 1957. Immediately, Polikarpov informed the Central Committee and suggested that they arm the Italian Communist Party with a copy so they could use it to add to the pressure on Feltrinelli. Mario Alicata, a literary critic and a senior figure in the party, was assigned to meet with Feltrinelli at the Milan office of the Communist Party. He angrily waved Pasternak’s telegram in Feltrinelli’s face, but the publisher would not relent.

Pasternak, meanwhile, was attempting to get messages to Feltrinelli and others lest the telegram be taken seriously. He told the Harvard scholar Miriam Berlin and her husband, who came to visit him in Peredelkino, that he certainly wanted the novel published outside the Soviet Union. Berlin had been asked by Pasternak’s sister Josephine to confirm his intentions. Pasternak told Berlin that he had been forced to write the telegram and it should be ignored. “It does not matter what might happen to me. My life is finished. The book is my last word to the civilized world.” When the Italian scholar Vittorio Strada came to see him, he whispered to him as he left, “Vittorio, tell Feltrinelli that I want my book to come out at all costs.”

Despite all the intrigue and intimidation, Pasternak appeared remarkably unruffled to his visitors. Yevgeni Yevtushenko saw Pasternak that September when he brought yet another Italian professor, Angelo Rippelino, to visit him. “I’m very fond of Italians,” said Pasternak. He invited them in for dinner. Yevtushenko remarked: “To look at him, Pasternak might have been forty-seven or forty-eight. His whole appearance had an amazing, sparkling freshness like a newly cut bunch of lilacs with the morning dew still on their leaves. It seemed as if there was a play of light all over him, from the flashing gestures of hands to the surprisingly childlike smile which constantly lit up his mobile face.” Pasternak and Yevtushenko drank and talked late into the night long after Rippelino had left. Zinaida admonished the twenty-three-year-old Yevtushenko. “You’re killing my husband,” she said.

Yevtushenko read Doctor Zhivago a short time later and was “disappointed.” He said the young writers of the post-Stalin period were attracted by the masculine prose of Hemingway, and the work of writers such as J. D. Salinger and Erich Maria Remarque. Doctor Zhivago, in comparison, seemed old-fashioned, even a little boring, the work of an earlier generation. He didn’t finish reading it.

The September deadline for a Soviet edition passed, and officials in Moscow were becoming desperate. Soviet trade representatives in Paris and London attempted without success to get the publishers Gallimard and Harvill Press to return the manuscript. The Soviet embassy in London also insisted that, if publication was inevitable, Harvill Press ought to include an introduction stating that Pasternak himself had not wished his book to be published. The Foreign Office, which discouraged Harvill Press from sending a copy of the English translation to Pasternak for his corrections, suggested that instead of a note about Pasternak’s purported objections, the publishers simply say, “Banned in the Soviet Union.” “That might only be of advantage from the propaganda point of view but would perhaps serve as a slight protection to Pasternak himself,” wrote Philip de Zulueta, the Foreign Office representative at No. 10 Downing Street. The remark may have been somewhat facetious, as it’s unclear how noting that the book was banned would help Pasternak, although it would certainly boost sales.

Pietro Zveteremich was in Moscow in October and found that “the atmosphere created around the book” was “very ugly.” Almost as soon as he arrived in the city, as part of an Italian delegation hosted by the Union of Soviet Writers, Zveteremich was told that publication of Doctor Zhivago would be an affront to both Pasternak and the Soviet Union. Zveteremich was handed a typewritten letter purportedly signed by Pasternak; it repeated some of what was in the February telegram and complained that Feltrinelli never replied. In a meeting with officials from the writers’ union, Zveteremich said publication of Doctor Zhivago could not be stopped. “A brawl, I can truly say, broke out,” he recalled. Pasternak felt it unsafe to meet with the translator, but Zveteremich was able to see Ivinskaya, who gave him a note from Pasternak for Feltrinelli, and it reflected the author’s true sentiments. In a letter to Feltrinelli, Zveteremich wrote that “P. asks you not to pay any heed to this and cannot wait for the book to come out even though they have threatened to reduce him to starvation.” Zveteremich’s experience in Moscow led him to leave the Communist Party. “I became convinced that there was no socialism in the USSR, but rather just Asian theocratic despotism,” he later wrote. In his short note to Feltrinelli, Pasternak wrote, “Forgive me for the injustices that have befallen you and for those perhaps yet to come caused by my wretched faith. May our distant future, the faith that helps me live, protect you.”

Feltrinelli replied to Pasternak’s telegram on October 10. The letter, although addressed to Pasternak, was clearly written for Soviet officialdom and was designed to protect Pasternak by shifting blame away from the author and onto the publisher. Feltrinelli began by saying that he saw none of the shortcomings described in the telegram: that the work was unfinished and needed thorough revision. Feltrinelli reminded his readers that he had agreed to delay publication until September and there was nothing now standing in the way of publication.

And he pretended to lecture his obstreperous author. “In order to avoid any further tension in Western literary circles, created as a result of your wholly regrettable telegram … we advise you to make no further attempts to hold up publication of the book, something that, far from preventing it, would lend the entire affair a tone of political scandal that we have never sought nor wish to create.”

Surkov traveled to Italy in October as part of a Soviet delegation of poets, but his real mission was to confront Feltrinelli. With a translator in tow, he stormed into the publisher’s offices on Via Andegari. His bellowing in Russian could be heard down on the street. Surkov, much like Alicata, waved Pasternak’s telegram in the publisher’s face. “I know how such letters are written,” said Feltrinelli, a photo of Pasternak hanging on the wall over his shoulder. Surkov pressed his case for three hours, but left with nothing. Feltrinelli said he was a “free publisher in a free country,” and he told Surkov that by publishing the novel he was paying tribute to a great narrative work of Soviet literature. The work was a testament to the truth, he said, even if the cultural bureaucrats in Moscow didn’t get it. After the meeting, Feltrinelli said seeing Surkov was like encountering “a hyena dipped in syrup.”

Surkov was not ready to quit, and he introduced the most menacing note to date in the affair. He gave an interview to L’Unità, the Communist party newspaper for which Feltrinelli had acted as a stringer eleven years earlier. In the first public comments by a Soviet official on Doctor Zhivago, he said he offered the facts, “in all sincerity”: Pasternak’s novel was rejected by his comrades because it cast doubt on the validity of the October Revolution. Pasternak accepted these criticisms and asked for the manuscript to be returned by his Italian publisher so he could revise it. But despite all this, the novel, according to press reports, will appear in Italy against the will of its author.

“The Cold War is beginning to involve literature,” intoned Surkov. “If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well, I must say we have a different view of it.” The reporter noted that he spoke “to make clear how terrible he felt all of this was.” Surkov continued: “Thus it is for the second time, for the second time in our literary history, after Mahogany by Boris Pilnyak, a book by a Russian will be first published abroad.”

The invocation of Pilnyak, Pasternak’s executed neighbor, was a direct threat. Surkov was comfortable with the exigencies of state violence. The previous year he told a Yugoslav newspaper, “I have seen my friends, writers, disappear before my eyes but at the time I believed it necessary, demanded by the Revolution.” Feltrinelli told Kurt Wolff, Pasternak’s American publisher, that Surkov’s words should be quoted as widely as possible and “Time and Newsweek should get on the move.”

At the end of October, Pasternak was compelled to send one more message to Feltrinelli. He told him he was “stunned” at Feltrinelli’s failure to reply to his telegram, and said that “decency demands that you respect the wishes of an author.”

With publication imminent, Pasternak followed up the final October 25 telegram with a private note to Feltrinelli. It was dated November 2:

Dear Sir,

I can find no words with which to express my gratitude. The future will reward us, you and me, for the vile humiliations, we have suffered. Oh, how happy I am that neither you, nor Gallimard, nor Collins have been fooled by those idiotic and brutal appeals accompanied by my signature (!), a signature all but false and counterfeit, insofar as it was extorted from me by a blend of fraud and violence. The unheard-of arrogance to wax indignant over the “violence” employed by you against my “literary freedom,” when exactly the same violence was being used against me, covertly. And that this vandalism should be disguised as concern for me, for the sacred rights of the artist! But we shall soon have an Italian Zhivago, French, English and German Zhivagos—and one day perhaps a geographically distant but Russian Zhivago! And this is a great deal, a very great deal, so let’s do our best and what will be will be.

The first edition of Doctor Zhivago in translation in Italian was printed on November 15, 1957, followed by a second run of three thousand copies five days later. The novel appeared in bookstores on November 23 following its launch the previous evening at the Hotel Continental in Milan. The book was an immediate best seller.

One of the first reviews appeared in the Corriere della Sera under the headline “You look for a political libel and find a work of art.” “Pasternak does not require any political judgments from us, the first readers of his novel in the West,” the review concluded. “Perhaps in the loneliness of his village, the old writer wants to know whether we heard his poetic voice in the story, whether we found proof of his artistic beliefs. And the answer is: yes, we did.”

The novel had begun a long journey. But to get back home to Russia, Zhivago would have a secret ally.