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

Chapter 10

“He also looks the genius: raw nerves, misfortune, fatality.”

On October 22, 1958, Max Frankel, Moscow correspondent for The New York Times, rushed out to Peredelkino to speak to Pasternak after the newspaper learned that the author of Doctor Zhivago seemed all but certain to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement was expected the following day. The dacha was crowded and Pasternak was surrounded by about a dozen friends. The gathering turned into a celebration with Frankel’s news. There was a note of sedition in the air, and the reporter found himself running to the toilet to take furtive notes on some of the incendiary, alcohol-fueled remarks he was hearing. Buoyed by the atmosphere, Pasternak was forthright about the novel’s genesis and message: “This book is the product of an incredible time. All around, you could not believe it, young men and women were being sacrificed up to the worship of this ox.… It was what I saw all around that I was forced to write. I was afraid only that I would not be able to complete it.”

Pasternak’s anticipation of the honor that Akhmatova believed he wanted “more than anything”—the Nobel Prize—was tinged with some trepidation—a shudder before the ordeal that was about to unfold. “You will think me immodest,” he told Frankel. “But my thoughts are not on whether I deserve this honor. This will mean a new role, a heavy responsibility. All my life it has been this way for me. One moment after something happens to me it seems as though it had always been that way. Oh, of course, I am extremely happy, but you must understand that I will move immediately into this new lonely role as though it had always been that way.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy—a bequest of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, who said that the award should go to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic nature.” The academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III as a small institute to promote the Swedish language and its literature—“to work for the purity, vigor and majesty of the Swedish Language, in the Sciences as well as in the Arts of Poetry and Oratory.” It also supervises various linguistic working groups on orthography and grammar and projects such as the historical Swedish Academy dictionary of the Swedish language.

After some internal debate about the effect on its fundamentally parochial mission, the academy accepted Nobel’s bequest and came to house the most prestigious international prize in literature. The eighteen members of the Swedish Academy appoint the Nobel Committee, a working group of four or five people from its own ranks. The committee solicits nominees from literary groups and academics around the world, evaluates nominees, and presents a shortlist to the full academy for a final vote. Along with its global prestige, the prize in 1958 carried the princely sum of 214,599.40 Swedish kronor, approximately $41,000.

Pasternak was first nominated in 1946, and he became a serious candidate in 1947 when the Nobel Committee asked the Swedish academic Anton Karlgren to write a detailed report on his work. Karlgren noted that Pasternak was the first Soviet writer to be considered by the academy; the émigré Russian writer Ivan Bunin had won the prize in 1933, but he spurned Moscow’s offers to return home and embrace the Communist state. Largely focusing on Pasternak’s poetry, Karlgren was not entirely positive and described the writer as often inaccessible to the ordinary reader. But Pasternak, he said, was regarded as the leading Russian poet by the most discerning Western critics. He added that in his prose Pasternak demonstrated the ability to seize upon “the most secret movements of the spirit,” and compared him to Proust.

Pasternak was considered every year for the Nobel Prize from 1946 to 1950. In 1954, the year Ernest Hemingway won, Pasternak believed he had been nominated again—although he was not. Pasternak said in a letter to his cousin that he was pleased “to be placed side by side, if only through a misunderstanding, with Hemingway.” She replied that “never has dynamite led to such happy consequences as your candidacy for the throne of Apollo.”

Pasternak was finally shortlisted in 1957, the year Albert Camus won the Nobel. In a lecture at the University of Uppsala on December 14, 1957, a few days after he accepted the prize, Camus spoke of the “great Pasternak” and opened a year of speculation that Pasternak’s moment had now arrived. Although he yearned for the honor, Pasternak understood his candidacy was fraught with political peril. Four days after Camus spoke in Sweden, Pasternak wrote to his sister Lydia in Oxford. “If, as some people think, I’m awarded the Nobel Prize in spite of Soviet protests, then I’ll probably be subjected to every kind of pressure here to refuse it. I think I have enough resolution to resist. But they may not allow me to travel to receive it.”

By the February 1958 deadline, Pasternak was separately nominated by Renato Poggioli and Harry Levin, professors at Harvard, and Ernest Simmons of Columbia University. Poggioli was the only one of the three who had actually read Doctor Zhivago, and he said the novel was “modeled on War and Peace, and unquestionably is one of the greatest works written in the Soviet Union where it cannot appear for that reason.”

Simmons wrote of Pasternak’s “fresh, innovative, difficult style, notable for its extraordinary imagery, elliptical language and associative method. Feeling and thought are wonderfully blended in his verse that reveals a passionately intense but always personal vision of life. His prose likewise is highly poetic, perhaps the most brilliant prose to emerge in Soviet literature, and in fiction, as in his long short story, “Detstvo Lyuvers” [The Childhood of Luvers], he displays uncanny powers of psychological analysis.… One can characterize Pasternak’s literary flavor by describing him as the T. S. Eliot of the Soviet Union.”

Levin told the Swedish Academy, “In a world where great poetry is unquestionably increasingly rare, Mr. Pasternak seems to me one of the half-dozen first-rate poets of our own time.… Perhaps the most extraordinary fact about his career is that, under heavy pressures forcing writers to turn their words into ideological propaganda, he has firmly adhered to those esthetic values which his writing so richly exemplifies. He has thus set an example of artistic integrity well deserving of your distinguished recognition.”

The publication of Doctor Zhivago in Milan gave new weight to Pasternak’s standing in Stockholm. Anders Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, read the Italian edition and also compared the novel to War and Peace. On January 27, 1958, he wrote a review of Doctor Zhivago in the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen, and his glowing assessment was an important if not decisive early endorsement: “A strong patriotic accent comes through but with no trace of empty propaganda. With its abundant documentation, its intense local color and its psychological frankness, this work bears convincing witness to the fact that the creative faculty in literature is in no sense extinct in Russia. It is hard to believe that the Soviet authorities might seriously envisage forbidding its publication in the land of its birth.”

Doctor Zhivago had immediately generated headlines in Europe and the United States. The press focused on what they saw as its anti-Communist flavor and the efforts to suppress it by the Kremlin and the Italian Communist Party. The New York Times, in a piece on November 21, 1957, reproduced some of the more damning quotes uttered by characters about Marxism, collectivization, and the failure of the revolution to achieve its ideals. A few days later, Le Monde said the novel could have been another achievement for the Soviet Union if not for the country’s inept censors. And The Observer in London wondered, “What are they afraid of?” The articles were translated for the Central Committee, but the Kremlin kept its silence on the publication of the novel, deciding that there was no advantage in any further statements after Surkov’s failed mission to Italy. There was also some measure of self-deception. Polikarpov even suggested in one note to his colleagues, including the Politburo member Yekaterina Furtseva, that the novel didn’t get a lot of attention in Italy and the efforts of those who wanted to organize an anti-Soviet sensation had failed.

Some of the continent’s major writers as well as Russian scholars were weighing in on the book. They expressed some qualms about Pasternak’s mastery of the novel as a form, but were still absorbed by its world, and the sensations it stimulated. In a long essay entitled “Pasternak and the Revolution,” Italo Calvino wrote that “halfway through the twentieth century the great Russian nineteenth century novel has come back to haunt us, like King Hamlet’s ghost.” Calvino argued that Pasternak “is not interested in psychology, character, situations, but in something more general and direct: life. Pasternak’s prose is simply a continuation of his verse.” He wrote that Pasternak’s “objections to Soviet communism seem … to move in two directions: against the barbarism, the ruthless cruelty unleashed by the civil war” and “against the theoretical and bureaucratic abstractions in which the revolutionary ideals become frozen.”

In The Dublin Review, Victor Frank, the head of the Russian service at Radio Liberation and the son of the Russian philosopher Semyon Frank, who was expelled from the Soviet Union by Lenin, also concluded that Pasternak is “not really at home in prose.” He still found the novel “a truly great and a truly modern piece of art.

“What makes the novel look as odd as an Aztec temple in a row of glum tenement blocks is its supreme indifference to all the official taboos and injunctions of modern Soviet literature. It is written as if the Communist Party line on art did not exist. It is written by a man who has preserved and deepened his freedom—freedom from all external restraints and all internal inhibitions.”

Pasternak followed the novel’s reception in the West, and the anti-Soviet complexion of some of the coverage. He argued that if the Soviet authorities would just issue the novel “in an openly censored form it would have a calming and soothing effect on the whole business. In the same way, Tolstoy’s Resurrection and many other of our books published here and abroad before the revolution came out in two sharply different forms; and no one saw anything to be ashamed of and everyone slept peacefully in their beds, and the floor did not give way under them.” The idea of publication was now anathema, and after the novel’s appearance in Italy, Surkov, in a speech in Moscow, attacked efforts “to canonize” Pasternak’s works.

Pyotr Suvchinsky, a Russian friend of Pasternak’s living in Paris, wrote to him to tell him about the Italian translation. “The reviews were enthusiastic; they all agreed that this novel was of world significance. All of a sudden, a hidden Russia and Russian literature came back to life for everyone. I read your ‘romanza’ in Italian with a dictionary. So many questions came up!”

Noting the Cold War tone in some articles, Suvchinsky added: “It is, of course, annoying, unforgivable and stupid that the American blockheads are making a political case out of it. That makes no sense at all.” Pasternak, too, was distressed by any reduction of his novel to something akin to a political pamphlet indicting his home country. “I deplore the fuss now being made about my book,” he said in late 1957. “Everybody’s writing about it but who in fact has read it? What do they quote from it? Always the same passages—three pages, perhaps, out of a book of 700 pages.”

The year 1958 began badly for Pasternak. In late January, he developed a blockage in his bladder. He was running a high temperature and experiencing sometimes violent pain in his leg. His family was unable to get him the proper treatment; the previous year the writers’ union had decreed that Pasternak was “unworthy of a bed in the Kremlin Hospital.” His wife gave him mustard baths and a nurse fitted him with a catheter at home. Pasternak’s neighbor Kornei Chukovsky visited him on February 3. Pasternak was exhausted, but seemed at first to be in good spirits. His neighbor noted that he was reading Henry James and listening to the radio. All at once, he seized Chukovsky’s hand and kissed it. “There was terror in his eyes,” recalled Chukovsky.

“I can feel the pain coming back. It makes me think how good it would be to …,” said Pasternak.

He didn’t utter the word die.

“I’ve done everything I meant to in my life,” Pasternak continued. “It would be so good.”

Chukovsky was infuriated that “nobodies and lickspittles,” as he called them, “scorned by one and all [could] command luxurious treatment at the drop of a hat, while Pasternak [lay] there lacking the most basic care.”

Chukovsky traveled into Moscow and he and other friends pleaded with the authorities to have Pasternak hospitalized. A bed was eventually found in the Central Committee Clinic and an ambulance was dispatched to his dacha. Zinaida dressed her husband in his fur hat and coat. Some workers cleared the snow from the front door to the street, and Pasternak was carried on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance. He blew kisses as he passed his worried friends.

Pasternak spent a couple of months in treatment and convalescing. He was unable to work with any consistency and spent much of his time answering the admiring letters that began to arrive in increasing numbers from abroad. There was time to reflect on the achievement of having written Doctor Zhivago. “More and more does fate carry me off nobody knows where and even I have only a faint idea where it is,” he wrote to a Georgian friend. “It is most probable that only many years after my death will it become clear what were the reasons, the great, the overwhelmingly great reasons that lay at the foundation of the activity of my last years, the air it breathed and drew sustenance from, what it served.”

Pasternak came home in April and Lydia Chukovskaya saw him at her father’s house. “My first impression was that he looked great: tanned, wide-eyed, youthful, grey, handsome. And possibly because he was so handsome and young, the mark of tragedy that had been on his face over the last years stood out even more. No weariness, no aging, but Tragedy, Fate, Doom.” Her father concurred and thought Pasternak “cut a tragic figure: twisted lips, tieless … but he also looks the genius: raw nerves, misfortune, fatality.”

Excitement about the novel continued to build abroad as translations into other languages neared completion. In February 1958, Kurt Wolff, the head of Pantheon Books, which was planning to publish Doctor Zhivago in the United States, wrote to Pasternak to introduce himself. He told Pasternak that he had only been able to read the novel in full in Italian as the English translation was still in progress. “It is the most important novel I have had the pleasure and honor of publishing in a long professional career,” wrote Wolff. The German-born publisher reminisced about his time as a student in Marburg, a year before Pasternak attended in 1912. “It would be nice to chat about all this and more—perhaps there will be an opportunity in Stockholm toward the end of 1958.” Pasternak replied, “What you write about Stockholm will never take place, since my government will never give permission for me to accept any kind of award.”

The French edition of Doctor Zhivago was published in June 1958. When Pasternak saw a copy of it, he burst into tears. He wrote to de Proyart to say that “the publication of Doctor Zhivago in France, the remarkable personal letters, dizzying and breathtaking, which I have received from there—this is a whole novel in itself, a special kind of experience which creates a feeling of being in love.”

Camus wrote to Pasternak that month, and enclosed a copy of his lecture in Uppsala. “I would be nothing without 19th century Russia,” he said. “I re-discovered in you the Russia that nourished and fortified me.”

Doctor Zhivago was published in Britain and the United States in September. In a long review in The New York Times Book Review, Marc Slonim was hugely enthusiastic: “To those who are familiar with Soviet novels of the last twenty-five years, Pasternak’s book comes as a surprise. The delight of this literary discovery is mixed with a sense of wonder: that Pasternak, who spent all his life in the Soviet environment, could resist all the external pressures and strictures and could conceive and execute a work of utter independence, of broad feeling and of an unusual imaginative power, amounts almost to a miracle.” Publication in Germany followed in early October, and in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the critic Friedrich Sieburg said, “this book has come to us like a refugee, or rather, like a pilgrim. There is no fear in it and no laughter, but certainty of the indestructability of human kind as long as it can love.”

The notices were largely but not entirely positive. The daily reviewer for The New York Times, Orville Prescott, said the novel was merely “a respectable achievement.”

If it were written by a Russian émigré, or by an American or English author who had done a lot of conscientious research, Doctor Zhivago would be unlikely to cause much stir.” Speaking on the BBC, E. M. Forster said he thought the novel was overrated. “It quite lacks the solidity of War and Peace. I don’t think Pasternak is really very interested in people. The book seems to me to be most interesting for its epic quality.”

Although the Kremlin had made no statements following the publication of the novel in Italy, official hostility toward Pasternak endured. When Surkov met the British journalist and politician R. H. S. Crossman in the summer, he defended the banning of the novel. “In your bourgeois society, so-called freedom is conceded not only to Shakespeare and to Graham Greene but to pornography. We see nothing immoral about forbidding publishers to print horror comics or damaging novels. Pasternak is a peculiar fellow. Some of his most distinguished colleagues tried to persuade him that the end of the novel was wrong, but he wouldn’t accept their advice. Officially, he is a member of our union but spiritually he is anti-social, a lone wolf.”

When Crossman remarked that many great writers were peculiar, including Nietzsche, Surkov shook his fist and shouted: “Yes, and we would have banned Nietzsche and in that way prevented the rise of Hitlerism.”

Crossman noted that he was arguing about a novel he hadn’t read.

“But Doctor Zhivago is notorious,” Surkov angrily replied. “Everyone is talking about it.”

“Everyone in Moscow?” replied Crossman with a little glee.

The attention Pasternak had received in the West not only brought fan mail, but letters from domestic critics. One writer from Vilnius, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania, told him, “When you hear the hired assassins from the Voice of America praise your novel, you ought to burn with shame.” Fyodor Panfyorov, the editor of the literary journal Oktyabr (October), aggressively suggested to Ivinskaya that Pasternak go to Baku and write about the construction of oil rigs in an effort to redeem himself.

In April, Georgi Markov, a senior member of the writers’ union, returned from an official trip to Sweden. He informed his colleagues that the Swedish intelligentsia and press were constantly discussing Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago. Markov passed along the rumor that potential candidates for the Nobel Prize included Pasternak, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, the American writer Ezra Pound, and Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of And Quiet Flows the Don. Sholokhov was Khrushchev’s brother-in-law and a favored author of the Kremlin. His novel was held up as a model of socialist realism and was one of the most-read books in the Soviet Union. Moscow had pressed his nomination in previous years. Citing Swedish writers close to the academy, Markov said there was also some discussion about Pasternak and Sholokhov sharing the prize, and there was precedent for two writers winning the Nobel in the same year. “Wanting justice to be served and Sholokhov to win, our Swedish comrades believe that the struggle to support Sholokhov should be intensified,” Markov wrote.

Dmitri Polikarpov, who along with Surkov had led the efforts to suppress the novel’s publication in Italy the previous year, urged his comrades to go on the offensive to oppose Pasternak’s candidacy. In a memo for the Central Committee, Polikarpov suggested that the newspapers Pravda, Izvestiya, and Literaturnaya Gazeta should immediately run articles about Sholokhov’s writing, and his public activities. (Sholokhov was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the country’s highest legislative body.) Polikarpov said that the newspapers should also emphasize that Sholokhov, who had written nothing of note in years, had just completed the second volume of Virgin Soil Upturned. The first volume had come out in 1932.

Polikarpov also wanted the Soviet embassy in Stockholm to reach out to its contacts in the arts in Sweden and explain to them that selecting Pasternak would be “an unfriendly act.” A few days later, the novelist and former war correspondent Boris Polevoi wrote to warn the Central Committee that the West might attempt to create an anti-Soviet “sensation” out of the Nobel Prize, and use it to stress the “lack of freedom of speech in the Soviet Union” and to claim there is “political pressure on certain authors.” Polevoi recognized Pasternak’s literary gifts but regarded him as alien to Soviet letters—“a man of immense talent; but he’s a foreign body in our midst.”

The Swedish Academy had experienced and rejected Soviet pressure before. In 1955, Dag Hammarskjöld, a member, wrote to a colleague, “I would vote against Sholokhov with a conviction based not only on artistic grounds and not only as an automatic response to attempts to pressure us, but also on the ground that a prize to a Soviet author today, involving as it would the kind of political motivations that would readily be alleged, is to me an idea with very little to recommend it.”

Any efforts on Sholokhov’s behalf failed again. The academy shortlisted three candidates for consideration: Pasternak; Alberto Moravia; and Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen), the Danish author who wrote Out of Africa in 1937.

By mid-September, Yekaterina Furtseva was requesting potential responses in the event that Pasternak won. Remarkably, Polevoi and Surkov said that Doctor Zhivago should be quickly published in a small edition of 5,000 to 10,000 copies that would not be sold to the general public but would be distributed to a select audience. They argued that such a printing would “make it impossible for the bourgeois media to make a scandal.”

The proposal was rejected because the head of the Central Committee’s culture department concluded that the Western press would make a scandal whether the book was published or not. Moreover, he feared, if the novel was published in the Soviet Union, it almost certainly would appear in other Eastern Bloc countries where it was also banned.

Instead, Polikarpov and other members of the Central Committee formulated a series of measures to be followed if the Swedish Academy took the “hostile act” of awarding the prize to Pasternak. Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin’s éminence grise and chief ideologist, signed off on the proposals.

The campaign to vilify the author began to take shape: The 1956 Novy Mir rejection letter should be published in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Pravda should run a “satirical article” denouncing the novel and “unveiling the true intentions of the bourgeois press’s hostile campaign around the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Pasternak.” A group of prominent Soviet writers should issue a joint statement that the award was an effort to ignite the Cold War. Finally, Pasternak should be told to refuse the Nobel, “since the award does not serve the interests of our Motherland.”

In the summer, Pasternak was visited in Peredelkino by the Swedish critic Erik Mesterton, who was an expert for the academy. The two discussed the Nobel Prize and any risk the award might entail for Pasternak. Mesterton also met Surkov and when he returned to Sweden he told Österling that the prize could be awarded to Pasternak despite the political shadow over the author in Moscow. Pasternak mistakenly believed that the Swedish Academy would not make him the laureate without the approval of the Soviet authorities—and that, he thought, would never be forthcoming. He continued to meet other Swedish visitors and told them that he “would have no hesitation about receiving the prize.” Pasternak continued to stress the eternal values in his work and his distance from the polemics of the Cold War. “In this era of world wars, in this atomic age … we have learned that we are the guests of existence, travellers between two stations,” he told Nils Åke Nilsson, another Swedish academic close to the academy. “We must discover security within ourselves. During our short span of life we must find our own insights into our relationship with the existence in which we participate so briefly. Otherwise, we cannot live!”

Pasternak occasionally seemed hesitant about the growing speculation, telling his sister, “I wish this could happen in a year’s time, not before. There will be so many undesirable complications.” He sensed that the political threat to his position was only “temporarily eased” and that official silence masked seething hostility.

These concerns were mostly private. With the foreign visitors who alighted at his door, he was as voluble as ever, and he could appear supremely indifferent to the probability that he was being closely monitored. “He several times referred to the Soviet way of life with a grin and an airy wave in the direction of his windows as vsyo eto: ‘all that,’ ” the British scholar Ronald Hingley recalled. When Hingley told Pasternak that he was nervous about a lecture he had to give at Moscow University, Pasternak dismissed his fears: “Never mind that; let them look at a free man.” But when Hingley and Pasternak, who were chatting in the writer’s upstairs study, saw a black sedan slowly and repeatedly pass the house, Pasternak stiffened.

Russian friends feared for him. Chukovsky warned Pasternak against attending a poetry evening at the Writers House because he feared that some of those in attendance “will turn the reading into a riot—just what Surkov wants.” At an evening event of Italian poetry that fall, Surkov was asked why Pasternak was not present. Surkov told the audience that Pasternak had written “an anti-Soviet novel against the spirit of the Russian Revolution and had sent it abroad for publication.”

In September, Österling argued before the academy that it should choose Pasternak, and not worry about any political fallout. “I strongly recommend this candidacy and think that if it gets the majority of the votes, the Academy can make its decision with a clear conscience—regardless of the temporary difficulty that Pasternak’s novel, so far, cannot appear in the Soviet Union.”

In a last-minute bid to postpone the award for at least a year, Pasternak’s German friend the poet Renate Schweitzer wrote to the Swedish Academy on October 19 and enclosed a page from a letter Pasternak had sent her. In it, Pasternak said that “one step out of place—and the people closest to you will be condemned to suffer from all the jealousy, resentment, wounded pride, and disappointment of others, and old scars on the heart will be reopened.” Schweitzer implored the committee to delay making an award to Pasternak for a year. Österling circulated the letter within the academy just before the final vote, but he told the members that the purported letter by Pasternak was not signed and, in any case, contradicted what Mesterton and Nilsson told him after they visited Pasternak during the summer.

The academy vote for Pasternak was unanimous. But in a nod to political sensitivities in Moscow, the citation that was agreed to did not mention Doctor Zhivago. The final language naming Pasternak said: “For his notable achievement in both contemporary poetry and the field of the great Russian narrative tradition.” But Doctor Zhivago was singled out in Österling’s official remarks: “It is indeed a great achievement to have been able to complete under difficult circumstance a work of such dignity, high above all political party frontiers and rather apolitical in its entirely human outlook.”

At 3:20 p.m. on October 23, 1958, Österling entered the sitting room of the Nobel Library in Stockholm and announced to the waiting press: “It’s Pasternak.”