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

Chapter 11

“There would be no mercy, that was clear.”

Wearing an overcoat and his old cap, Pasternak was walking in driving rain in the woods near his dacha on the afternoon of October 23 when a group of journalists who had come out from Moscow found him. The newsmen asked for his reaction to Österling’s announcement, and his pleasure was obvious. “To receive this prize fills me with great joy, and also gives me great moral support. But my joy today is a lonely joy.” He told the reporters there was little more he could say as he had yet to get any official notification of the Swedish Academy’s decision. He seemed flushed and agitated. Pasternak told the correspondents that he did his best thinking while walking, and he needed to walk some more.

Pasternak got further confirmation that the prize was his when Zinaida came home from Moscow, where she and Nina Tabidze had been shopping. They had run into a friend of Tabidze’s in the city who told them she had heard about the prize on the radio. Zinaida was shocked and upset, fearing a scandal.

That night, at around 11:00, Pasternak’s neighbor, Tamara Ivanova, received a phone call from Maria Tikhonova, the wife of the secretary of the writers’ union, who told her that Pasternak had won the prize. Ivanova was thrilled. Tikhonova, aware of the unease in official circles, said it was too early to get excited, but said Ivanova should alert Pasternak, who didn’t have a phone. Ivanova roused her husband, Vsevolod, who got up and put on a housecoat and a winter coat over his pajamas, and the two of them padded over to Pasternak’s house. Nina Tabidze let them in and a delighted Pasternak emerged from his study. While Tabidze opened some wine, Tamara Ivanova went to Zinaida’s bedroom to tell her the news. Pasternak’s wife refused to get up. She said she didn’t expect anything good would come of the prize.

The first official Soviet reaction was muted and condescending. Nikolai Mikhailov, the Soviet minister of culture, said he was surprised by the award. “I know Pasternak as a true poet and excellent translator, but why should he get the prize now, dozens of years after his best poems were published?” He told a Swedish correspondent in Moscow that it would be up to the writers’ union to decide if Pasternak would be allowed to receive the prize.

The Ivanovs got another call the following morning, Friday the twenty-fourth. They were told to tell Konstantin Fedin, Pasternak’s other next-door neighbor, that Polikarpov was on his way out from Moscow. The Central Committee had earlier decided that Fedin had some influence with Pasternak and he should relay the Kremlin’s decision that he must refuse the Nobel Prize. Polikarpov came directly to Fedin’s house, gave him his instructions, and told him he would wait for him to return with Pasternak’s response. From their window, the Ivanovs watched Fedin hurry up the path to Pasternak’s door. When Fedin came in, Zinaida was baking. It was her name day, and her mood had improved over the previous night; she was now considering what she might wear in Stockholm at the awards ceremony. But Fedin ignored her and went directly up to Pasternak’s study. He told Pasternak it was an official, not a friendly, call. “I’m not going to congratulate you because Polikarpov is at my place and he’s demanding that you renounce the prize.”

“Under no circumstances,” said Pasternak.

They argued loudly for a few more minutes, and a report to the Kremlin stated that Pasternak was very aggressive and “even said, ‘They can do whatever they want with me.’ ” Pasternak finally asked for some time to think things over, and Fedin gave him two hours. Polikarpov, infuriated by the delay, returned to Moscow. Fedin sent a message to Polikarpov later to say that Pasternak never showed up with an answer. “That should be understood as his refusal to make a statement,” Polikarpov told his superiors.

After Fedin left, Pasternak walked over to Vsevolod Ivanov’s house to talk about Fedin’s ultimatum. He appeared hurt and offended by the visit.

“Do what seems right to you; don’t listen to anyone,” his neighbor told him. “I told you yesterday and I say it again today: You’re the best poet of the era. You deserve any prize.”

“In that case I will send a telegram of thanks,” Pasternak declared.

“Good for you!”

Kornei Chukovsky heard about the award from his secretary, who was “jumping for joy.” Chukovsky grabbed his granddaughter Yelena and rushed over to congratulate Pasternak. “He was happy, thrilled with his conquest,” Chukovsky recalled. “I threw my arms around him and smothered him with kisses.” Chukovsky proposed a toast, a moment that was captured by some of the Western and Russian photographers who had already arrived at the dacha. (Fearful that his embrace of Pasternak could compromise him, Chukovsky, the victim of an earlier slander campaign that traumatized him, later prepared a note for the authorities explaining that he was “unaware that Doctor Zhivago contained attacks on the Soviet system.”)

Pasternak showed Chukovsky some of the telegrams he had received—all from abroad. Several times, Zinaida said aloud that the Nobel Prize was not political and not for Doctor Zhivago, as if she could wish away her sense of danger. She also worried that she would not be allowed to travel to Sweden and whispered quietly to Chukovsky: “Kornei Ivanovich, what do you think? … After all, they have to invite the wife too.”

When the photographers left, Pasternak went up to his study to compose a telegram for the Swedish Academy. Later in the afternoon, he sent it: “Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed. Pasternak.”

When he was finished writing, he walked for a short while with Chukovsky and his granddaughter. He told them he wouldn’t be taking Zinaida to Stockholm.

After leaving Pasternak, Chukovsky called on Fedin, who told him, “Pasternak will do us all great harm with all of this. They’ll launch a fierce campaign against the intelligentsia now.” In fact, Chukovsky was soon served with a notice to attend an emergency meeting of the writers’ union the following day. A courier was going house to house in Peredelkino with summonses for the writers in the village—each understood the public indictment that was to come and felt again Stalin’s shadow. After Vsevolod Ivanov received his notification, he collapsed and his housekeeper found him lying on the floor. He was diagnosed with a possible stroke and was bedridden for a month.

When the courier arrived at Pasternak’s house, the writer’s “face grew dark; he clutched at his heart and could barely climb the stairs to his room.” He began to experience pain in his arm which felt as if it “had been amputated.”

“There would be no mercy, that was clear,” Chukovsky wrote in his diary. “They were out to pillory him. They would trample him to death just as they had Zoshchenko, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Mirsky and Benedikt Livshits.”

Chukovsky proposed that Pasternak go see Yekaterina Furtseva, the only woman in the Politburo, and tell her that the novel had been taken to Italy against his wishes and that he was upset by all the “hullabaloo surrounding his name.” Pasternak asked Tamara Ivanova whether he should write a letter to Furtseva. His neighbor thought it was a good idea. “Well, because, after all, she is a woman.”

Dear Yekaterina Alekseyevna,

It always appeared to me that Soviet man can be something other than they want to let me believe, more alive, open to debate, free and daring. I do not want to abandon that idea and I am prepared to pay any price to stay true to it. I thought the joy of receiving the Nobel Prize would not be mine alone, but would be shared with the society which I am part of. I think the honor is granted not only to me, but to the literature to which I belong, Soviet literature, and to which, with my hand on my heart, I have contributed a thing or two.

However great my differences with these times may be, I would not want them to be settled with an axe. Well then, if it seems right to you, I am willing to endure and accept everything. But I would not want that willingness to look like a provocation or impudence. Quite the contrary, it is an obligation of humility. I believe in the presence of higher forces on earth and in life, and heaven forbids me to be proud and presumptuous.

B. Pasternak.

When he read it, Chukovsky was dismayed by the references to God and the heavens, and fled Pasternak’s house in despair.

At some point in the afternoon, Pasternak also visited Ivinskaya at the “Little House.” He probably brought over the letter to Furtseva, which was never sent and was found much later among Ivinskaya’s papers. Like Chukovsky, she would have realized that this was not the act of contrition the authorities were looking for. Pasternak also told her about the telegram he had sent to Stockholm and was in an agitated state, turning over what Fedin had demanded. “What do you think, can I say I repudiate the novel?” He didn’t really want an answer. Ivinskaya felt he was having a prolonged dialogue with himself.

The Kremlin regarded the reaction in the West to the award as entirely predictable. The despised Radio Liberation announced that it would immediately begin broadcasting the text of Doctor Zhivago; it was ultimately directed not to by the CIA for copyright reasons. In the American and European press, Pasternak was celebrated as a nonconformist facing down an oppressive system. In an official response to Österling, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted his remarks about Doctor Zhivago and wrote: “You and those who made this decision focused not on the novel’s literary or artistic qualities, and this is clear since it does not have any, but on its political aspects since Pasternak’s novel presents Soviet reality in a perverted way, libels the socialist revolution, socialism and the Soviet people.” The ministry accused the academy of wanting to intensify the Cold War and international tension.

The full fury of the authorities was about to be unleashed, but in Pasternak’s home the celebration continued as more friends came to toast him and celebrate Zinaida’s name day. “No one foresaw the imminent catastrophe,” Chukovsky wrote in his diary.

On Saturday morning, Muscovites snapped up copies of Literaturnaya Gazeta as word spread in the city about an extraordinary attack on Pasternak. The newspaper printed in full the 1956 rejection letter written by the editors of Novy Mir, and it was accompanied by a long editorial brimming with insults under the headline “A Provocative Sortie of International Reaction.” For ordinary readers, many of whom were learning about Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel Prize for the first time, it was a feast of delicious detail about the novel’s sins. Rarely were readers provided such unexpurgated descriptions and quotes from a piece of banned literature. By 6:00 a.m. people were lining up to buy copies of Literaturnaya Gazeta. The newspaper had a circulation of 880,000 and it sold out within a few hours.

The editorial read: “The internal emigrant Zhivago, faint-hearted and base in his small-mindedness, is alien to the Soviet people, as is the malicious literary snob Pasternak—he is their opponent, he is the ally of those who hate our country and our system.”

Repeatedly, Pasternak was called a “Judas” who had betrayed his homeland for “thirty pieces of silver.” The “Swedish litterateurs, and their inspirers from across the Atlantic,” turned the novel into a Cold War weapon. After all, the readers of Literaturnaya Gazeta were told, Western critics didn’t think much of Doctor Zhivago. Negative reviews from Germany, the Netherlands, and France were quoted to make the point that “many Western critics expressed themselves quite openly on its modest artistic merits.” But when such an “arch-intriguer” as the owner of The New York Times extolled the novel for “spitting on the Russian people,” Doctor Zhivago was guaranteed ovations from the enemies of the Soviet Union. The novel and “the personality of its author became a golden vein for the reactionary press.”

“The honor conferred on Pasternak was not great,” the editorial concluded. “He was rewarded because he voluntarily agreed to play the part of a bait on the rusty hook of anti-Soviet propaganda. But it is difficult to hold this ‘position’ for long. A piece of bait is changed as soon as it goes rotten. History shows that such changes take place very quickly. An ignominious end waits for this Judas who has risen again, for Doctor Zhivago, and for his creator, who is destined to be scorned by the people.”

Around the city, bureaucrats took their cues from the newspaper and a drumbeat of condemnation began to dominate radio and television broadcasts. At the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute, the director told the students that they would have to attend a demonstration against Pasternak and sign a letter denouncing him that would be published in Literaturnaya Gazeta. He said their participation was a “litmus test.” But despite the threats, many students balked at condemning Pasternak. As administrators went through the dorms, some hid in the toilets or the kitchen, or didn’t answer their doors. Three students in Leningrad painted “Long Live Pasternak!” on the embankment of the river Neva. In Moscow, only 110 of about 300 Literary Institute students signed the letter, a remarkable act of defiance. Also, only a few dozen people from the student body attended the institute’s “spontaneous demonstration,” as administrators later described it. It was led by Vladimir Firsov, a budding poet, and Nikolai Sergovantsev, a critic. The group walked to the nearby Union of Soviet Writers building, and their handmade posters picked up on the anti-Semitic tone of the Literaturnaya Gazeta editorial. One placard depicted a caricature of Pasternak “reaching for a sack of dollars with crooked, grasping fingers.” Another said: “Throw the Judas out of the USSR.” They handed a letter to Konstantin Voronkov, a playwright and member of the union board, and said they planned to go to Peredelkino to continue the protest in front of Pasternak’s house. Voronkov advised against it until an official decision was made to increase pressure on Pasternak.

Inside the union’s palatial headquarters about forty-five writers who were also members of the Communist Party held a meeting about Pasternak. The comrades expressed their “wrath and indignation” and there was general agreement that Pasternak should be expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers—the ultimate sanction, as it would deprive him of the ability to earn a living and could also threaten his state-provided housing. A number of writers, including Sergei Mikhalkov, author of the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, went further and said Pasternak should be expelled from the Soviet Union. There was also criticism of Surkov for allowing the situation to get out of control; at the time he was away at a sanitarium and didn’t participate in any of the debates surrounding the Nobel Prize. A number of writers felt that Pasternak should have been expelled when it was learned he had given his manuscript to a foreigner. They deluded themselves into believing that if the Novy Mir rejection letter had been printed earlier it would have prevented Pasternak from winning the Nobel Prize, since “the progressive press all over the world would not have let it happen.” A formal decision on expelling Pasternak was put on the agenda for a meeting of the union’s executive on Monday.

Pasternak, as a matter of habit, didn’t read the newspapers but the scale and vehemence of the campaign was inescapable. Le Monde correspondent Michel Tatu visited Pasternak with a couple of other journalists after the appearance of the harsh Literaturnaya Gazeta editorial. It had been raining for six days and they found Peredelkino desolate and melancholy. Pasternak, however, was in good spirits and they talked in the music room. Pasternak tried to speak French, not very well, but he enjoyed the effort. He told the reporters that the Nobel Prize was not only a joy but a “moral support.” He added that it was a solitary joy.

Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Party, weighed in next with a long personal attack on Pasternak that was written by one of its more notorious journalists, David Zaslavsky. Both Lenin and Trotsky had dismissed Zaslavsky, an anti-Bolshevik before the revolution, as a hack. “Mr. Zaslavsky has acted only as a scandal monger,” said Lenin. “We need to distinguish a slanderer and scandal monger from an unmasker, who demands the discovery of precisely identified facts.” But under Stalin, the Pravda journalist was a favored hatchet man. Zaslavsky and Pasternak also had history. In May 1929, Zaslavsky began his career as a provocateur when he used the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta to accuse Mandelstam of plagiarism. Pasternak, Pilnyak, Fedin, Zoshchenko, and others signed a letter defending Mandelstam and calling him “an outstanding poet, one of the most highly qualified of translators, and a literary master craftsman.” The return of the seventy-eight-year-old Zaslavsky from semi-retirement to attack Pasternak gave the Pravda article “an especially sinister nuance.”

The piece was headlined: “Reactionary Propaganda Uproar Over a Literary Weed.”

“It is ridiculous, but Doctor Zhivago, this infuriated moral freak, is presented by Pasternak as the ‘finest’ representative of the old Russian intelligentsia. This slander of the leading intelligentsia is as absurd as it is devoid of talent,” Zaslavsky wrote. “Pasternak’s novel is low-grade reactionary hackwork.”

The novel, he continued, “was taken up triumphantly by the most inveterate enemies of the Soviet Union—obscurantists of various shades, incendiaries of a new world war, provocateurs. Out of an ostensibly literary event they seek to make a political scandal, with the clear aim of aggravating international relations, adding fuel to the flames of the ‘cold war,’ sowing hostility towards the Soviet Union, blackening the Soviet public. Choking with delight, the anti-Soviet press has proclaimed the novel the ‘best’ work of the current year, while the obliging grovelers of the big bourgeoisie have crowned Pasternak with the Nobel Prize.…

“The inflated self-esteem of an offended and spiteful Philistine has left no trace of dignity and patriotism in Pasternak’s soul,” Zaslavsky concluded. “By all his activity, Pasternak confirms that in our socialist country, gripped by enthusiasm for the building of the radiant Communist society, he is a weed.”

The state’s giant propaganda machine was now working at full tilt, according to the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who was studying at the time in the Gorky Literary Institute. “The radio, from 5 in the morning until 12 at night, the television, the newspapers, the journals, magazines, even for children, were full of articles and attacks on the renegade writer.”

Pasternak’s friend Alexander Gladkov was in a barber shop on Arbat Square Sunday afternoon when Zaslavsky’s article was read out over the radio. “Everybody listened in silence—a sullen kind of silence, I would say. Only one chirpy workman started talking about all the money Pasternak would get, but nobody encouraged him to go on. I knew that cheap tittle-tattle of this kind would be much harder for Pasternak to bear than all the official fulminations. I had felt very depressed all day, but this silence in the barber’s shop cheered me up.”

Pasternak tried to laugh some of it off but “it was in fact all very painful to him.” On Sunday, Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, visited Pasternak with two fellow students from the Literary Institute, the young poets Yuri Pankratov and Ivan Kharabarov. Pasternak wasn’t happy to have visitors and made it clear he wanted to be alone. He said he was ready to “drink his cup of suffering to the end” as the three young people accompanied him along part of his walk. “One had the clear impression of his loneliness—a loneliness borne with great courage,” recalled Ivinskaya’s daughter. Pankratov recited some lines from one of Pasternak’s poems:

That is the reason why in early Spring

My friends and I foregather,

Our evenings are farewells

Our revelries are testaments,

So that suffering’s secret flow

Should warm the cold of being.

Pasternak was visibly moved, but the visit ended on a note of disappointment. Pankratov and Kharabarov explained that they were under pressure to sign the letter of denunciation at the Literary Institute and asked Pasternak what they should do. “Really now,” said Pasternak, “what does it matter? It’s an empty formality—sign it.”

“When I looked out the window I saw them skipping with joy as they ran off hand in hand,” Pasternak later told Yevtushenko, seeing their relief as a small betrayal. “How strange young people are now, what a strange generation! In our time, such things were not done.”

Other former friends hurried to distance themselves. The poet Ilya Selvinsky, who had previously called Pasternak his teacher, and Pasternak’s neighbor, the critic Viktor Shklovsky, sent telegrams of congratulations from the Crimea, where they were vacationing. But Selvinsky quickly followed it up with a letter when he read about the official reaction. “I now take it on myself to tell you that to ignore the view of the Party, even if you think it is wrong, is equivalent, in the international situation of the present moment, to deliver a blow at the country in which you live.” Selvinsky and Shklovsky then wrote to a local newspaper in Yalta and accused Pasternak of “a low act of treachery.”

“Why? The most terrible thing is I don’t remember anymore,” said Shklovsky many years later. “The times? Sure, but we’re the time, I am, millions like me. One day everything will come to light: the records of those meetings, the letters from those years, the interrogation procedures, the denunciations—everything. And all that sewage will also dredge up the stench of fear.”

The literary community was now “gripped by the sickening, clammy feeling of dread” and it led to a near-frenzy of condemnation. These inquisitorial feedings were an almost ritualistic part of the Soviet literary system that stretched back to Stalin. Error was followed by collective attack. The fallen writer was expected to respond with contrition and self-criticism before being welcomed back into the fold. Writers scurried to attack Pasternak. They were motivated by the need to survive within a system that could just as easily turn on them. Some despised Pasternak for his success and what they sensed or knew was his disdain for them. And others were true believers who were convinced that Pasternak was a traitor. The scale of the rhetorical assault and the global attention it drew was unprecedented. Moreover, Pasternak failed to follow the time-honored script.

The meeting of the executive of the writers’ union was scheduled for noon on Monday. Pasternak went into town early with Vyacheslav “Koma” Ivanov, his neighbor’s son. At Ivinskaya’s apartment, Ivanov, with the support of Olga and Irina, argued that Pasternak should not go to the meeting, which was likely to be an “execution.” Pasternak, who was pale and feeling ill, said he would instead send a letter to the meeting. It was written in pencil in a series of bullet points and Pasternak apologized in the text that it was “not as smooth and persuasive as [he] would like it to be.” It was also not apologetic:

“I still believe even after all this noise and all those articles in the press that it was possible to write Doctor Zhivago as a Soviet citizen. It’s just that I have a broader understanding of the rights and possibilities of a Soviet writer, and I don’t think I disparage the dignity of Soviet writers in any way.”

Pasternak described his attempts to have the book published in the Soviet Union, his requests to Feltrinelli to delay publication, and his unhappiness at the selective quotations from the book that had appeared in the Western press.

“I would not call myself a literary parasite,” he told his colleagues. “Frankly, I believe that I have done something for literature.

“I thought that my joy and the cheerful feelings I had when the Nobel Prize was awarded to me would be shared by the society I’ve always believed I am a part of. I thought the honor bestowed on me, a writer who lives in Russia and hence a Soviet writer, is an honor for all of Soviet literature.

“As for the prize itself nothing would ever make me regard this honor as a sham and respond to it with rudeness.”

He concluded by telling his colleagues that whatever punishment they might dole out would bring them neither happiness nor glory.

Ivanov rushed by taxi over to the writers’ union and a young man “with the cold eyes of a dutiful clerk” took the letter from him. The vestibule of the old union building buzzed with the sound of voices as writers arrived for the meeting in the White Hall. All the seats were taken and writers lined up along the walls. Pasternak’s letter was read, and greeted with “anger and indignation.” Polikarpov’s summary of the meeting for the Central Committee described the letter as “scandalous in its impudence and cynicism.”

Twenty-nine writers spoke and the rhetoric became increasingly pitched. The novelist Galina Nikolayeva compared Pasternak to the World War II traitor Gen. Andrei Vlasov who collaborated with the Nazis. “For me it is not enough to expel him from the Writers’ Union. This person should not live on Soviet soil.”

Nikolayeva later wrote a letter to Pasternak declaring her love for his early poetry but adding that she would not hesitate to “put a bullet through a traitor’s head.”

“I am a woman who has known much sorrow and I am not a spiteful person, but for treachery such as this, I would not flinch from it,” she wrote. Pasternak replied in a letter that said, “You are younger than I, and you will live to see a time when people take a different view of what has happened.”

The novelist Vera Panova’s speech was “harsh, very direct, hostile.” When Gladkov asked her later why she was so vicious she said she panicked, felt like it was 1937 again, and had to protect her large family.

Nikolai Chukovsky, Kornei’s son, also spoke at the meeting. “There is one good thing in this whole, shameful story—Pasternak has finally taken off his mask and openly acknowledged that he is our enemy. So let us deal with him as we always deal with our enemies.”

Chukovsky’s younger sister, Lydia, was appalled when she heard about his participation. She recalled in her diary that since her brother had tasted success with his novel Baltic Skies he increasingly had found his sister’s outspokenness “sharp, ill-considered, or even dangerous for him.” Nikolai wanted to protect his career in the Soviet literary bureaucracy; Chukovsky had recently set up the translators’ section of the writers’ union.

The meeting dragged on for hours and some writers slipped out to smoke and argue. Alexander Tvardovsky, known as a liberal editor at Novy Mir, was sitting under the painting entitled Gorky Reading “The Girl and the Death” in the Presence of Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov when he was approached by Vadim Kozhevnikov, the editor-in-chief of the journal Znamya.

He teased Tvardovsky.

“Well, Sasha, tell me, didn’t you want to publish that novel?”

“That was before my time,” Tvardovsky replied. “But the former board did not want it either, and you know it.… Get out of here!”

“Why should I?”

“Because you lack conscience and honor.”

“Why do I lack conscience and honor?”

“Go [to hell].”

A gloomy-faced Polikarpov also prowled the halls. He seemed uncertain if expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers was the correct punishment. And a number of writers—Tvardovsky, Sergei Smirnov, and Konstantin Vanshenkin—told him they were opposed.

Both Smirnov and Nikolai Rylenkov would regret their dissent and would forcibly condemn Pasternak in the coming days.

The vote to expel Pasternak was “unanimous,” according to the official record, and a long, formal resolution stated that “the novel Doctor Zhivago, around which a propaganda uproar has been centered, only reveals the author’s immeasurable self-conceit coupled with a dearth of ideas; it is the cry of a frightened philistine, offended and terrified by the fact that history did not follow the crooked path that he would have liked to allot it. The idea of the novel is false and paltry, fished out of a rubbish heap.…

“Bearing in mind Pasternak’s political and moral downfall, his betrayal of the Soviet Union, socialism, peace and progress, which was rewarded with the Nobel Prize for the sake of fanning the cold war, the presidium of the board of the Union of Writers … strip Boris Pasternak of the title of Soviet writer and expel him from the Union of Writers of the USSR.”

Pasternak and Ivinskaya were now being followed by the KGB. The agents made no secret of their presence and harassed the couple—sometimes pretending to hold drunken parties outside Ivinskaya’s apartment on Popatov Street. “Good day to you, microphone,” said Pasternak when he entered Ivinskaya’s room in Peredelkino. She recalled: “We spoke mostly in whispers, frightened of our own shadows, and constantly glancing sideways at the walls—even they seemed hostile to us.” Pasternak took solace in small gestures of kindness like the postman who greeted him as always despite the secret policemen parked nearby.

On Tuesday morning, Lydia Chukovskaya went to see Pasternak. As she walked from her father’s house, she saw four men sitting in a car, watching her. “To my shame, I have to say that fear already touched me.” When she approached Pasternak’s gate she expected to hear someone shout stop.

“Did they expel me?” asked Pasternak.

Chukovskaya nodded.

Pasternak took her inside and sat with her in the piano room.

“In the bright morning light, I saw his yellow face, with his shining eyes, and his old man’s neck.”

Pasternak began to talk with his usual fervor, jumping from subject to subject, and interrupting himself with questions.

“What do you think, will they also hurt Lyonya?” he asked, speaking of his son.

Pasternak told Chukovskaya that the Ivanovs had warned him to move into the city because they were afraid the dacha would be stoned by protesters.

He jumped up and stood in front of Chukovskaya. “But that’s nonsense, isn’t it? Their imagination has run away with them?”

“Right,” said Chukovskaya, “pure nonsense. How is that possible?”

Chukovskaya, trying to change the subject, mentioned a recent poem by Pasternak.

“Poems are unimportant,” he replied a little peevishly. “I don’t understand why people busy themselves with my verses. I always feel awkward when your dad pays attention to this nonsense. The only thing worthwhile that I have done in my life is the novel. And it’s not true that people only value the novel because of politics. That’s a lie. They read it because they love it.”

In his voice, she heard “something dry, something troubled, something more restless than in his usual impassioned speech.”

Outside, in the quiet of the morning, Pasternak glanced around. “Strange,” he said, “there is nobody there, yet it feels as though everybody is watching us.”

Later that day, Pasternak went over to see Ivinskaya, who had come out from Moscow with her teenage son, Mitya. His mood had darkened and Pasternak spoke in a tremble. “I cannot stand this business anymore,” he said to Olga and her son. “I think it’s time to leave this life, it’s too much.”

Pasternak suggested that he and Olga take a fatal dose of Nembutal, a barbiturate.

“It will cost them very dearly,” he said. “It will be a slap in the face.”

Mitya went outside after listening to this plan to have his mother commit suicide. “Mitya, forgive me, don’t think too badly of me, my precious child, for taking your mother with me, but we can’t live, and it will be easier for you after our death.”

The boy was pale with shock but obedient. “You are right, Boris Leonidovich. Mother must do what you do.”

Ivinskaya, who had no desire to kill herself, told Pasternak that his death would suit the authorities.

“It shows we were weak and knew we were wrong, and they will gloat over us into the bargain,” she said.

Ivinskaya asked him for time to see what the authorities wanted, and if there was no way out then, she said, “we’ll put an end to it.” Pasternak agreed. “Very well, go wherever it is today … and we’ll decide then. I cannot stand up anymore to this hounding.”

After Pasternak left, Ivinskaya and her son walked through a nasty sleet to Fedin’s house. The roads were soft with slush, and by the time they reached their destination they were soaking wet and trailing mud. Initially, Fedin’s daughter wouldn’t let them beyond the hallway, but her father eventually appeared on the landing above and told Ivinskaya to come up to his study. She told him that Pasternak was contemplating suicide. “Tell me: what do they want from him? Do they really want him to commit suicide?”

Fedin walked over to the window, and Ivinskaya thought she saw tears in his eyes.

But when he turned around he had adopted his official manner: “Boris Leonidovich has dug such an abyss between himself and us that it cannot be crossed,” he said.

“You have told me a terrible thing,” he continued. “You realize, don’t you, that you must restrain him. He must not inflict a second blow on his country.”

Ivinskaya said she was looking for a way out and was “willing to write any letter to whomever, and convince Pasternak to sign it.”

Fedin wrote a note to Polikarpov about Ivinskaya’s visit. “I think you should be aware of the real or imaginary, serious or theatrical intention of Pasternak. You should know there is such a threat, or maybe it is an attempt to maneuver.”

The following morning, Pasternak and Ivinskaya spoke by phone and argued. Ivinskaya accused him of being selfish. “Of course, they won’t harm you,” she said, “but I’ll come off worse.”

That same morning, Pasternak’s brother drove him into the Central Telegraph Office near the Kremlin. He sent a second telegram, in French, to Stockholm: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure—Pasternak.”

The Swedish Academy responded that it “has received your refusal with deep regret, sympathy and respect.” It was only the third time a Nobel award had been rejected. Three German scientists had refused the prize on Hitler’s orders. The German dictator had been infuriated when Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a concentration camp, was awarded the peace prize in 1935, and Hitler decreed that in the future no German could accept a Nobel Prize.

Pasternak sent a second telegram to the Central Committee informing the Kremlin of his decision and asking the authorities to allow Ivinskaya, who had been blackballed by official publishers, to work again.

Pasternak told a Western reporter: “I made the decision quite alone. I did not consult anybody. I have not even told my good friends.”

The strain was now beginning to show. Pasternak’s son Yevgeni was shocked when he saw his father later that day. Pasternak was “grey and disheveled,” he later wrote.

“My father was unrecognizable.”

Ivinskaya met Polikarpov and he told her that she had to stay by Pasternak’s side and prevent him from getting any “silly ideas into his head.” (The Central Committee also dispatched a nurse to Pasternak’s dacha to keep watch over him; the nurse was told she was not wanted, but she refused to leave and was eventually set up with a cot in the drawing room.)

“This whole scandal must be settled—which we will be able to do with your help,” Polikarpov told Ivinskaya. “You can help him find his way back to the people again. But if anything happens to him, the responsibility will be yours.”

The decision to reject the Nobel Prize brought no respite, however. In fact, it was treated as an act of spite by a man who was expected to surrender and make no attempt to control events. “This is an even dirtier provocation,” said Smirnov, reversing his support for Pasternak. The refusal of the prize, he said, “carries treachery still further.”