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

Chapter 12

“Pasternak’s name spells war.”

The evening before Pasternak sent the telegram to Stockholm rejecting the prize, Vladimir Semichastny, the head of Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party, was summoned to a meeting with Khrushchev at the Kremlin. The Soviet leader was waiting in his office with Mikhail Suslov, the party’s enforcer of ideological purity.

Khrushchev remarked that Semichastny was making a major speech the following evening and told him he wanted to include a section on Pasternak. Semichastny said that something on the Nobel controversy might not be suited to the speech, which was supposed to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Komsomol organization.

“We’ll find a place where it fits,” said Khrushchev, who called in a stenographer. Khrushchev dictated several pages of notes, and goosed up the speech with a string of insults. He promised Semichastny that he would visibly applaud when he reached the passage about Pasternak. “Everyone will understand it,” Khrushchev said. The following evening, on October 29, Semichastny spoke before twelve thousand young people at the Sports Palace in Moscow. The address was broadcast live on television and on the radio.

“As the Russian proverb goes, every flock has its mangy sheep,” said Semichastny as Khrushchev beamed in the background. “We have such a mangy sheep in our socialist society in the person of Pasternak, who appeared with his slanderous work.… And this man has lived in our country and been better provided for than the average workman who worked, labored and fought. Now this man has gone and spat in the people’s face. What can we call this? Sometimes, incidentally, we talk about a pig and say this, that or the other about it quite undeservedly. I must say this is a calumny on the pig. As everybody who has anything to do with this animal knows, one of the peculiarities of the pig is that it never makes a mess where it eats or sleeps. Therefore if we compare Pasternak with a pig, then we must say that a pig will never do what he has done. Pasternak, this man who considers himself amongst the best representatives of society, has fouled the spot where he ate and cast filth on those by whose labor he lives and breathes.”

Semichastny was interrupted by repeated bursts of applause. He then issued the threat Pasternak feared most: “Why shouldn’t this internal emigrant breathe the capitalist air which he so yearned for and which he spoke of in his book? I am sure our society would welcome that. Let him become a real emigrant and go to his capitalist paradise. I am sure that neither society nor the government would hinder him in any way—on the contrary, they would consider that his departure from our midst would clear the air.”

The following morning, Pasternak read accounts of Semichastny’s speech. He discussed the possibility of emigrating with his wife. She said that in order to live in peace he could go. Pasternak was surprised and asked, “With you and Lyonya?” referring to his son.

“Not in my life, but I wish you all the best and hope you’ll spend your last years in honor and peace,” said Zinaida. “Lyonya and I will have to denounce you, but you’ll understand, that is just a formality.”

“If you refuse to go abroad with me, I will not go, never,” said Pasternak.

Pasternak also spoke to Ivinskaya, and wrote and tore up a note to the government requesting permission for Ivinskaya and her family to emigrate with him. Pasternak felt completely tied to Russia, and, in any case, he again found it impossible to choose between his two families. “I must have the work-a-day life I know here, the birch trees, the familiar troubles—even the familiar harassments.”

Ivinskaya feared Pasternak might be given no choice. And she continued to try to wheedle some form of compromise. She went to see Grigori Khesin, who headed the “author’s rights” section of the writers’ union. He had always treated Ivinskaya well and had long declared his admiration for Pasternak. But his agreeability had vanished and he greeted his guest coldly.

“What are we to do?” asked Ivinskaya. “There is this dreadful speech by Semichastny. What are we to do?”

“Olga Vsevolodovna,” replied Khesin, “there is now no further advice for us to give you.… There are certain things one cannot forgive—for the country’s sake. No, I’m afraid I cannot give you any advice.”

As Ivinskaya left, slamming the door behind her, she was approached by a young copyright lawyer, Isidor Gringolts, who said he would like to help. Gringolts described himself as an admirer of Pasternak: “For me, Boris Leonidovich is a saint!” Ivinskaya, desperate for any help, didn’t question his gushing solicitousness. They agreed to meet two hours later at the apartment of Ivinskaya’s mother. When Gringolts arrived he suggested that Pasternak write directly to Khrushchev to avoid being expelled from the country, and he offered to help draft a letter.

Ivinskaya called together her daughter, Irina, and some of Pasternak’s close friends, and they debated the merits of a direct appeal to Khrushchev. The campaign seemed increasingly sinister—Pasternak was receiving threatening letters, and there were rumors that the house in Peredelkino would be sacked by a mob. One night a group of local thugs threw stones at the dacha and shouted anti-Semitic abuse. After Semichastny’s speech, a demonstration of workers and young Communists outside Pasternak’s home threatened to get out of hand, and police reinforcements were called to the scene.

Khesin of the writers’ union had also informed Ivinskaya that unless Pasternak showed remorse he would be expelled from the country.

“It seemed clear to me that we had to give in,” said Ivinskaya, who rejected her daughter Irina’s defiant insistence that Pasternak should never apologize. Ivinskaya’s stance was supported by the chain-smoking Ariadna Efron, the poet Tsvetaeva’s daughter. Efron had just returned to Moscow after sixteen years in the camps and exile; she didn’t think a letter would achieve much, but thought it couldn’t hurt.

The group reworked the text prepared by Gringolts to make it sound more like Pasternak. A draft of the letter was brought to Pasternak in Peredelkino by Irina and Koma Ivanov. He met them at the gate of the dacha. “What do you think, with whom will I be expelled?” he asked. “My thought is: in Russian history, those who lived in exile meant a great deal more to the country: Herzen, Lenin.”

The three walked down to the village post office, where Pasternak had a long telephone conversation with Ivinskaya. He agreed to review the letter and made only one change—adding that he was tied to Russia by birth, not to the Soviet Union. He signed a few blank pages in case his friends needed to make further revisions. His willingness to resist was draining away:

Dear Nikita Sergeyevich,

I am addressing you personally, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Government.

From Comrade Semichastny’s speech I learn that the government would not put any obstacles in the way of my departure from the USSR.

For me this is impossible. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and by work.

I cannot conceive of my destiny separate from Russia, or outside it. Whatever my mistakes and failings, I could not imagine that I should find myself at the center of such a political campaign as has been worked up around my name in the West.

Once aware of this, I informed the Swedish Academy of my voluntary renunciation of the Nobel Prize.

Departure beyond the borders of my country would for me be tantamount to death and I therefore request you not to take this extreme measure against me.

With my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature, and may still be of service to it.

B. Pasternak

Irina and a friend brought the letter to the Central Committee building on the Old Square that night. They asked a guard smoking in the shadows of the entryway where they could hand in a letter for Khrushchev.

“Who is it from?” asked the guard.

“Pasternak,” replied Irina.

The guard took the letter.

At noon the following day, the virulence of the offensive reached something of a climax inside Cinema House, a classic piece of constructivist architecture near the writers’ union. About eight hundred writers from the Moscow branch of the union crowded into the main theater to discuss the single agenda item—“the conduct of B. Pasternak.” The meeting was designed to rubber-stamp Pasternak’s expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and, in the wake of Semichastny’s speech, echo his call for Pasternak’s expulsion to the West. Attendance was mandatory and the brave simply called in sick. There was already a heaving, moblike atmosphere when Sergei Smirnov opened the meeting. Smirnov spoke at great length and recapped the usual charges against Pasternak: remoteness from the people, the mediocre prose of his shocking novel, and his treachery in colluding with foreigners. “He sent the manuscript to the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who is a renegade and a deserter from the progressive camp, and you know that there is no worse enemy than the renegade and that the renegade nurses an especially strong hatred for the thing that he has betrayed.” At times Smirnov’s blustering indignation stretched to the almost comic: “A Nobel Prize went to the fascist-inclined French writer Camus, who is very little known in France and who is morally the kind of person that no decent person would ever sit by.”

Murmurs of approval rippled through the crowd and some chorused: “Shame!”

The speech’s defining element was not the outrage but the undercurrents of jealousy and long-standing resentment that surfaced in Smirnov’s mocking tone and his attempt to imitate Pasternak’s way of talking. The myth of Pasternak was fostered by his small group of friends, Smirnov said, and it was one “of an entirely apolitical poet, a child in politics, who understands nothing and is locked away in his castle of ‘pure art’ where he turns out his talented works.… From this coterie, this narrow circle around Pasternak we have heard ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ about his talent and his greatness in literature. Let us not hide the fact that there have been people among Pasternak’s friends who have stated at meetings that when Pasternak’s name is spoken, people should stand.”

The meeting ran for five hours, and Smirnov was merely the first of fourteen speakers. And they included some surprising names. When Yevtushenko saw that the poet Boris Slutsky, who had solicited Pasternak’s opinion on his verse earlier that summer, was scheduled to speak, he warned him to be careful, fearing he would defend Pasternak, rile the crowd, and hurt himself.

“Don’t worry,” Slutsky replied. “I shall know how to make my point.”

Slutsky had only recently been admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers, and he felt that his budding career would be ruined if he didn’t speak out against Pasternak. He kept his speech short and avoided the violent language of some of the other speakers. “A poet’s obligation is to seek the recognition of his own people, not of his enemies,” he said. “This year’s Nobel Prize winner could almost be called the winner of the Nobel Prize against Communism. It is a disgrace for a man who has grown up in our country to bear such a title.”

In private, Slutsky was angry with Pasternak. He felt he had damaged the possibilities for the “young literature” emerging after Stalin’s death. Over time he was haunted by his participation. “That I spoke against Pasternak is my shame,” he said years later.

The chairman of the meeting, Smirnov, also said that the “blot” on himself for his attack could “never be washed away.” But in a bitter exchange of letters with Yevtushenko in the 1980s, another speaker, Vladimir Soloukhin, said that Pasternak’s supporters, who remained silent, were as culpable as those who spoke against him. Yevtushenko, who attended the meeting, was approached about speaking, but refused.

“Let’s agree that all of us, all 14 people, were cowards, time-servers, lickspittles, traitors and bastards who will never ‘clear themselves,’ ” wrote Soloukhin. He asked where Pasternak’s friends were, among the hundreds in the room. “Why did they keep silent? Not a single sound, not a single move. Why? Not a single exclamation or remark or word in defense of the poet.”

Yevtushenko replied that “for 30 years, this sin of yours, Vladimir Alexeyevich, has lain safely hidden.…

“But glasnost, like spring waters, has dissolved the shroud of secrecy and your old guilt comes to light like the arm of a murdered child emerges from the snow when it begins to melt,” Yevtushenko continued. “I have never considered my refusal as heroism. However, is there no difference between direct participation in a crime and refusal to participate?”

Most of the speakers, in contrast to Slutsky, wielded the knife with striking vehemence. Korneli Zelinsky, the literary scholar who taught at the Gorky Literary Institute, was once a friend of Pasternak’s, but his speech was “particularly vile.” At Pasternak’s request, he had chaired one of his recitals at the Polytechnic Museum in 1932 and had written about Pasternak’s work over the years, generally favorably. He had described Pasternak as a “dacha-dweller of genius” and said some of the poems in the collection Second Birth would “always remain in Russian poetry … as masterpieces of intimate lyric poetry.” After the war, Zelinsky attended one of the first readings of Doctor Zhivago at the dacha in Peredelkino.

Zelinsky told the audience that he had gone through the novel the previous year with “a fine-tooth comb.” He had been involved in the negotiations that led to a contract in early 1957 to bring out an abridged version of the book in the Soviet Union. And Zelinsky had expressed some mild concerns about the novel’s remoteness from contemporary themes in the summer of 1958 in an interview with Radio Warsaw. Perhaps it was his involvement with Pasternak’s work that led him to speak with such venom.

“I was left with a feeling of great heaviness after reading” Doctor Zhivago, Zelinsky told the audience. “I felt as though I had been literally spat upon. The whole of my life seemed to be defiled in the novel.… I have no wish to spell out all the evil-smelling nastiness which leaves such a bad taste. It was very strange for me to see Pasternak, the poet and artist, sink to such a level. But what we have subsequently learned has revealed in full the underlying truth, that terrible traitorous philosophy and that pervasive taint of treachery.

“You ought to know, comrades, that Pasternak’s name in the West where I have just been is now synonymous with war. Pasternak is a standard-bearer of the cold war. It is not mere chance that the most reactionary, monarchistic, rabid circles have battened upon his name.… I repeat that Pasternak’s name spells war. It heralds the cold war.”

After Zelinsky spoke, he approached Konstantin Paustovsky, one of the grand old men of Russian letters, who turned away in disgust and refused to shake his hand.

Smirnov moved to end the meeting with thirteen more writers waiting in the wings to speak. The crowd was exhausted. After a show of hands, Smirnov announced that the resolution was adopted unanimously. “Not true! Not unanimously! I voted against!” shouted a woman who pushed her way to the front of the crowd as others headed for the exits. The lone dissenter, a Gulag survivor, was Anna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s sister-in-law.

The pillorying of Pasternak was front-page news around the world. Correspondents in Moscow reported in detail on the media campaign, the expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers, the acceptance and rejection of the Nobel Prize, and the threat of exile. Editorialists weighed in on the startling virulence of the assault on a solitary writer. In an editorial headlined “Pasternak and the Pygmies,” The New York Times declared, “In the fury, venom and intensity of this reaction there is much that is illuminating. Superficially the Soviet leaders are strong. At their command are hydrogen bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, large armies and fleets of mighty bombers and warships. Against them is one elderly man who is completely helpless before the physical power of the Kremlin. Yet such is the moral authority of Pasternak, so vividly does he symbolize the conscience of an outraged Russia striking back at its tormentors, that it is the men in the Kremlin who tremble.”

In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin created a Pulitzer Prize–winning image of Pasternak as a ragged Gulag prisoner wearing a ball and chain and chopping wood in the snow with another inmate. The caption read: “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?”

The French newspaper Dimanche described the literary crisis as “an intellectual Budapest” for Khrushchev.

The Swedes issued their own rebuke. On October 27, the Lenin Peace Prize was presented in Stockholm to the poet Artur Lundkvist. Three members of the Swedish Academy who had been scheduled to attend, including Österling, boycotted the event. A string quartet that was booked to perform refused to play, and a florist sent wilting flowers in protest.

Bewilderment at the treatment of Pasternak only increased when three Soviet scientists won the Nobel Prize for Physics. The award was celebrated in Moscow as a national achievement; Western correspondents were invited to meet two of the winners at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where they discussed their research into atomic particles—and their hobbies and home life. The Soviet press was forced into some contortions in logic to explain the contrasting coverage of the different Nobel Prizes, often on the same pages. Pravda explained that while the award in science illustrated “the recognition by the Swedish Academy of Sciences of the major merits of Russian and Soviet scientists … the award of this prize for literature was prompted entirely for political motives.” Bourgeois scientists “were capable of objectivity,” the newspaper concluded, but the assessment of literary works is “entirely under the influence of the ideology of the dominant class.”

Feltrinelli was in Hamburg when the loud disparagement of his writer began, and he immediately began to use his contacts in publishing to rally writers in defense of Pasternak. Literary societies from Mexico to India issued statements as the drama unfolded. A group of prominent writers, including T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley, Rebecca West, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley, sent a telegram to the Union of Soviet Writers to protest. “We are profoundly anxious about the state of one of the world’s great poets and writers, Boris Pasternak. We consider his novel, Doctor Zhivago, a moving personal testimony and not a political document. We appeal to you in the name of the great Russian literary tradition for which you stand not to dishonor it by victimizing a writer revered throughout the whole civilized world.” PEN, the international association of writers, sent its own message, saying the organization was “very distressed by rumors concerning Pasternak” and demanded protection for the poet by maintaining the conditions for creative freedom. “Writers throughout the world are thinking of him fraternally.”

Radio Liberation solicited messages of support for broadcast from Upton Sinclair, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Carlos Williams, Lewis Mumford, Pearl Buck, and Gore Vidal, among others. Ernest Hemingway said he would give Pasternak a house if he was expelled. “I want to create for him the conditions he needs to carry on with his writing,” said Hemingway. “I can understand how divided Boris must be in his own mind right now. I know how deeply, with all his heart, he is attached to Russia. For a genius such as Pasternak, separation from his country would be a tragedy. But if he comes to us we shall not disappoint him. I shall do everything in my modest power to save this genius for the world. I think of Pasternak every day.”

The controversy reinvigorated sales of the novel across Europe, and in the United States, where it was published in September, the novel finally hit the top of The New York Times bestseller list, dislodging Lolita. The book had already sold seventy thousand copies in the United States in its first six weeks. “That is fantastic,” his publisher Kurt Wolff wrote. The Nobel controversy boosted sales of an already successful book to rare heights. “You have moved beyond the history of literature into the history of mankind,” Wolff concluded in a letter to Pasternak toward the end of the year. “Your name has become a household word throughout the world.”

The U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles told reporters that Pasternak’s refusal of the Nobel Prize was forced on the writer by the Soviet authorities. “The system of international communism,” he said, “insists on conformity not only in deed but in thought. Anything a little out of line, they try to stamp out.”

The U.S. embassy in Moscow cautioned the State Department against official involvement, and senior officials in Washington said relatively little; instead they relished what they saw as a propaganda coup for the West that was entirely manufactured in Moscow. At a meeting of Dulles’s senior staff, he was told that “the communists’ treatment of Pasternak is one of their worst blunders. It is on par in terms of embarrassment and damage to them with the brutality in Hungary.” Dulles told his staff to explore the possibility of covertly subsidizing publication of the novel in the Far East and the Middle East; presumably he knew that his brother, the head of the CIA, had already organized a Russian edition as they both served on the Operations Control Board. State Department officials were told to coordinate their publication efforts with the “other agency,” government-speak for the CIA.

Dulles told his senior staff that he hadn’t had a chance to read the book but “supposed he would have to do so.” He asked if the novel was damaging to the Communist cause. Abbott Washburn, deputy director of the United States Information Agency, said, “It was because it reveals the stifling of an individual under the oppressive communist system and that the very suppression of the book shows that the communist leaders regard it as injurious.” Others at the meeting argued that Doctor Zhivago was not particularly anti-Communist but “that the treatment received by the author was the real pay dirt for us.”

At first, the CIA also concluded that it should not overplay its hand. Director Allen Dulles said agency assets, including Radio Liberation, should give “maximum factual play” to the Nobel Award “without any propagandistic commentary.” Dulles also said the agency should use every opportunity to have Soviet citizens read the novel.

For some within the CIA, Pasternak’s plight was another reminder of the West’s inability to affect events inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “Reactions of revulsion and shock cannot conceal from Free World consciousness the sense of its own impotence to further the cause of liberalization within the Bloc,” stated an agency memo sent to Dulles. “Any further attempt on our part to portray the personal ordeal of Pasternak as a triumph of freedom will only, as in the case of Hungary, heighten the tragic irony which informs it.”

Dulles was not persuaded. At a meeting of the National Security Council’s Operations Control Board a few days later, there was “considerable discussion of the actions which the U.S. has taken and might take to exploit” the Zhivago affair. Earlier, some on Dulles’s staff had recommended that CIA assets should be used to “sparkplug” anti-Soviet coverage, and encourage the “leftist press and writers” in the West to express their outrage.

The sound of Western consternation was nothing new in Moscow. Much more troubling for the Soviet Union than the statements of “bourgeois writers” and American officials such as John Foster Dulles was the damage to its reputation among friends and allies, and in parts of the world where it expected a sympathetic hearing.

In Lebanon, the affair was front-page news, and the CIA noted approvingly that in a front-page editorial the newspaper Al-Binaa concluded that “free thought and dialectical materialism do not go together.” In Morocco, the daily Al-Alam, which was rarely critical of the Soviet Union, said, whatever the Soviet Union accuses the West of in the future, it “will never be able to deny its suppression of Pasternak.” The Times of Karachi described the treatment of the writer as “despicable.”

The Brazilian writer Jorge Amado said the expulsion of Pasternak from the writers’ union demonstrated that it was still controlled by elements from Stalin’s time. The Brazilian paper Última Hora, which had supported good relations with the Soviet Union, called the affair “cultural terrorism.”

The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey wrote to Literaturnaya Gazeta to protest the decision of the Union of Soviet Writers. “As a friend of your magnificent land since 1917, I would plead for the withdrawal of this expulsion order,” he said. “Every artist is something of an anarchist, as Bernard Shaw tells us in one of his prefaces, and the artist should be forgiven many things.”

The Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness, a Nobel laureate and the chairman of the Iceland-Soviet Friendship Society, sent a telegram to Khrushchev: “I implore you as level-headed statesman to use your influence mitigating malicious onslaughts of sectarian intolerance upon an old meritorious Russian poet Boris Pasternak. Why light-heartedly arouse the wrath of the world’s poets, writers, intellectuals and socialists against the Soviet Union in this matter? Kindly spare friends of the Soviet Union an incomprehensible and most unworthy spectacle.”

“Iceland?” said Pasternak when he learned of the telegram, “Iceland, but if China intervened it would help?”

In fact, the case was drawing major attention in Asia, particularly in India, a nonaligned country that nonetheless had strong ties with the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had visited the Soviet Union in 1955 and Khrushchev had traveled to India the following year. The treatment of Pasternak infuriated leading writers in India, including some prominent Communists. And concern about his plight culminated at a press conference in New Delhi when Nehru said Indian opinion had been pained by the daily abuse. “A noted writer, even if he expresses an opinion opposed to the dominating opinion, according to us should be respected and it should be given free play,” he told reporters.

The Soviet Union’s cultural diplomacy was also being damaged. The Norwegian press demanded that the government abrogate a recently signed cultural-exchange program. Swedish officials threatened to postpone indefinitely a youth-exchange program. Twenty-eight Austrian writers said in an open letter that all future cultural and scientific exchanges should be conditional on Pasternak’s complete rehabilitation as a citizen and a writer.

The international backlash was unwelcome and the Kremlin wanted a way out of the crisis. After receiving Pasternak’s letter, Khrushchev ordered a halt. “Enough. He’s admitted his mistakes. Stop it.” The terms were left to the bureaucracy.

While the writers were fulminating at Cinema House, Polikarpov began maneuvering to end the affair. Khesin, the man who had cold-shouldered Ivinskaya the day before the meeting, phoned her at her mother’s apartment, where she had gone to try to get some sleep. (Ivinskaya’s movements were clearly being monitored.) Khesin oozed a fake friendliness. “Olga Vsevolodovna, my dear, you’re a good girl. They have received the letter from Boris Leonidovich and everything will be all right, just be patient. What I have to say is that we must see you straight away.”

Ivinskaya was irritated by the approach, and told Khesin she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Polikarpov came on the line. “We must see you,” he said. “We’ll drive over to Sobinov Street now, you put on a coat and come down, and we’ll go together to Peredelkino. We must bring Boris Leonidovich to Moscow, to the Central Committee, as soon as possible.”

Ivinskaya told her daughter to go ahead to alert Pasternak. It seemed to Ivinskaya that if Polikarpov was in such a hurry and willing to go to Peredelkino to fetch Pasternak, it could only mean that Khrushchev would meet the writer. A black government Zil pulled up outside Ivinskaya’s mother’s apartment building, and Polikarpov and Khesin were inside. The sedan traveled in the middle lane reserved on Moscow streets for select government cars and whisked them to Peredelkino ahead of Irina.

Pasternak was now emotional and fragile, subject to severe mood swings and very much caged in his dacha. Telegrams from well-wishers in the West were piling up on his desk, but at home he felt increasingly isolated and people he thought of as friends were shunning him. When the sculptor Zoya Maslenikova visited Pasternak that Friday around lunchtime, he broke down and wept, his head on the table; the prompt for his tears was a telegram that contained a line from one of his Zhivago poems: “To see no distance is lonely.”

As Ivinskaya rode with the two men toward Peredelkino, Khesin whispered to her that it was he who had sent Gringolts to her. Ivinskaya gasped at how easily she had been manipulated into getting Pasternak to write a letter to Khrushchev. And now Polikarpov, turning around to face her from the front seat, wanted more. “We’re now relying entirely on you,” he said. When they arrived in the village, there were already a number of official cars near Pasternak’s house, with other officials from the writers’ union. Irina, when she arrived, was asked to go to the dacha and get Pasternak; Ivinskaya would not risk meeting Pasternak’s wife, but Zinaida tolerated her daughter. Zinaida was frightened by the official hubbub, but Pasternak emerged with a strange cheerfulness. As he got into Polikarpov and Khesin’s car, he started to complain that he wasn’t wearing a suitable pair of trousers because he, too, concluded that he was to meet Khrushchev. “I’m going to show them,” he blustered. “I’ll make such a fuss and tell them everything I think—everything.” He joked all the way into town, and the mood “was one of almost hysterical gaiety.”

At Polikarpov’s request, Ivinskaya brought Pasternak to her apartment for a short interlude before they went over to the Central Committee building. When they arrived at the latter, Pasternak went up to the guard and told him he was expected but had no identification except his writers’ union card—“the membership card of this union of yours which you’ve just thrown me out of.” And then he continued to be preoccupied with his trousers. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” said the guard, “it doesn’t matter, it’s quite all right.”

There was no meeting with Khrushchev. Pasternak was ushered into a room with Polikarpov, who had freshened up and was acting as if he had been sitting at his desk all day. He rose to his feet and “in a voice befitting a town crier” announced that Pasternak would be allowed “to remain in the Motherland.”

But Polikarpov said Pasternak would have to make peace with the Soviet people. “There is nothing we can do at the moment to calm the anger,” said Polikarpov. He noted that the following day’s issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta would include a sampling of this anger.

This was not the meeting Pasternak expected and he erupted in fury. “Aren’t you ashamed, Dmitri Alexeyevich? What do you mean ‘anger’? You have your human side, I can see, but why do you come out with these stock phrases? ‘The people! The people!’—as though it were something you could just produce from your own trouser pockets. You know perfectly well that you really shouldn’t use the word ‘people’ at all.”

Polikarpov sucked in his breath to contain himself; the crisis had to be ended and he needed Pasternak’s acquiescence. “Now look here, Boris Leonidovich, the whole business is over so let’s make things up, and everything will soon be all right again.

“Goodness me, old fellow, what a mess you’ve landed us in,” he continued, coming round to pat Pasternak on the shoulder.

Pasternak recoiled from the intimacy and the reference to an “old fellow.”

“Will you kindly drop that tone? You cannot talk to me like that,” he said.

“Really now,” Polikarpov continued, “here you go sticking a knife in the country’s back, and we have to patch it all up.”

Pasternak had had it with the accusations of treachery. “I will ask you to take those words back. I do not wish to speak to you anymore.”

He headed for the door.

Polikarpov was aghast. “Stop him, stop him, Olga Vsevolodovna.”

Ivinskaya, sensing Polikarpov’s weakness, told him, “You must take your words back!”

“I do, I do,” mumbled Polikarpov.

Pasternak stayed, and the conversation continued in a more civil tone. Polikarpov suggested he would be in touch soon with a plan and quietly told Ivinskaya as she left that another public letter from Pasternak might be necessary.

Pasternak was pleased with his performance. “They are not people but machines,” he said. “See how terrible they are, these walls here, and everyone inside them is like an automaton.… But all the same I gave them something to worry about—they got what they deserved.”

In the car, on the way back to Peredelkino, Pasternak loudly replayed the whole conversation with Polikarpov, ignoring Ivinskaya’s warning that the chauffeur was certain to report back on everything that was said.

In a lull, Irina recited some lines from Pasternak’s epic poem “Lieutenant Schmidt”:

In vain, in years of turmoil,

One seeks a happy ending—

Some are fated to kill—and repent—

While others go to Golgotha …

I suppose you never flinch

From wiping out a man.

Ah well, martyrs to your dogma,

You too are victims of the times …

I know the stake at which

I’ll die will be the boundary mark

Between two different epochs,

And I rejoice at being so elect.

Pasternak fell silent. A very long Friday had come to an end.