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

Chapter 13

“I am lost like a beast in an enclosure.”

The wrath of the people appeared under the headline “Rage and Indignation: Soviet People Condemn B. Pasternak’s Behavior” in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Twenty-two letters were spread out over much of a broadsheet page under subheads such as “Beautiful Is Our Reality,” “The Word of a Worker,” and “Paid Calumny.” The excavator operator F. Vasiltsev wondered who this Pasternak was. “I have never heard of him before and I have never read any of his books,” he wrote. “This is not a writer but a White Guardist.” R. Kasimov, an oil worker, also asked: “Who is Pasternak?” and then dismissed his work as “aesthetic verse in obscure language incomprehensible to the people.”

Lydia Chukovskaya assumed that the letters were the creations of the editors, and she said she could just imagine “a wench from the editorial board” dictating their content. This assessment was unfair; the letters were written by real people, even though some variation on the words “I have not read Doctor Zhivago but …” appeared in a number of missives and led to much amused mocking among those who sympathized with Pasternak. The newspaper was indeed inundated with letters, about 423 in all between October 25 and December 1, and a clear majority reflected the genuine response of Soviet readers. They had, unsurprisingly, absorbed the unrelenting message of the previous days that Pasternak was a money-grubbing traitor who had stigmatized the revolution and the Soviet Union. This, many readers felt, was not only grievously insulting, but an attack on their achievement in building Soviet society. “The revolution remained central to these people’s consciousness and socioethical order, the sacred foundation of a mental universe,” said one historian, “and their reaction to the Pasternak affair was above all a defense against any attempt, real or imaginary, to undermine this intellectual cornerstone of their existence.”

American psychologists who were visiting the Soviet Union during the attacks on Pasternak found some sympathy for him and demand for the novel, but such sentiments were far from universal. “There was also substantial evidence that many, perhaps the majority, of students in the literary, historical and philosophical faculties of Moscow and Leningrad higher-educational institutions accepted the official line condemning Pasternak as a traitor to Russia,” they reported in a summary of their visit. “Acceptance of the official point of view seems to have been based, in part, upon resentment of what was felt to have been exploitation in the West of the Pasternak matter in the interests of anti-Russian propaganda.”

At the height of the Nobel crisis, Pasternak was also getting fifty to seventy letters a day, both from Soviet citizens and from abroad. Most offered support—albeit anonymously from his fellow countrymen. Even among the letters to Novy Mir there were about 10 percent, mostly from young people, who backed Pasternak’s right to publish Doctor Zhivago or their right to read the novel. There is some evidence that the editors of Novy Mir forwarded letters defending Pasternak to the KGB.

There were also letters that wounded Pasternak. He singled out one that was addressed “To Pasternak from Judas: ‘I only betrayed Jesus, but you—you betrayed the whole of Russia.’ ”

For a time, all of Pasternak’s mail was blocked. At his meeting with Polikarpov, Pasternak had demanded that letters and parcels be allowed through, and the following morning the postwoman brought two bags full. The German journalist Gerd Ruge estimated that in all Pasternak received between twenty thousand and thirty thousand letters after the award of the Nobel Prize. His delight in this correspondence, even though it soaked up his time, was expressed in the light poem “God’s World”:

I return with a bundle of letters

To the house where my joy will prevail.

The letters broke his isolation, reconnected him with old friends in the West, and forged new literary bonds with writers such as T. S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, and Albert Camus. “The great and undeserved happiness bestowed on me at the end of my life is to be in touch with many honorable people in the widest and far world and to engage with them in spontaneous, spiritual and important conversations,” he told one correspondent in 1959. He stayed up until two or three in the morning answering these letters, using his dictionaries to help him respond in multiple languages. “I’m troubled by the volume of it and the compulsion to answer it all,” he said. There were moments, as he put it in one poem, when he felt he would like to “merge into privacy, like landscape into fog.”

He was troubled, too, by the desire of Western admirers to resurrect and publish many of his old poems, work that he felt was often best forgotten. “It is an unspeakable grief and pain for me to be reminded again and again of those scarce grains of life and truth, interspersed with an immensity of dead, schematic nonsense and nonexistent stuff,” he told one translator. “I wonder [at] your … attempt to rescue the things deservedly doomed to ruin and oblivion.” Nor was he happy with some overelaborate interpretations of the novel in the West. He rejected a proposal by Kurt Wolff to publish a collection of critical essays to be called Monument to Zhivago. “Didn’t the doctor have enough trouble?” Pasternak asked Wolff in a letter. “There can only be one monument: a new book. And I am the only one who can do that.”

Along with the appearance of the letters in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet news agency Tass reported on November 1 that should Pasternak wish “to leave the Soviet Union permanently, the Socialist regime and people he has slandered in his anti-Soviet work, Doctor Zhivago, will not raise any obstacles. He can leave the Soviet Union and experience personally ‘all the fascinations of the capitalist paradise.’ ”

Pasternak’s wife told a reporter from United Press International the following day that Pasternak was not feeling well and must rest. She said expulsion from the Soviet Union would be the worst thing that could happen to him. “I am going to cook for him as well as I can, and we shall live very quietly here for one year or longer—with no visits or interviews.” Like Emma Ernestovna, the housekeeper of Viktor Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago, Zinaida saw herself the “matron of his quiet seclusion,” who “managed his household inaudibly, and invisibly, and he repaid her with chivalrous gratitude, natural in such a gentleman.”

On November 4, Polikarpov phoned Ivinskaya’s apartment while Pasternak was visiting. “We must ask Boris Leonidovich to write an open letter to the people,” he informed her. The letter to Khrushchev was insufficient as a public apology. Pasternak immediately began to craft another attempt. It echoed his earlier statements that he always felt the award of the Nobel would be a matter of pride for the Soviet people. When Ivinskaya brought a draft to Polikarpov, he rejected it and said he and Ivinskaya would have to fashion a more acceptable version. “We ‘worked’ on it like a pair of professional counterfeiters,” said Ivinskaya. When she showed the rewritten version of the letter to Pasternak, he “simply waved his hand. He was tired. He just wanted an end to the whole abnormal situation.”

The letter, addressed to the editors of Pravda, was published on November 6. Pasternak said he voluntarily rejected the Nobel Prize when he saw “the scope of the political campaign around my novel, and realized that this award was a political step, which had now led to monstrous consequences.” He said he regretted that he had not heeded the warning from the editors of Novy Mir about Doctor Zhivago. And Pasternak said he could not accept erroneous interpretations of the novel, including the assertion that the October Revolution was an illegitimate event. Such claims, he wrote (or rather Polikarpov wrote), have been “carried to absurdity.…

“In the course of this tempestuous week,” the letter continued, “I have not been persecuted, I have not risked either my life or my freedom, I have risked absolutely nothing.”

The letter concluded with “I believe that I shall find the strength to restore my good name and the confidence of my comrades.”

Exhaustion and concern for Ivinskaya combined to give the authorities the concession they wanted even though most careful readers of the letter knew it was not from Pasternak’s hand. The repeated assertion that he was acting voluntarily stretched the credulity of even Pravda readers. But the fact that he signed any letter of contrition disappointed some Russians. In Ryazan, a schoolteacher named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “writhed with shame for him”—that he would “demean himself by pleading with the government.”

Anna Akhmatova dismissed Pasternak’s ordeal as inconsequential compared to what she and Zoshchenko had suffered when they were thrown out of the Union of Soviet Writers in Stalin’s time. Pasternak and his family were left untouched in his fine house, she remarked. “The story of Boris is—a battle of butterflies,” she told Chukovskaya. Some long-standing tension between Akhmatova and Pasternak had begun to surface. The Leningrad poet smarted from what she felt was Pasternak’s lack of homage to her art; she was irritated by his manner, but still loved him and craved his admiration. Akhmatova continued to believe that Doctor Zhivago was a bad novel “except for the landscapes,” and that Pasternak was too self-satisfied with his martyrdom and his fame. Later in the year, when the two met at a birthday party in Peredelkino, Akhmatova commented, “Boris spoke the whole time only about himself, about the letters he was receiving.… Then for a long time, in a totally boring way, he played the coquette when they asked him to read. After I read, he asked me, shouting across the table: ‘What do you do with your poetry? Pass it around to your friends?’ ”

Akhmatova recalled visiting the composer Dmitri Shostakovich at his summer home in Komarovo outside Leningrad. “I looked at him and thought: he carries his fame like a hunchback, used to it from birth. But Boris—like a crown which just fell down over his eyes, and he shoves it back in place with his elbow.”

The Pravda letter was a tactical retreat; Pasternak still had to support two households. The authorities in return for Pasternak’s signature agreed to restore his and Ivinskaya’s ability to earn a living through translation work; Polikarpov also said that a second edition of Pasternak’s translation of Faust would be published. He lied. That winter, Pasternak was unable to earn any money. His translation of Maria Stuart by Juliusz Słowacki, which was about to be published, was suspended; the production of Shakespeare and Schiller plays that he had translated was stopped; and no new translation work was commissioned. In January he wrote to the Soviet copyright agency to ask what had happened to payments he was scheduled to receive and he also wrote to Khrushchev to complain that he couldn’t even participate in the “harmless profession” of translation. He even suggested to the copyright agency that it could get his royalties in exchange for fees owed to Western writers who were published in the Soviet Union but not paid, such as Hemingway. The Soviet Union did not pay for the Western books it translated and published until 1967, when it entered into an international copyright agreement.

On paper, Pasternak was a wealthy man. Feltrinelli had been depositing payments from publishers around the world into a Swiss bank account, and both the CIA and the Kremlin speculated that Pasternak was already a millionaire. Accessing some of that money would bring relief, but also more heartache and tragedy. Pasternak realized his wealth was a poisoned chalice and that if he sought permission to transfer it to Moscow, he would face “the perpetual accusation of treacherously living off foreign capital.” He did tell his publisher in February to disburse $112,000 in gifts of various sizes to his friends, translators, and family in the West. But initially he expressed some indifference about his fortune, telling Feltrinelli, “The fact that I am completely lacking in curiosity regarding the various details and how much it all amounts to must not amaze or hurt you.”

The pinch of no income eventually began to hurt. “Their desire to drown me is so great I can see nothing but this desire,” Pasternak said. And he expressed bewilderment at his predicament. “Have I really done insufficient in this life not to have at seventy the possibility of feeding my family?” He began to borrow money, first from his housekeeper and then friends. In late December he asked Valeria Prishvina, the widow of the writer Mikhail Prishvin, if he could borrow 3,000 rubles, about $300, until the end of 1959. Early in January, he borrowed 5,000 rubles from Kornei Chukovsky, who presumed it was for Ivinskaya. His neighbor found Pasternak older. “His cheeks are sunken but no matter: he’s full of life.” Chukovsky told him he hadn’t slept in three months because of what Pasternak had endured. “Well, I’m sleeping fine,” Pasternak responded.

He told Ivinskaya the following month, “We must put our financial affairs, both yours and mine, in order.” Pasternak asked Gerd Ruge, the German correspondent, if he could get him some cash that would be paid back from the money held in the West by Feltrinelli. Ruge gathered about $8,000 worth of rubles at the West German embassy from Russians of ethnic German origin who had been granted permission to emigrate but could take no money with them. Ruge took their cash in exchange for the payment of deutsche marks when they reached Germany. The German journalist handed Ivinskaya’s daughter a package of cash when the two brushed by each other at the metro station Oktyabrskaya in a prearranged piece of amateur spycraft.

Pasternak seemed to realize the danger Ivinskaya and her family faced when he involved them in these secretive efforts to get money. He alerted his French translator, Jacqueline de Proyart, that if he wrote to her and told her he had scarlet fever, it meant that Ivinskaya had been arrested and she should raise the alarm in the West.

In April, Pasternak asked Polikarpov if he could get permission to receive money held by his Norwegian publishers, and he offered to donate part of the royalties to a fund for writers in need. “You know that as of this moment, I have not received one single penny of what is owed to me in royalties from the foreign editions of my novel,” Pasternak said.

The authorities, unmoved, warned him not to accept any money held in Western banks, and forced him to sign a letter renouncing the funds. When Ivinskaya complained that Pasternak and she had nothing to live on, Polikarpov replied ambiguously, “It wouldn’t be so bad if they even brought you your money in a sack as long as Pasternak quiets down.”

Feltrinelli also sent in seven or eight packages, or “rolls” (Brötchen) as they called them, amounting to about 100,000 rubles with another German journalist, Heinz Schewe, who had become friends with Pasternak and Ivinskaya and worked for Die Welt. At the end of 1959, Pasternak asked Feltrinelli to turn over $100,000 to D’Angelo, who had written to the author to tell him he could purchase rubles in the West and safely smuggle the cash into the Soviet Union.

The average annual income of a Soviet citizen at this time was about 12,000 rubles. Under the official exchange rate, which bore no relation to the black market, one dollar in early 1959 would buy ten rubles. This money smuggling was all well-intentioned but reckless. Pasternak and his circle were still being watched, as were all foreigners in touch with him. Pasternak’s Western friends, riven by their own interests and jealousies, wanted to please him. The KGB was monitoring the various streams of cash, and biding its time.

In 1959, Pasternak was caught in another imbroglio, partly of his own making—a bitter business dispute between Feltrinelli and Jacqueline de Proyart. A Radcliffe College graduate who had traveled to Moscow in late 1956 to perfect her Russian at Moscow State University, de Proyart happened to read a manuscript copy of Doctor Zhivago, and some Russian friends brought her to see Pasternak on the evening of January 1, 1957. Pasternak had invited them to share leftovers from the New Year’s feast; earlier he had had dinner with Akhmatova, Voznesensky, the Neigauzes, and Ariadna Efron, among other friends. Pasternak was thrilled at the presence of a young Frenchwoman—de Proyart was just shy of thirty—and the evening stretched out pleasantly. Pasternak talked about Paris, which he had visited in 1935 for the Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture; about Stalin and the Leader’s wife; and about Mandelstam.

The conversation turned to Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak asked his guests if they had detected the influence of any Russian writers on his novel. “Leo Tolstoy,” said someone, but it was not the answer Pasternak was looking for. He turned to de Proyart, who risked, “Chekhov.”

“Magnificent!” cried Pasternak. “You’ve guessed correctly.”

It seemed to de Proyart that Pasternak’s willingness to trust her turned on that single answer. They met several more times in January and February. Pasternak showed her his contract with Feltrinelli, and de Proyart expressed reservations about allowing such a young publisher, who didn’t speak Russian, to control the novel’s destiny. Pasternak gave de Proyart a handwritten literary power of attorney—a decision that could only bewilder and infuriate Feltrinelli.

De Proyart would eventually attempt to assert control over any Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago, the publication of some of Pasternak’s earlier works, and, armed with a fresh letter from Pasternak, the management of all of his royalties. Feltrinelli felt betrayed. “To find myself bereft of your trust, of the support of your authority, is an unexpected surprise, and an extremely painful one.” Pasternak envisioned de Proyart as an aesthetic companion to Feltrinelli’s publishing acumen, but the two despised each other and much of 1959 was spent in painful correspondence, disentangling the mess. “I have confused the issue beyond measure,” he told them in a joint letter. “Forgive me, therefore, both of you.” The confusion was compounded by the difficulty of getting letters in and out of Peredelkino. To discuss publishing and financial matters both Pasternak and his closest Western friends often used trusted couriers to communicate, and letters often took weeks or months to reach their destination. “Conducting business, making decisions, and coming to agreement by means of a mail service that is so uncertain, slow and ill disposed, over such distances, with such tight deadlines—it is a torment, an unsolvable problem, a wretched misfortune,” Pasternak wrote.

The novel was the subject of continued attention and acclaim in the West. The premier American critic Edmund Wilson wrote a long and glowing review in The New Yorker in November, although he was unhappy with the quality of the translation into English: “Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.”

When Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, visited the United States in early 1959, he went out for a sightseeing stroll and was famously photographed outside a bookstore window full of copies of Doctor Zhivago. He gazed into the window as if a little perplexed. Later, outside the venue where a private steak dinner was hosted by the Motion Picture Association, Mikoyan was confronted by protesters carrying placards that read: “Suffering from delusions about Communism? Consult Dr. Zhivago.”

By March 1959, 850,000 copies of the novel had been sold in the United States. The Sunday Times in London declared Doctor Zhivago the novel of the year. When an Uruguayan journalist visited Pasternak, he told his Soviet minder, “Pasternak is so fashionable in Uruguay that girls from aristocratic families believe it is a must and good manners to have copies of Doctor Zhivago in your hand when you go out to parties.” At an anti-Communist rally held by Roman Catholic youth in Vienna, a massive photograph of Pasternak was raised above the speakers’ platform. The New York Times reported that “a photomontage made [Pasternak] appear to be standing behind barbed wire. From a distance he seemed to be wearing a crown of thorns.”

Not everyone regarded Pasternak as a religious hero, and one of the strongest objections to Doctor Zhivago came from David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, who was appalled by the novel’s position on assimilation and said it was “one of the most despicable books about Jews ever written by a man of Jewish origin.” He added that it was “a pity that such a book came from the pen of a man who had the courage to defy his own government.”

The Nobel awards ceremony took place on December 10, 1958, at Stockholm Concert Hall, which was packed with two thousand dignitaries, including Gustaf VI, the Swedish king, and the Soviet ambassador. The Soviet science laureates, along with the other winners, sat in a row of plush red chairs; Igor Tamm, wearing a broad grin, bowed so deeply before the king that his medal almost fell off. Toward the end of the ceremony, Österling simply noted of Pasternak that “the laureate has, as is known, announced that he does not wish to accept the prize. This renunciation in no way changes the validity of the distinction. It remains only for the Swedish Academy to state with regret that it was not possible for the acceptance to take place.” The audience listened in complete silence.

In the weeks after the Pravda letter, Pasternak was circumspect with journalists, and the public hysteria of late October and early November began to fade. “Tempest not yet over do not grieve be firm and quiet. Tired loving believing in the future,” Pasternak said in a telegram to his sisters in mid-November. He was worn out. The following day he wrote to a cousin, “It would be best of all to die right now, but probably I shall not lay hands on myself.”

His spirit slowly rekindled, however, inflamed by the pettiness of the authorities and disgust at the continuing abuse of old foes like Surkov. At the Congress of Writers in December, Surkov spoke of Pasternak’s “putrid internal émigré position” and said he was an “apostate our righteous wrath has driven from the honorable family of Soviet writers.” Surkov also was forced to admit that Pasternak’s expulsion from the writers’ union had “disoriented progressive writers and put in their hearts some doubt about the rightness of our decision.”

In a draft letter to the Central Committee, which was obtained by the KGB, Pasternak railed against the “supreme power”: “I realize that I can’t demand anything, that I have no rights, that I can be crushed like a small insect.… I was so stupid to expect generosity after those two letters.”

His anger rising, Pasternak told the British journalist Alan Moray Williams in January 1959, “The technocrats want writers to be a sort of power for them. They want us to produce work which can be used for all kinds of social purposes, like so many radioactive isotopes.… The Union of Soviet Writers would like me to go on my knees to them—but they will never make me.” He told another journalist that “in every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.”

In a letter to Feltrinelli, he displayed some of his old heightened vigor, describing his life as “distressing, deadly dangerous, but full of significance and responsibility, dizzyingly enthralling, and worthy of being accepted and lived in glad and grateful obedience to God.”

Pasternak was also enervated by strains in his relationship with Ivinskaya. He had talked about making a break with his wife and spending the winter in Tarusa, about ninety miles south of Moscow, with his lover. The writer Konstantin Paustovsky had offered them his home. Ivinskaya more than ever wanted to marry. But Pasternak changed his mind at the last minute. He said he didn’t want to hurt people who “wanted only to preserve the appearance of the life they were used to.” He told Ivinskaya that she was his “right hand” and he was entirely with her.

“What more do you need?” he asked.

“I was very angry indeed,” recalled Ivinskaya. “I felt intuitively that I needed the protection of Pasternak’s name more than anyone else.” She stormed back to Moscow.

In the following days, Pasternak wrote several poems, including one called “The Nobel Prize.” It began:

I am lost like a beast in an enclosure

Somewhere are people, freedom, and light,

Behind me is the noise of pursuit,

And there is no way out.

Pasternak showed it to Chukovsky, who thought it was a mood piece, written on impulse. Pasternak gave a copy of it to Anthony Brown, a correspondent for the Daily Mail who visited him for an interview on January 30. When it was published, “The Nobel Prize” created another global sensation. The Daily Mail declared that “Pasternak is an outcast” under the headline “Pasternak Surprise: His Agony Revealed in ‘The Nobel Prize.’ ”

“I am a white cormorant,” Pasternak told the journalist. “As you know, Mr. Brown, there are only black cormorants. I am an oddity, an individual in a society which is not meant for the unit but for the masses.”

Pasternak said he asked the journalist to give the poem to Jacqueline de Proyart, and never intended it for publication. He complained to other reporters who visited him on February 10, his birthday. “The poem should not have been published,” he told one correspondent. “It makes me look like a young girl who is admiring herself in the mirror. Besides, the translation is bad.” Pasternak said the poem was written in a pessimistic mood, which had passed. His wife was furious. “How many times did I tell you that you should not trust reporters?” she asked. “If this is going to continue, I’m leaving you.”

Pasternak protested a little too much about Brown’s betrayal—perhaps in deference to the hidden microphones. In early 1959 he could no longer legitimately claim to be unaware of the consequences of passing his writing to unknown foreigners. To hand over such a personal and polemical piece of work so soon after the Nobel Prize trouble was perhaps foolish, but it was characteristically defiant. “Only a madman would do such a thing,” commented Chukovsky, “and I’m not sure there isn’t a glint of madness in his eyes.”