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

Chapter 14

“A college weekend with Russians”

In the West, there was no longer any doubt that Pasternak’s renunciation of the Nobel Prize, and the letters of apology to Khrushchev and Pravda, were coerced. The authorities reacted with predictable fury to the Daily Mail article. Polikarpov told Ivinskaya that Pasternak was to cut off all contact with the foreign press. The writer was also “advised” to get out of Moscow during a visit by British prime minister Harold Macmillan so the inevitable retinue of reporters would not make their way to Peredelkino.

In the face of Ivinskaya’s outrage, Pasternak took up an invitation to visit Nina Tabidze in Tbilisi with Zinaida. Ivinskaya took off for Leningrad “in a cold fury.”

Georgia was a wonderful escape. Tabidze’s house looked out over the city with views of the distant Daryal Gorge and Mount Kazbek. Tabidze told Pasternak that he was the third disgraced Russian poet, after Pushkin and Lermontov, to be sheltered by Georgia. She prepared a private room for him. Pasternak spent his days reading Proust, thinking about a possible new work to be set, in part, in Georgia, and walking the cold, cobblestone streets of the Old Town. In the evening, actors and writers crowded into Tabidze’s apartment to eat and drink with Pasternak.

The painter Lado Gudiashvili held a reception in his honor, despite official warnings that Pasternak was not to be celebrated in any way. The poet recited by candlelight, amid the artist’s vivid, colorful works, which crowded the walls. Pasternak inscribed Gudiashvili’s scrapbook with lines from the poem “After the Storm”:

The artist’s hand is more powerful still.

It washes all the dust and dirt away

So life, reality, the simple truth

Come freshly colored from his dye works.

Pasternak wrote frequently to Ivinskaya and spoke of the need to move beyond the “scares and scandals.” “I really should draw in my horns, calm down and write for the future.” He reproached himself for involving Ivinskaya so deeply “in all these terrible affairs.”

“I am casting a large shadow on you and putting you in awful danger,” he wrote. “It’s unmanly and contemptible.” He doted on her in his fashion: “Olyusha, my precious girl, I give you a big kiss. I am bound to you by life, by the sun shining through my window, by a feeling of remorse and sadness, by a feeling of guilt (oh, not toward you of course, but toward everyone), by the knowledge of my weakness and the inadequacy of everything I have done so far, by my certainty of the need to bend every effort and move mountains if I am not to let down my friends and prove an imposter.… I hold you to me terribly, terribly tight and almost faint from tenderness, and almost cry.”

He was also a little smitten with Gudiashvili’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Chukurtma, a dark-haired ballet student. Pasternak fell to his knees and read her his poetry, and she went out walking with him, taking him to the excavation of a tenth-century site outside Tbilisi; Pasternak considered writing a novel about geologists discovering their links to early Christianity in Georgia. Lado Gudiashvili thought his daughter, prone to depression, bloomed under the poet’s attention. In a letter to Chukurtma after he returned to Moscow, Pasternak told her that she had moved him. “I don’t want to talk nonsense to you, don’t want to offend your seriousness or my life with something ridiculous or inappropriate, but I have to tell you this. If by the time I die you have not forgotten me, and you, somehow, will still be in need of me, remember that I counted you among my very best friends and gave you the right to mourn for me and to think of me as someone very close.”

The trip also brought a reminder of the state’s cruelty. The elderly Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze, a cousin of Nina’s murdered husband who had survived Stalin’s purges, was pressured by the authorities to write a letter to the newspaper condemning Pasternak. His mental health was already fragile, and Tabidze found the latest official harassment unbearable. He jumped to his death from a hospital window.

On March 14, shortly after he returned to Russia, Pasternak was hauled into Moscow for a meeting with the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, Roman Rudenko, who had also led the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials of the leading Nazi war criminals. After the appearance of the poem “Nobel Prize,” Rudenko recommended that Pasternak be stripped of his citizenship and deported, but the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which had the power to do so, did not approve the measure.

Rudenko was, however, authorized to interrogate the writer. He accused Pasternak of “double-dealing” when he turned over his poem to Brown. He threatened Pasternak with a charge of treason. Pasternak said it was an act of “fatal carelessness,” but said he never intended the poem to be published, according to Rudenko’s report of the interrogation, which was countersigned by Pasternak. “I denounce those actions of mine and I am well aware that I may be criminally liable in accordance with the law,” Pasternak admitted, according to the report. Rudenko told his colleagues that Pasternak “behaved like a coward.”

Pasternak’s own report to Ivinskaya was somewhat different. “Do you know I’ve been talking to a man without a neck?” Pasternak told her that Rudenko had asked him to sign a statement saying he would not meet foreigners, but he had refused.

“Cordon me off and don’t let foreigners through, if you want,” said Pasternak, “but all I can say in writing is that I’ve read your piece of paper. I can’t make any promises.” No further action was taken by Rudenko. The state appeared unwilling to draw further attention to Pasternak by openly persecuting him. In England, Isaiah Berlin thought that Pasternak seemed “like Tolstoy in 1903 or so, when all the disseminators of his gospel were punished by the government but the old man himself was too eminent & odd to be touched by the police.”

When he got home, Pasternak nonetheless put up signs in English, French, and German on his front and side doors in Peredelkino. They stated: “Pasternak does not receive. He is forbidden to receive foreigners.” Zinaida also continued to insist that he not admit foreigners. “You have to stop receiving that trash,” she told him, “or else they will cross the threshold of this house over my dead body.”

The signs were routinely taken as souvenirs, and the message varied: “Journalists and others, please go away. I am busy.” When the journalist Patricia Blake visited him on Easter, Pasternak spoke to her on the top step of his porch and did not invite her in. “Please forgive me for my terrible rudeness,” he said, explaining that he was in serious trouble and banned from meeting foreigners. Although Blake found him “astonishingly young for a man of sixty-nine, she was shocked by the immense weariness in his face, in his whole bearing.” When she left the dacha, plainclothes policemen followed her back to the train station. The Swedish professor Nils Åke Nilsson didn’t make it out of the station before the police told him to return to Moscow. The enforced isolation extended to warnings that Pasternak should not attend public events in Moscow. His friends shrank to a small circle, and the close monitoring continued; the KGB recorded the names of the guests who attended his sixty-ninth-birthday party at the dacha.

The CIA’s efforts to exploit Doctor Zhivago were re-energized by the Nobel crisis. The agency continued to try to get its dwindling supply of Russian-language copies of Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union, and it also purchased copies of the English edition for distribution. At first, the agency gave the novel only to non-Americans who were traveling to the Soviet Union, preferably by air rather than train because it calculated that fewer of those passengers would be thoroughly searched. If stopped and checked, visitors carrying the novel were instructed to say they purchased it from a Russian émigré or it was obtained at the Brussels Fair so that the smuggling effort could not be linked to the U.S. government.

As the storm over the Nobel Prize abated, the CIA decided that other parts of the U.S. government, as well as American travelers, could openly participate in the novel’s dissemination. The agency calculated that the original rationale for secrecy—to avoid the “possibility of personal reprisal against Pasternak”—was no longer an issue.

“The worldwide discussion of the book and Pasternak’s own personal statements have shown that his personal position has not become worse,” a CIA memo concluded. “In other words, an all-out overt exploitation of Dr. Zhivago would not harm Pasternak more than he has already harmed himself.” Shortly afterward, the Soviet Russia Division said it was forwarding by sea freight a batch of copies of the University of Michigan edition of Doctor Zhivago so that American travelers in Europe could also carry it into the Soviet Union: “It would be quite natural for an American who speaks or reads Russian to be carrying and reading the book, which has been number one on the bestseller list for the past three months.”

The CIA also provided elaborate guidelines for its agents to encourage tourists to talk about literature and Doctor Zhivago with Soviet citizens they might meet.

“We feel that Dr. Zhivago is an excellent springboard for conversations with Soviets on the general theme of ‘Communism versus Freedom of Expression,’ ” the head of the Soviet Russia Division, John Maury, wrote in a memo in April 1959. “Travelers should be prepared to discuss with their Soviet contacts not only the basic theme of the book itself—a cry for the freedom and dignity of the individual—but also the plight of the individual in the communist society. The whole Pasternak affair is indeed a tragic but classic example of the system of thought control which the party has always used to maintain its position of power over the intellectual. Like jamming, censorship, and the party’s ideological decrees for writers and artists, the banning of this book is another example of the means which the regime must use to control the Soviet mind. It is a reflection of the Nekulturnost, the intellectual barbarity, and the cultural sterility which are features of the closed society.”

The memo went on to say that Americans and other visitors could raise doubts about the tenets of socialist realism: “Perhaps a good opening to such conversations is to ask the Soviet interlocutor about the latest developments in Soviet drama, poetry, art, etc. A sympathetic but curious attitude towards the innovations and trends in the Soviet artistic world will usually set a friendly tone for the conversation. After discussing the latest artistic developments, a Westerner can inquire about what makes the works of Soviet writers such as Sholokhov, Pasternak, Margarita Aliger, Fedin … as great as they are. After discussing the works of these writers he can ask what limits the party has placed upon artistic works.”

Maury then suggests that the tourist “can point out that a true artist must be free to speak of the ideals as well as the iniquities of any society, to criticize capitalism or communism, in short to say what he believes to be true. A number of American and European writers such as Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Sartre, Camus and others have criticized as well as defended various aspects of life in their home countries.”

Agency officials congratulated themselves that “in one form or another, including full-length and condensed books and serials in indigenous languages, this book has been spread throughout the world, with assistance from this agency in a number of areas where interest might not normally be great.” (Unfortunately, CIA documents provide no further detail on these efforts.) The CIA also considered publishing an anthology of Pasternak’s works, including a pirated, Russian-language edition of his Essay in Autobiography. This had recently been published in translation in France, and the agency obtained the Russian-language manuscript from which the French translation was made.

In the end, the CIA just went forward with another edition of Doctor Zhivago. As early as August 1958, even before the publication of the first Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago, the CIA began to consider a miniature, paperback edition to be printed on “bible-stock” or similar lightweight paper. Such an edition had the obvious benefit of being “more easily concealed and infiltrated” than either the Mouton or University of Michigan editions. During the height of the Nobel crisis, officials at the agency also considered an abridged edition of the novel that could be handed out to Soviet sailors or even ballooned into East Germany. In November 1958, the Soviet Russia Division began to firm up plans for its miniature edition. In a memo to the acting deputy director for Plans, the chief of the Soviet Russia Division said he believed that there was “tremendous demand on the part of students and intellectuals to obtain copies of this book.” The agency reported that Soviet customs officials were instructed to search tourist baggage “for this particularly hot item.” In fact, in late 1958, the Soviet Union reinstituted searches of tourist luggage, which it had abandoned after the death of Stalin. One of the seized Mouton copies of the CIA edition of Doctor Zhivago was turned over in 1959 to the closed special collections section of Moscow’s V. I. Lenin State Library, where top party officials and approved researchers could read banned publications. Books designated for the shelves in this area of the library were affixed with one or two purple hexagonal stamps, the marks of the censor. Different censors had different numbers; Doctor Zhivago was stamped once with “124”—a designation that should have allowed some people to read it. But the novel was kept under strict KGB embargo and was off-limits even to favored academics, according to a former librarian in the special collections section.

The CIA had its own press in Washington to print miniature books, and over the course of the Cold War printed a small library of literature—books that would fit “inside a man’s suit or trouser pocket.” Officials reviewed all the difficulties with the Mouton edition published in the Netherlands, and argued against any outside involvement in a new printing. “In view of the security, legal and technical problems involved, it is recommended that a black miniature edition of Dr. Zhivago be published at headquarters using the first Feltrinelli text and attributing it to a fictitious publisher.”

By July, at least nine thousand copies of a miniature edition of Doctor Zhivago had been printed “in a one and two volume series,” the latter presumably to make it not so thick, and easier to split up and hide. “The miniature edition was produced at headquarters from the original Russian language text of the Mouton edition,” the agency reported in an internal memo. The CIA attempted to create the illusion that this edition of the novel was published in Paris by ascribing publication to a fictitious entity that was called the Société d’Edition et d’Impression Mondiale. Some of these copies were subsequently distributed by the NTS (National Alliance of Russian Solidarists), the militant Russian émigré group in Germany, another measure to hide the CIA’s involvement, although the agency’s released records don’t mention the organization.

At a press conference in The Hague on November 4, 1958, Yevgeni Garanin, a member of the executive board of the NTS, said his group was planning to print a special bible-stock edition of the novel. Garanin said the NTS had obtained a copy of Doctor Zhivago at the Vatican pavilion, but no decisions had been taken on the size of the print run or where the novel would be printed. He said the group planned to distribute copies among sailors and visitors from Russia. A new, unsigned foreword was written by Boris Filippov, a Washington, D.C., resident and prominent Russian émigré who had previously edited Grani, the NTS journal; Filippov claimed in correspondence with a colleague that he had “released” this edition of Zhivago. Without mentioning the CIA by name, he complained that his introduction was “so maliciously and ignorantly mutilated by the man who gave money for the edition that I removed my name from the edition and the article.”

CIA records state that the miniature books were passed out by “agents who [had] contact with Soviet tourists and officials in the West.” Two thousand copies of this edition were set aside for dissemination to Soviet and East European students at the 1959 World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship, which would be held in Vienna.

The festival, which was sponsored by Communist youth organizations, took place between July 26 and August 4. The Kremlin spent millions of dollars on these events, and the Vienna festival was supervised personally by Alexander Shelepin, the head of the KGB. Until 1958, when he moved to the Lubyanka, Shelepin was the vice president of the International Union of Students, a prime mover behind the festival. After becoming head of the KGB, Shelepin kept his position at the International Union of Students for another year so he could supervise events in Vienna, which attracted thousands of young people from across the world. The Soviet Union underwrote the attendance of delegates from the developing world. Because it was the first such festival held in the West, it was also the target of efforts covertly orchestrated by the CIA to disrupt the proceedings—or as the agency’s young provocateurs preferred to call the jamboree, “a tool for the advancement of world communism.” Half of the Northern Hemisphere was Communist and the superpowers increasingly fought for the allegiance of Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians.

The CIA created another front organization, the Independent Service for Information (ISI) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to recruit American students to disrupt the festival. The ISI was headed by Gloria Steinem, a recent graduate, who was made aware of the CIA’s role when she asked about the organization’s funding. When the CIA’s involvement was revealed in 1967, Steinem said she found the CIA officers with whom she worked “liberal and farsighted and open to an exchange of ideas. I never felt I was being dictated to at all.…

“The CIA was the only one with enough guts and foresight to see that youth and student affairs were important,” said Steinem, who said no member of the ISI delegation passed information to the agency. “They wanted to do what we wanted to do—present a healthy, diverse view of the United States.”

The ISI set up a news bureau to feed information to Western correspondents who were refused entry to the festival and smuggled copies of an unsanctioned newspaper into event venues. Newspapers published in several languages were brought in at night and placed in the toilets. The festival grounds were guarded by a security force that checked credentials and patrolled for interlopers. Hotel porters were paid to slip newspapers under the doors of senior officials attending the festival.

Much of the group’s activities took the form of student high jinks. Zbigniew Brzezinski, later President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, tried to sow discord by bumping into Russian delegates and then in a thick Polish accent telling them in Russian, “Out of my way, Russian pig!” Brzezinski, Walter Pincus—later a national security correspondent at The Washington Post—and one of Brzezinski’s students at Harvard hid on a rooftop over Vienna’s Rathausplatz just as the festival’s closing ceremony was about to begin below. The three men hung Hungarian and Algerian flags with the centers cut out in a somewhat strained attempt to equate communism with colonialism and express solidarity with the movements against both. They also hung two white bedsheets with the words Peace and Freedom spelled vertically and in German. The three used a plank to escape onto another rooftop and away from the festival’s security personnel, who dimmed the lights over the square and raced toward the roof to tear down the flags and banners. Pincus later described the ISI’s shenanigans in Vienna as “a college weekend with Russians.” At the time, however, it all seemed very important. “I suppose this was my small world equivalent of going off to join the Spanish Revolution,” Steinem told her aunt and uncle in a letter.

There was a significant effort to distribute books in Vienna—about 30,000 in fourteen languages, including 1984, Animal Farm, The God That Failed, and Doctor Zhivago. The goal was “to expose delegates from the Soviet orbit to revisionist writing” and to “supply the delegates from uncommitted areas with exposés of ideas competing with Communism.” The books were handed out from kiosks and sold at discounted prices at bookstores around town. Young activists from the West noted that these locations “were under observation by communist agents.” The scrutiny in and around the festival grounds was so intense that teams of young people followed sightseeing delegates so they could hand out books at locations such as museums where the minders were not able to exercise as much control. Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law and the editor of Izvestiya, as well as the Soviet ambassador to Austria, “complained bitterly” about ISI’s projects in Vienna.

Plans for a Vienna book program were created by Samuel Walker, the former editor of the CIA-funded Free Europe Press, and C. D. Jackson, a Time-Life executive who previously had served as an adviser to the Eisenhower administration on psychological warfare. Walker, with the blessing of the “friends,” as he called the CIA, set up a dummy company in New York, the Publications Development Corporation, to target the Vienna youth festival with books. Overall responsibility for getting books into the hands of the delegates was mostly left to Austrian allies of the effort. When one of Jackson’s European partners, Klaus Dohrn, a Time-Life executive in Zurich, worried that “special efforts … will have to be made to secure the original Russian text of Dr. Zhivago,” Jackson replied: “Don’t worry about the ‘Dr. Zhivago’ text. We have the authentic one, and that is the one that will be used.”

Apart from a Russian edition, plans also called for Doctor Zhivago to be distributed in Polish, German, Czech, Hungarian, and Chinese at the festival.

The novel had been published in Taiwan in Chinese in 1958 and serialized in Chinese by two newspapers in Hong Kong late the same year. Reaction to the novel in the Chinese press was hostile and in the periodical World Literature, Zang Kejia, the managing secretary of the Chinese Writers Association, said Doctor Zhivago was an ulcer on the Soviet Union. At the Vienna festival, the four-hundred-strong Chinese delegation was even more cocooned than their Eastern European comrades; delegates were instructed not to communicate with the Westerners they encountered, even the waiters who served their meals. And a report by a group of Polish anti-festival activists found the Chinese, unlike other delegations from Communist countries, to be “absolutely uncommunicative.” The Free Europe Committee flew in fifty copies of Doctor Zhivago from Hong Kong for distribution.

The New York Times reported that some members of the Soviet delegation “evinced a great curiosity about Mr. Pasternak’s novel, which is available here.” Occasionally it was not only available but unavoidable. The Soviet delegation of students and performers arrived in a sweltering Vienna from Budapest on forty buses; among the Soviet visitors was the young ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Crowds of Russian émigrés swarmed the Soviet convoy when it entered the city and tossed copies of the CIA miniature edition of Doctor Zhivago through the open windows of the buses.

Pasternak’s novel was the book most in demand among many of the delegations, and copies of it and other novels were handed out in bags from Vienna department stores to disguise the contents; in the darkness of movie theaters; and at a changing roster of pickup points, the locations of which were circulated by word of mouth. For the trip home, delegates tucked books inside camping equipment, stage sets, film cans, and other hiding places.

None of the secret police accompanying the delegations were fooled. When the Polish students were set to return home, one of the group’s leaders warned there would be a thorough search at the border, and it was best to turn in any illicit books before departure. When he got almost no response, he compromised and said, “Only Dr. Zhivago should be given up.”

One Soviet visitor recalled returning to his bus and finding the cabin covered with pocket editions of Doctor Zhivago. “None of us, of course, had read the book but we feared it,” he said. Soviet students were watched by the KGB, who fooled no one when they described themselves as “researchers.” The Soviet “researchers” proved more tolerant than might have been expected. “Take it, read it,” they said, “but by no means bring it home.”

In the summer of 1959, Pasternak began work on a drama to be called The Blind Beauty. “I want to re-create a whole historical era, the nineteenth century in Russia with its main event, the liberation of the serfs,” he told one visitor. “We have, of course, many works about that time, but there is no modern treatment of it. I want to write something panoramic, like Gogol’s Dead Souls.” He envisioned the drama as an ambitious trilogy with the first two parts taking place on a country estate in the 1840s and then the 1860s before the action shifts to Saint Petersburg in the 1880s. The trilogy includes a serf who loses her sight, but the blind beauty is Russia, a country “oblivious for so long of its own beauty, of its own destinies.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll ever finish it,” Pasternak told a visitor. “But I know that when I complete a line that sounds exactly right, I am better able to love those who love me and to understand those who don’t.”

Pasternak began to put aside his massive correspondence to focus on this “happy endeavor,” his enthusiasm for the subject rising as he delved into the research and writing. “I have been eagerly zealous at my new work of late,” he told his sister in July. He told a correspondent in Paris, “Since the time when I first lukewarmly toyed with the idea of the play, it has turned from an idle whim or trial shot into a cherished ambition, it has become a passion.” He began to read scenes out loud to Ivinskaya, who found the language colorful and every word alive. She felt that the play would “be a work just as bound up with his life and artistic nature as the novel was.”

Some of the official hostility in Moscow began to ease that summer. At the Third Congress of Soviet Writers in May, Khrushchev suggested that writers should keep their feuds in-house and not trouble—or embarrass—the government. Pasternak was not mentioned and of course did not attend, but Khrushchev was bothered by the Zhivago affair. Smarting from the global reaction to the campaign against Pasternak, he asked his son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, to read Doctor Zhivago and report back. According to The New York Times, Adzhubei said that while the novel “is not a book that would cause a good Young Communist to toss his cap in the air … it is not a book that would touch off counter-revolution.” Adzhubei concluded that with the removal of a mere three hundred or four hundred words, Doctor Zhivago could have been published. Khrushchev exploded, and had Surkov removed as secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers; one report said he grabbed Surkov by the collar and shook him furiously.

In a speech to the Third Congress, Khrushchev told the delegates, “You may say: ‘Criticize us, control us; if a work is incorrect, do not print it.’ But you know that it is not easy to decide right away what to print and what not to print. The easiest thing would be to print nothing, then there would be no mistakes.… But it would be stupidity. Therefore, Comrades, do not burden the government with the solution of such questions, decide them for yourselves in a comradely fashion.” Later in the year, the Union of Soviet Writers suggested that Pasternak could apply to be reinstated, but he rejected the approach. “They all showed themselves up at that time,” he said, “and now they think that everything can be forgotten.”

Pasternak began to venture out in public in Moscow, and his first appearance, to attend a concert of the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, drew press notice. The Philharmonic was playing in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev—the first major concert tour by an American organization after the signing in 1958 of the United States–Soviet Union Cultural Exchange Agreement. Bernstein was a sensation, bringing audiences to their feet, although some Communist critics were unhappy with what they saw as his attempt to lift the Iron Curtain in music. As well as American compositions, he played works by Igor Stravinsky that had never been played in the Soviet Union. Before pieces, Bernstein also spoke directly to the audience, and Soviet listeners were completely unused to that kind of engagement with a conductor. Before playing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, he said the composer “created a revolution before your own revolution. Music has never been the same since that performance.” The New York Times noted that “when the savage rhythms and weird melodies had reached their climax, there was a moment of breathless silence and then a great explosion of wild cheering.”

While in Leningrad, Bernstein got Pasternak’s address and invited him to the final Moscow concert on September 11. Pasternak responded in a letter with two postscripts in which he accepted the invitation but went back and forth on an invitation to Bernstein and his wife to visit him in Peredelkino on the day before the concert. His changes of mind may have reflected Zinaida’s objections before he finally defied her and asked them to come in the final postscript. When Bernstein and his wife arrived they were initially left outside in the pouring rain while Pasternak and his wife had a lengthy argument. The guests, upon being admitted, were told that the family squabble was about what door they should enter; they evidently never suspected that Pasternak’s wife despised the thought of foreign visitors.

Bernstein and his wife ate with Pasternak, and the conductor found him “both a saint and a galant.” Bernstein reported that they talked for hours about art and music and the “artist’s view of history” before later correcting himself and noting that the conversation was “in fact virtually monologues by him on aesthetic matters.” When Bernstein complained about his difficulties with the minister of culture, Pasternak replied, “What have ministers got to do with it?”

“The Artist communes with God,” he told the American, “and God puts on various performances so that he can have something to write about. This can be a farce, as in your case; or it can be a tragedy—but that is a secondary matter.”

Moscow Conservatory’s Great Hall was packed with much of the intelligentsia. Pasternak attended with his wife and “every eye in the hall seemed to focus on the two people … there was a subdued buzzing in the hall as people motioned to one another and stared.

“The tension, almost unbearable in its intensity, was broken suddenly when Mr. Bernstein appeared on stage, followed by a tremendous cheer. Some of those present, perhaps including Mr. Bernstein, were sure that at least part of the enthusiastic greeting was meant to be shared by Mr. Pasternak.”

Pasternak visited Bernstein backstage and the two men shared a bear hug. “You have taken us up to heaven,” said Pasternak. “Now we must return to earth.”