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

Chapter 16

“It’s too late for me to express regret that the book wasn’t published.”

Ivinskaya was arrested in Peredelkino on August 16. It was dusk, and she was drinking tea with her mother and stepfather when several men came through the garden gate. “You were expecting us to come, of course, weren’t you?” said one of the KGB officers, pink-faced and smiling with satisfaction. “You didn’t imagine, did you, that your criminal activities would go unpunished?”

Over the previous eighteen months, the secret police had been watching various foreigners bring money into the country for Pasternak—and Ivinskaya was charged with illegal currency trading. While her arrest was at first kept secret, the authorities eventually decided to scapegoat her in a crude attempt to somehow reclaim the early Pasternak, not the author of Doctor Zhivago, as a great Soviet writer. Pasternak, according to Surkov, had been misled by an “adventuress who got him to write Doctor Zhivago and then to send it abroad, so that she could enrich herself.”

In the last year of his life, Pasternak was a rich man, but control of his fortune lay frustratingly beyond his reach. He authorized Feltrinelli to give $100,000 from his royalties to D’Angelo after the Italian had written to Pasternak to tell him he had “reliable” friends who could carry cash into the Soviet Union.

Pasternak was wary at first: “Olyusha, where should we leave all that money?”

“Well, in that suitcase over there!” replied Ivinskaya.

Feltrinelli transferred the money to D’Angelo from an account in the tax haven of Liechtenstein in March 1960. D’Angelo immediately began purchasing rubles in Western Europe and then arranging for Italian friends to smuggle the currency into the Soviet Union and pass it secretly to Pasternak via Ivinskaya or her daughter. D’Angelo described himself as “running” an “operation” with his own security protocols.

The Italian, however, was no match for the KGB.

The secret police watched as Giuseppe Garritano, a Moscow correspondent for the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità, arranged the transfer of a large sum of rubles that D’Angelo had purchased. In March 1960, Garritano’s wife, Mirella, called Ivinskaya’s city apartment, which was almost certainly bugged and under close surveillance, and asked her to come to the post office and collect some books for Pasternak. Ivinskaya was laid up with a sprained leg and Pasternak was reluctant to meet an unknown foreigner. They agreed to send Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, who took her younger brother with her. They were handed a shabby black suitcase and when it was opened back in the apartment, Ivinskaya and Pasternak “gasped with astonishment: instead of books, it contained bundles of Soviet banknotes in wrappers, all neatly stacked together, row upon row of them.”

Pasternak gave Ivinskaya one bundle and took the suitcase to Peredelkino.

The Italians agreed to take back some documents to Feltrinelli. Garritano and his wife lost the papers while vacationing in the Caucasus, including a signed instruction that gave Ivinskaya control over Pasternak’s royalties. When she noticed the papers were gone, Mirella Garritano thought the documents might have fallen out of her bag during a rainstorm. Her husband suspected they were being watched and the documents were stolen when she put her bag down at a party. In August, Ivinskaya separately forwarded to Feltrinelli a power of attorney that Pasternak had signed in December 1956 and gave her “power to carry out all tasks related to the publication of the novel Doctor Zhivago.” But this did not provide any broad authority to manage his posthumous affairs.

The Garritanos’ carelessness made for a very complicating loss. Pasternak left no will, and often unseemly struggles for control over various parts of his legacy began almost immediately after his death and were litigated by friends and family well into the 1990s.

In late 1959, Feltrinelli had sent Pasternak a new contract, which gave the Milan publisher control over the film rights for Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak’s other writings, and also sidelined de Proyart as the author’s second legally sanctioned adviser in the West. Hesitant about offending his French friend, Pasternak procrastinated for several months. Pressed by both Ivinskaya and the German journalist Heinz Schewe, Feltrinelli’s trusted courier to Moscow, Pasternak eventually signed the contract in April 1960.

In the week after the funeral, Ivinskaya wrote to Feltrinelli and after mentioning her “terrible sorrow” told him that they urgently had to talk about practical matters. “In April, when Boris wanted to dedicate himself exclusively to his drama and already felt weak, he wrote me a power of attorney for you,” she said, referring to the material she had entrusted to the Garritanos. “It says that he wishes my signature to be as valid as his own whether it concerns financial agreements or any other sort of document.” She wrote that D’Angelo’s friends would pass it along. She also promised to support Feltrinelli in any conflict with Pasternak’s family, including his sisters in England. “The Pasternak family has no claim to the publishing rights,” Ivinskaya wrote. “The last power of attorney is the agreement I just informed you about.”

Feltrinelli wrote back to Ivinskaya to tell her that he thought D’Angelo’s methods “were too dangerous” and she should trust only the German correspondent. In his own effort at spycraft, Feltrinelli enclosed half of a thousand-lira banknote and told Ivinskaya that in the absence of Schewe she should deal with the person who could produce the other half of the bill. Ivinskaya thought the banknote was something out of a “bad thriller,” and she would pay a steep price for possessing it.

Ivinskaya said she hadn’t had a “quiet moment” since she learned the documents were gone and feared what would happen if they fell into the wrong hands. “My dear, dear Giangiacomo. Let’s hope that the most horrible thing will not happen and that I will keep my liberty, for as long as it takes.”

Following the death of the author, Feltrinelli hoped that Ivinskaya could continue to entrust him with Pasternak’s affairs. The publisher had no previous contact with Pasternak’s wife and children, and his adviser Schewe was predisposed to Ivinskaya, not the widow, Zinaida. “I will always make sure that a substantial part of the profits is left for you and Irina,” Feltrinelli promised Ivinskaya. He also told her that his contracts with Pasternak “must never end up in the hands of the authorities or the Pasternak family.”

Excluding Pasternak’s family was a venal suggestion, and one that would be exploited by the Soviet Union. But it didn’t entirely reflect Feltrinelli’s position. He accepted Ivinskaya as Pasternak’s executor but told her “not to get involved in a battle in Moscow” and to be “generous with money matters,” for there could be “dangerous enemies.”

Unaware of Feltrinelli’s misgivings, D’Angelo continued with his own plans. In July, he gave a second, large installment of cash to another Italian couple, the Benedettis, who drove to Moscow from Berlin in a Volkswagen Beetle. The money was hidden in the paneling of the car. When they arrived in Moscow, the couple carried the cash to Ivinskaya’s apartment in a large rucksack. The Benedettis brought in 500,000 rubles, which was worth about $125,000 at the official exchange rate, but could be acquired for much less, about $50,000, on the gray market in Western Europe.

Ivinskaya tried to refuse the money after her daughter sensed the danger in accepting it. But the Benedettis had come too far not to complete their mission. “You have no right to refuse it,” they said. “This is a personal debt.” Ivinskaya’s caution was short-lived. She bought a motorcycle for her son and, on the day of her arrest, a polished wardrobe, part of a shopping spree certain to draw attention to a woman with no visible income. Some of the hasty spending may have been caused by a currency reform that would have required Soviet citizens to turn in old rubles for new by the end of the year. The Pasternaks were also involved in some head-turning spending. In April, shortly before his death, Pasternak bought a new car, a Volga, for 45,000 rubles, a strikingly big-ticket cash purchase for an author who had ostensibly lost a great deal of income after the Nobel Prize controversy.

The KGB began to pressure Ivinskaya almost immediately after Pasternak’s funeral. She was visited by a “thick-set man with black eyes” who produced the red identity card of a KGB agent and demanded the manuscript of Pasternak’s work in progress, The Blind Beauty. Ivinskaya was told that unless she produced the original copy she would be “taken to a place that will certainly be more traumatic.” Ivinskaya handed it over, but soon after arranged for Schewe to get another copy of the play out of the country. Feltrinelli promised not to publish it without Ivinskaya’s permission.

The secret police also began to isolate Ivinskaya’s family. Irina was engaged to a French student, Georges Nivat. But before the August 20 wedding he fell ill with a mysterious illness. He was hospitalized after he broke out in blisters over much of his body and started running a high temperature. He recovered but his visa was not renewed and he was forced to fly home to France on August 10. All pleas on his behalf, including directly to Khrushchev from the French ambassador to the Soviet Union, were ignored. In retrospect, Irina considered the possibility that Nivat’s contagious disease and hospitalization were not accidental, but organized to stop the marriage.

Day-to-day harassment of Ivinskaya and her family was stepped up. “Strange groups of young people” hung around outside the Moscow apartment, and when Olga and her daughter went out they were shadowed by men who made no effort to hide themselves—repeating a tactic from the days of the Nobel Prize controversy.

On August 16, the day of Ivinskaya’s arrest, her rental home in Peredelkino and her apartment in Moscow were searched—as were the homes of some of her friends. She had hidden the remaining money as well as some of Pasternak’s papers in a suitcase in a neighbor’s house, where it was found. Pasternak’s house was also searched by two agents, who said they were acting on information from Ivinskaya that Pasternak had received one hundred pairs of boots and fifty coats from abroad, as well as cash. The lead about the clothing was patently false, and it’s doubtful there was any such “tip” from Ivinskaya. The search was probably focused on finding money and documents.

Sandwiched between two agents, Ivinskaya was driven to the Lubyanka—KGB headquarters—where she had been held in 1949.

“I was overcome by a peculiar feeling of indifference,” she recalled. “Now that Borya was in his grave, perhaps it was just as well that I had been plucked out of the hopeless dead-end of my existence.”

The twenty-two-year-old Irina was arrested on September 5. She was interrogated every day but never for more than two hours. “After all, you are a teeny-weeny criminal,” her investigator said.

Feltrinelli learned of Ivinskaya’s arrest in early September. “We have read all of your letters at once, as soon as we came home from vacation, and are absolutely appalled,” he wrote to Schewe. “The sequence of events—with the culmination in your last letter—is truly awful. This, unfortunately, is due to the carelessness and temporary mistrust in us of our lady friend who, against all cautions and warnings, took advantage of the other party whose goals are very shady.” He was apparently referring to D’Angelo’s couriers.

“As for D’Angelo, I am really in the dark,” he continued. “We are dealing here either with a provocateur or an idiot.”

At first the mother and daughter were held in secret; there was no announcement of their arrest. D’Angelo and his wife visited Moscow in September, unaware of what had happened. They checked in at the Hotel Ukraine, the Stalinist skyscraper near their old apartment by the Moscow River. When he called Ivinskaya, a strange female voice answered and said she wasn’t home. The following day when D’Angelo called back, someone that he believed to be Irina told him, “Mom’s on vacation in the south and she won’t be back until the end of the month.”

“Well, maybe we could get together with just you and Mitya,” said D’Angelo.

The fake Irina eventually agreed that they could come over, but when they did, only Mitya, Ivinskaya’s son, was at home. He said his sister was really sorry but “she had to leave rather suddenly. She had a chance to get a ride with friends who are driving to the south and she wants to go visit our mother.”

The boy seemed nervous and uncomfortable. The conversation was being monitored. D’Angelo and his wife withdrew.

At the Lubyanka, Ivinskaya was again subjected to daily interrogations. At one point, she was questioned by Vadim Tikunov, the deputy chairman of the KGB, whose involvement signaled the importance the authorities attached to the case. Ivinskaya described him as consisting of three spheres: “his backside, his belly and his head.”

When Ivinskaya was brought before Tikunov, a copy of Doctor Zhivago lay on his desk, along with some of Pasternak’s letters to her.

“You disguised it very well,” he said, “but we know perfectly well that the novel was written not by Pasternak but by you. Look, he says so himself.”

Tikunov quoted from one of Pasternak’s letters to Ivinskaya: “It was you who did it all, Olyusha! Nobody knows that it was you who did it all—you guided my hand and stood behind me, all of it I owe to you.”

“You have probably never loved a woman,” said Ivinskaya, “so you don’t know what it means, and the sort of things people think and write at such a time.”

Ivinskaya was indicted on November 10, 1960.

The trial began and ended on December 7, a day of driving sleet. Ivinskaya and her daughter were brought to Moscow City Court on Kalanchevskaya Street in Black Marias. They were overjoyed to see each other and “could not stop talking.”

There were no witnesses, family, or press in the courtroom—only the judge, lawyers, court staff, and investigators. Some of Irina’s friends had learned of the trial, probably from the defense attorneys, and they stood at the gates of the courthouse to wave to the women as they were driven in.

The prosecutor told the court that the correspondence between Ivinskaya and Feltrinelli convinced him that the novel was sent abroad by Olga, although Pasternak had also “sold himself to the Western warmongers.” The prosecutor said he was uncertain who had actually written the novel—Pasternak or Ivinskaya—but the point was moot as the charges were limited to currency smuggling and trading. The half of Feltrinelli’s thousand-lira note was produced in court, and the roster of couriers was detailed along with the amounts of money they smuggled in.

Ivinskaya’s lawyers argued that Ivinskaya and her daughter had smuggled nothing and had never exchanged foreign currency for rubles. Moreover, they said, Feltrinelli and his emissaries were following Pasternak’s instructions. And the lawyers questioned why couriers who were under surveillance were never arrested.

There was never any doubt about the verdict, but when the length of the sentence was announced, there was utter bewilderment at its severity—eight years forced labor for Ivinskaya, three years for Irina.

In January, the two women were sent by train to a camp in Taishet, Siberia, nearly three thousand miles east of Moscow. The nearest city was Krasnoyarsk. Surrounded by common criminals and nuns who sang about Christ, they were kept in cages inside the train coaches on the journey east. The cold was terrible and Irina was wearing only a light spring coat. The final leg of the trip was a forced walk at night in temperatures of minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. Ivinskaya found it “unbearable for Muscovites like [her and Irina] who were quite unused to such bitter cold.”

The regime at the camp, a facility for women convicted of political offenses, proved not to be too harsh. The barracks were warm, there was a banya (sauna), and parcels from Moscow arrived without difficulty. Olga and Irina were nicknamed the “Pasternachkis” by the other inmates. But their stay was short-lived. While they were being transported to the camp in Taishet, the Gulag—the system of forced-labor camps that began under Stalin—was officially abolished. After several weeks, the women were sent back west to Potma—the camp where Ivinskaya had served her time between 1950 and 1953 and part of the penitentiary system.

Word about the arrest and trial seeped out slowly. At first a number of Western writers and academics, including Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bertrand Russell, wrote quiet appeals to the Soviet authorities, which were ignored. Russell, an elderly philosopher who had campaigned hard for unilateral nuclear disarmament, told Khrushchev in a letter that the Soviet persecution of Olga and Irina “was the sort of thing that made my campaign for better relations with Russia extremely difficult.”

The news broke publicly January 18. The New York Times described the sentence as a “pure act of revenge” against “Boris Pasternak’s close collaborator and intimate friend, who inspired the novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ and served as the model for its heroine, Larisa.”

Radio Moscow responded on January 21. The English-language broadcast described the smuggling of cash and quoted from Feltrinelli’s letter in July in which he asked Ivinskaya not to let his contracts with Pasternak fall into the hands of the authorities or the Pasternak family. The report said that Ivinskaya had confessed, and it ended with an arch commentary that recalled Hamlet’s description of his mother: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” A week later the international broadcaster followed up and recapped the prosecution in a long commentary in Italian: “The dream of fantastic riches impelled her to crime and she began to trade Pasternak’s name, wholesale and retail. The more the author’s health declined, the greater grew the trade; even death did not stop business.”

The report went on to detail what it described as “a whole conspiratorial system, similar to those usually described in thrillers. They had everything: a code language, clandestine meetings, aliases and even identification codes: an Italian currency note cut in half was used as identification token.”

The broadcast concluded that “the last page of this sordid history is closed: the Moscow City Court, on behalf of millions of Soviet citizens whose land has been besmirched by these dregs of society, bought with dollars, lire, francs and marks, has pronounced sentence.”

In the West, the story was far from over. The prosecution of Ivinskaya was seen as a continuation of the Nobel campaign against Pasternak. “People in the West will be justified in asking what one can expect, on the level of relations between states, from a regime which displays so little courage and generosity toward its own citizens and so little respect for the great culture of which—in many ways—it is the custodian,” wrote the retired American diplomat George Kennan in a letter to The New York Times. The Times of London concluded that the “radio statement is much too vindictive in its wording and too melodramatic to be swallowed whole.”

The basis of the Soviet case against Ivinskaya was challenged. Feltrinelli released a statement on January 28: “As Boris Pasternak’s publisher I have preferred hitherto to refrain from making any statement, because I maintain that controversy in this matter does not help the persons involved in the case—not even the late author’s family. So gross, however, are the inaccuracies reported by the most varied sources that it is my duty to state today a fact of which I am personally aware.

“I myself know that the 100,000 dollars, converted entirely or in part into rubles and transmitted to Moscow, came from funds at the disposal of Boris Pasternak in the West. The amount in question was withdrawn on a written order in the author’s own hand, dated 6th December 1959.”

Feltrinelli said the order arrived in the West in March 1960.

“In conclusion, it is my opinion that Olga Ivinskaya is not responsible either for the transfer of the sum or for its eventual destination. In the first place, the transfer order was given, I repeat, by Pasternak himself; secondly, it was Pasternak himself who wished that the sum converted into rubles should be sent, without distinction, either to himself or to Mrs. Ivinskaya.

“Nor can one rule out that the wish of the author was, in fact to consider Olga Ivinskaya as his heiress. I trust therefore that the Soviet judicial authorities will take into account the circumstances which I have related, which are all confirmed by irrefutable documents.”

D’Angelo also published a series of articles that included the text from Pasternak’s letters to him and contained “irrefutable proof to the effect that it was the author himself who requested and received the money.” And Nivat told reporters in Paris, “Knowing the ties between Boris Pasternak and Madame Ivinskaya, I know that she would never have undertaken anything without his initiative.” Through a friend Nivat asked Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who in 1958 was the first royal to visit the Soviet Union, to intervene. “Had Boris Pasternak, whom I loved as a father, still lived, this would not have happened,” he wrote.

Surkov entered the fight with an interview in the French Communist daily, L’Humanité. He expressed surprise that he was getting letters from writers such as Graham Greene. “What, you intervene and demand the liberation of rogues of whom you know nothing? Now this is really a question of an illegal currency deal and is not connected with Pasternak, who was a great poet. His family, it must be said, has nothing to do with this sordid story. All these rumors offend the writer’s memory. If people abroad wish to respect his memory then they should not stir up mud around him, just because among his friends there was an adventuress.”

Surkov also wrote to David Carver, the general secretary of International PEN, to say that Ivinskaya “advertised her intimacy with Pasternak” and “despite her advanced age (48) did not stop to have many parallel and frequent intimate relations with other men.”

The following month, Surkov and Alexei Adzhubei visited Britain. They brought with them what they called documentary evidence proving Ivinskaya’s guilt, including photographs of bundles of rubles; a photograph of the now-famous half of Feltrinelli’s thousand-lira note; a letter from Feltrinelli to Ivinskaya; and a copy of a handwritten statement Ivinskaya gave to the KGB.

“We have brought documents and letters which will give you absolute evidence that she was mixed up in some very dirty business, which could only harm Mr. Pasternak’s name,” said Adzhubei at a press conference in London.

The Soviet officials in London had little understanding of how Ivinskaya’s alleged confession would be read in the West: “Everything in the accusation is the essential truth,” she wrote. “For my part, I dispute none of it. (Perhaps with the exception of details about which I myself may have become confused owing to my nervous condition.) On the other hand, I wish to thank the interrogator for his tact and correctness, not only in connection with me, but also with my archives, which have been carefully sorted, part of them returned to me, part delivered to the [literary archive], and nothing which I wanted to preserve destroyed.”

Adzhubei demanded that British newspapers publish the documents “without comment whatsoever” and accused the British press of censorship when editors told him that this was not how journalism in the West was practiced. The British press also pointed out that none of this material had been published in the Soviet Union and noted that the case against Ivinskaya had been subject to an almost total news blackout.

Surkov persisted in his efforts to cast Pasternak as a great poet who was exploited in his old age by Ivinskaya. And the state began to publish some of Pasternak’s work but not, of course, Doctor Zhivago. A literary committee “was formed a month after the poet’s death to arrange for the publication of his work of which all Russians are very fond,” Surkov announced. It was a mixed group of friends and family, including Vsevolod Ivanov, Ehrenburg, Zinaida and Pasternak’s sons, as well as some officials. Several months later, Surkov made a selection of Pasternak’s poetry for a collection to be published by Goslit, the state publishing house. Some of Pasternak’s family and friends objected to the choice of poems and the slimness of the volume, but Zinaida Pasternak was happy to see anything published and get some income. “I don’t care how it looks,” she said, “as long as they put it out quickly.”

Zinaida was left in poor straits in the wake of Pasternak’s death. She spent a good deal of money on specialist care in the weeks before his death, and had no way to access the royalties that sat in bank accounts in the West. She suggested that the Soviet government repatriate and take all of the royalties if they would just give her a pension. “I’m a pauper,” she complained to Chukovsky.

In August 1961, she asked Surkov if the family could transfer royalties held abroad for Pasternak’s poems and other works, but not from Doctor Zhivago, which they would reject for “moral reasons.” Surkov supported an effort to help her, noting in a memo to his colleagues that “she has practically no means of subsistence” and “has always been and is loyal to the Soviet power.” She “never approved” of Pasternak’s novel, he added.

Polikarpov, the Central Committee bureaucrat in charge of cultural matters, rejected any attempt to withdraw money from accounts held abroad, arguing that it could lead to “yet another anti-Soviet campaign in the reactionary press.”

“It seems appropriate to stop discussing this issue,” he wrote.

In 1966, a number of writers and artists wrote to the Politburo to ask for a pension for Zinaida, who had suffered a series of heart attacks since her husband’s death. Polikarpov blocked it, apparently because he “had a longstanding dislike for Zinaida … who he viewed as overly blunt and lacking in cultural refinement.”

Zinaida never saw a ruble and died on June 28, 1966. She was buried next to her husband. Zinaida and Pasternak’s son, Leonid, died ten years later of a heart attack while sitting in his car near Manège Square in central Moscow. He was only thirty-eight.

The money continued to pile up in Western Europe. In 1964, Feltrinelli sold the film rights to Zhivago to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $450,000. Feltrinelli insisted that the screenplay not misrepresent or distort “the author’s ideas in a way that might lead to their being attributed with a meaning and a political orientation that was not in conformity” with his intentions. In Hollywood, this was dismissed as posturing, and the film’s producer, Carlo Ponti, thought that Feltrinelli “didn’t give a damn, all he wanted was the money.” The film, starring Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, was directed by David Lean, and key scenes were shot in Spain and Finland. The movie was a major hit, and introduced vast numbers of people who had never read the novel to the story of Doctor Zhivago. The movie was banned in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Foreign Ministry protested to the United States embassy when American diplomats held private showings of Doctor Zhivago in their apartments. The ministry labeled the screenings “frankly provocative” and said the movie, like the book, “falsified Soviet history and the life of the Soviet people.”

The film, like most adaptations, was not entirely faithful to the novel, and was criticized for its naïve rendering of history and its melodrama. But like the novel, the film had a huge impact on popular culture. Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara are still remembered in those roles, the cinematography was breathtaking, and the music of “Lara’s Theme” by Maurice Jarre remains instantly familiar. Adjusted for inflation, Doctor Zhivago is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.

One Russian reader of Doctor Zhivago who changed his mind about the novel was Khrushchev. The Soviet leader was ousted in October 1964 by his colleagues, including Vladimir Semichastny, the former youth leader who compared Pasternak to a pig and had since risen to become chairman of the KGB. In retirement, Khrushchev’s son gave him a typewritten, samizdat copy, and he took a long time to read it. “We shouldn’t have banned it,” he said. “I should have read it myself. There’s nothing anti-Soviet in it.”

In his memoirs, Khrushchev reflected, “In connection with Doctor Zhivago, some might say it’s too late for me to express regret that the book wasn’t published. Yes, maybe it is too late. But better late than never.”

In October 1965, Mikhail Sholokhov, the candidate long favored by the Kremlin, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy said the award was “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he had given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people.”

Sholokhov proved to be an ungracious winner. “I am the first Russian writer, the first Soviet writer to win the Nobel Prize,” he told a press conference in Moscow. “It is natural that I should feel proud. It did come rather late, however.”

Pasternak, he said, “was just an internal émigré” and “I am not going to change my opinion of Pasternak just because he’s dead.”

Sholokhov did change his opinion of the academy, which he had said was “not objective in its judgment of an individual author’s worth” when Pasternak won the prize. But in 1965, he “gratefully” accepted the honor.

In Moscow, too, the academy was no longer depicted as a stooge of the West. “The fact that this bright talent has received the world’s recognition is estimated by Soviet writers as a victory of Soviet literature,” said Leonid Leonov, a Union of Soviet Writers official. “This is the rehabilitation of the Nobel Prize itself as an objective and noble recognition of literary talent.”

The Swedish Academy’s rehabilitation did not last very long. In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had chronicled life in the Gulag, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Then, the Union of Soviet Writers said that “it is deplorable that the Nobel committee allowed itself to be drawn into an unseemly game that was not started in the interests of the development of the spiritual values and traditions of literature but was prompted by speculative political consideration.”

Ivinskaya was released from prison in late 1964; Irina had been released two years earlier, also after serving half her sentence. While at the camp in Potma, Ivinskaya had written to Khrushchev to plead for clemency, particularly for her daughter, whom she described as “dying slowly right in front of my eyes.” In June 1961, The New York Times reported that Ivinskaya and her daughter were seriously ill and hospitalized. Irina was reported to have a stomach ulcer.

“I am not saying that I am not guilty because I believe Pasternak was guilty,” wrote Ivinskaya at the start of the letter, dated March 10, 1961. Nor did she blame Pasternak, although she was frank in her descriptions of his involvement in the effort to bring in his royalties. “One cannot just present [Pasternak] as an innocent lamb,” she said, stating the plainest of facts. “This does not deceive anyone and neither does my ‘criminal case.’ ”

In the long, rambling letter that sprawled over sixteen handwritten pages, Ivinskaya argued that the case against her was flawed, if not ludicrous. And she expressed disbelief that her daughter, “this girl,” was imprisoned—“and for what? Just for holding the suitcase … ?”

Ivinskaya said she only learned at KGB headquarters that the receipt of money from abroad—even though such transactions weren’t particularly appealing—had damaged the state. She noted, as had her defense lawyers and Pasternak’s defenders in the West, that the author had received royalties from abroad for some time and the money helped support Pasternak and his family. Ivinskaya mentioned the Pasternak family’s purchase of a new car. “It was impossible not to know the money came from abroad,” she wrote.

“I shared Pasternak’s life for 14 years and in most cases I shared not his royalties but all his misfortunes and the vicissitudes of his fate and very often in contrast to my beliefs,” she continued. “But I loved him and I did my best as my friends joked to shield him with my ‘broad back.’ And he believed that I was his closest and dearest person, the person whom he needed most.”

She noted—as she would later in her memoir—that she intervened with D’Angelo to delay publication of Doctor Zhivago and that the Central Committee had asked her to stop Pasternak from meeting foreigners. In that, she had an even sterner ally in Zinaida Pasternak.

Ivinskaya concluded that Pasternak would “turn in his coffin if he found out the terrible end of my life was caused by him.

“Please return me and my daughter to life. I promise I will live the rest of my life so that it will be good for my country.”

The letter was accompanied by a report from the camp commander on the “characteristics of the detainee.” Ivinskaya was described as conscientious, modest, and polite, and it was noted that she “correctly understands” the politics of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. But the commander added that “she feels her conviction was wrong, that she was convicted for a crime she did not commit.”

Tendentious excerpts from Ivinskaya’s letter to Khrushchev were published in a Moscow newspaper in 1997 when Ivinskaya’s heirs were in a dispute with the State Archives of Literature and Art over some of Pasternak’s papers. The article, employing selective quotes, attempted to smear Ivinskaya as a KGB informer. The complete letter was not published. Unfortunately, the effort to damage Ivinskaya’s reputation largely succeeded, as the article’s allegation was uncritically reproduced in the Western press. A reading of the full letter, which is available in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, simply doesn’t support the label of informer. The KGB, in its own secret assessment, described Ivinskaya as anti-Soviet. The letter is the plea of a desperate woman who tried to ingratiate herself to the Soviet leader—as did countless other inmates who sought mercy from the Kremlin.

After her release, Ivinskaya resumed her career as a literary translator and started writing about her life. Her memoirs were taken out of the Soviet Union in 1976 by Yevtushenko and published under the title A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak. She died in 1995 at the age of eighty-three. Her daughter, Irina Yemelyanova, lives in Paris and has published two memoirs of her own.

Sergio D’Angelo lives in Viterbo, Italy, and continues to write about the Zhivago affair and charm guests as easily as he did Pasternak. He unsuccessfully sued Feltrinelli for half of Pasternak’s royalties in the 1960s. He believed he had a claim to the money because of a note Pasternak had written, asking that D’Angelo be rewarded. D’Angelo had hoped to use the royalties to establish a literary prize in Pasternak’s name that would be “awarded to writers who have championed the cause of freedom.” The court battle was protracted and D’Angelo finally abandoned his appeal of a lower-court ruling. The English translation of his memoir is available online.

In 1966, the Pasternak family, with the support of the Soviet authorities, began to negotiate a settlement with Feltrinelli over the royalties and the transfer of Pasternak’s money to the Soviet Union. “It seems to me that the time has come for frankness and loyalty, all the more fitting by way of a tribute to the memory of the late Poet,” Feltrinelli wrote to Alexander Volchkov, the president of the College of International Jurists in Moscow, and the Pasternak family’s representative. “The time is therefore ripe, in my opinion, for all of us to take a more open and straightforward step forward, including those who at the time showed no mercy to the noble figure of the late Poet.”

A deal took several years to reach—so long that the Soviets, on their visits to Milan, “learned to wind spaghetti around their forks,” in the words of Feltrinelli’s son. Schewe reported that Ivinskaya was “bellicose and uncompromising as ever” and reluctant to share the estate, although she had no legal standing to challenge any agreement. She received the equivalent of $24,000 in rubles in acknowledgment of her role as Pasternak’s “faithful companion” when a final settlement was reached in 1970.

By that year, Feltrinelli’s political passions were beginning to consume him. After he broke with the Italian Communist Party, he felt like he “no longer believed in anything. No type of commitment either ideological or political.” But two visits to Cuba in 1964 and 1965, and long discussions with Fidel Castro, whose memoirs he hoped to publish, had a rejuvenating effect on Feltrinelli. Here was a political experiment he could admire. The Cold War adversaries seemed hopelessly corrupt to him as the 1960s progressed—the Americans were killing in Vietnam and Soviet tanks were smothering the Prague Spring. In Italy, Feltrinelli feared a Fascist coup. The publisher gradually and then completely immersed himself in a radical, anti-imperialist struggle, and his views hardened to the point that he advocated “the use of systematic and progressive counter-violence” to ensure the success of the Italian working class. For the Italian secret services, he was fast becoming an enemy of the state. When bombs exploded in Milan at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricultura, killing sixteen and injuring eighty-four, Feltrinelli’s name was floated as a suspect by the police. He could have fought the accusation, but instead went underground—seeking “untraceability,” as he called it. “It is the only condition that allows me to serve the cause of socialism,” he said in a letter to his staff. He moved from place to place between Italy, Switzerland, France, and Austria. He assumed new identities. He was unsuited to a life on the run and seemed increasingly haggard and disoriented. “He’s lost,” his wife, Inge Schönthal Feltrinelli, wrote in her diary. When she met him in Innsbruck in April 1970, she failed to recognize him. “He looked like a tramp.” A year later, when the Bolivian consul in Hamburg—a regime thug—was assassinated, the gun was traced to Feltrinelli. He was not involved in the conspiracy but probably met the assassin through his Latin American contacts and gave her the gun—a .38 Colt Cobra—on the Côte d’Azur. There was now no way back. He was a revolutionary outlaw. He wrote a long letter to the Red Brigades, a violent Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group, suggesting that they work together on “a political, strategic and tactical platform.” Later in 1971, he wrote a new manifesto, Class Struggle or Class War?—a call for the revolutionary movement to confront, wear down, and disarm the political and military power of its adversary.

On March 15, 1972, the body of a man was found under a high-voltage electricity pylon in a suburb of Milan. It was Feltrinelli. He was killed when the bomb he and some co-conspirators planned to use to cause a power cut went off prematurely. “Did the explosion happen because of a sharp movement up on the crossbar (the fabric of the pocket pressing against the timer, the pin making contact) or did someone set the time with minutes instead of hours?” Feltrinelli’s son Carlo asked in his memoir of his father. “The answer might close the story, but it would not resolve what really matters.”

In 1988 and 1989, as he rode the subway in Moscow, the journalist David Remnick was arrested by an incredible sight: “ordinary people reading Pasternak in their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir.” The intelligentsia had long since read Doctor Zhivago and the other banned works of seven decades of censorship. Now it was the turn of ordinary people to experience the excitement of what for so long had been forbidden.

Official attitudes toward Pasternak began to soften in the early 1980s—before the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader and his policy of glasnost allowed the publication of banned works. Pasternak’s former protégés, including the poets Voznesensky and Yevtushenko, began to agitate for the publication of Doctor Zhivago. Voznesensky described publication as a litmus test of the times, an act necessary to lance the past. “It will be a triumph over the witch hunt against anti-Sovietism,” he said.

“You destroy the black magic myth,” he continued. “The lie against Pasternak will be dead. It will be a revolution.”

The magazine Ogonyok (Little Flame) published some short excerpts from Doctor Zhivago in December 1987. From January to April 1988, Novy Mir, the journal that first rejected Doctor Zhivago, serialized the novel and Soviet readers could finally and openly read Pasternak’s work in full. A first legal Russian edition appeared the following year and the copyright line read: “Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano.”

At the V. I. Lenin State Library, which was later renamed the Russian State Library, a copy of the CIA edition of Doctor Zhivago that had been hidden away since 1959 was transferred out of the Spetskhran (Special Collections) and made available to the public, albeit on a controlled basis because the edition is considered very precious. In libraries across Russia, thousands of titles and “a wealth of noncommunist philosophy, political science, history, and economics and the treasure trove of Russian émigré memoirs and literature” emerged from the hidden stacks.

Olga Carlisle, who had interviewed Pasternak shortly before his death, was in Moscow at the time Doctor Zhivago began to appear. On a spring evening on Gorky Street, she and a friend saw a line of two or three hundred people. Carlisle’s companion, a Muscovite, joined the queue out of habit before knowing what was for sale, an old Soviet instinct in case some rare consumer good or food had made it to the threadbare shelves of the city’s stores. The line ended at a bookstore and the crowd, they soon learned, was expecting a shipment of copies of Doctor Zhivago the following morning.

Also in 1989, the Swedish Academy invited Yevgeny Pasternak, who along with his wife, Yelena, had become the tireless compiler and editor of Boris Pasternak’s complete works, to come to Stockholm. In a brief ceremony in the academy’s great hall on December 9, Sture Allén, the permanent secretary, read the telegrams Pasternak had sent accepting and then rejecting the Nobel Prize in October 1958. Yevgeny was overcome with emotion when he stepped forward and on behalf of his father accepted the gold medal for the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.