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

Chapter 4

“You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel?”

When World War II ended, Pasternak’s marriage to his second wife, Zinaida, had long since settled into an arid routine. Zinaida ran the household with stern efficiency, and he appreciated her for it. “My wife’s passionate love of work, her skill in everything—in washing, cooking, cleaning, bringing up the children—has created domestic comfort, a garden, a way of life and daily routine, the calm and quiet needed for work.” He told a friend he loved her for her “big hands.” But there was an air of deep regret in the home—“a divided family, lacerated by suffering and constantly looking over our shoulders at that other family, the first ones.” When Zinaida got pregnant in 1937, Pasternak wrote his parents that “her present condition is entirely unexpected, and if abortion weren’t illegal, we’d have been dismayed by our insufficiently joyful response to the event, and she’d have had the pregnancy terminated.” Zinaida later wrote that she very much wanted “Borya’s child,” but her raw fear that her husband could be arrested at any moment—this was the height of the Terror and he was refusing to sign petitions—made it hard to carry the pregnancy.

Zinaida had little interest in Pasternak’s writing, confessing that she didn’t understand his poetry. Her principal diversion was sitting at the kitchen table chain-smoking and playing cards or mah-jongg with her female friends. Hard-edged and frequently ill-humored, Zinaida was described by Akhmatova as “a dragon on eight feet.” But she had earned her unhappiness. In 1937, Adrian, the older of her two sons with her first husband, Genrikh Neigauz, was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, a discovery that began a long and agonizing decline in his health. In 1942, in an effort to arrest the spread of the disease, one of the boy’s legs was amputated, above the knee, and the previously active seventeen-year-old was inconsolable. Adrian died in April 1945 from tubercular meningitis after being infected by the boy next to him in a sanatorium; his mother was by his side there. After his death, his body was held in the morgue for four days for research. When Zinaida saw him again he had been embalmed. She cradled Adrian’s head and was horrified that it was light “as a matchbox.” His brain had been removed. Zinaida remained haunted by the sensation of holding him. She was suicidal for days after the death, and Pasternak remained close, doing chores with her, to distract and comfort her. Adrian’s ashes were buried in the garden in Peredelkino. Zinaida said she neglected her husband and felt old. Intimacy seemed a “curse” to her and she said she could not always “fulfill my duty as a wife.”

On an October 1946 day, just as winter announced itself with a driving snow, Pasternak walked into Novy Mir’s cavernous reception area, a converted former ballroom where Pushkin had once danced, now painted the dark red of Soviet gaud. After he had crossed the long carpet to the back of the room where the junior editors sat, Pasternak encountered two women about to go to lunch. The older of the pair held out her hand to be kissed and said to Pasternak. “Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce one of your most ardent admirers.” The devotee was Olga Ivinskaya, a blond, in an old squirrel-fur coat and an editor at Novy Mir. She was more than twenty years Pasternak’s junior, and later was a source of inspiration for the character Lara in Doctor Zhivago. Pretty, voluptuous, and sexually self-confident despite the prudish mores of Soviet society, the thirty-four-year-old Ivinskaya immediately felt his lingering stare—“so much a man’s appraising gaze that there could be no doubt about it.” As he bowed and took Ivinskaya’s hand, Pasternak inquired as to which of his books she possessed. Just the one, she confessed. Pasternak promised to return with some volumes. “How interesting that I still have admirers.” The next day, five books appeared on Ivinskaya’s desk.

Ivinskaya had recently attended a Pasternak recital at the Historical Museum. It was the first time she had seen him at such close range, and she described him as “tall and trim, extraordinarily youthful, with the strong neck of a young man, and he spoke in a deep low voice, conversing with the audience as one talks with an intimate friend.” When she returned to her flat after midnight, her mother complained about having to get up to let her in. “Leave me alone,” said Ivinskaya, “I’ve just been talking to God.”

Pasternak was typically self-deprecating about his own charms and described the “few women who have had an affair with me” as “magnanimous martyrs so unbearable and uninteresting am I ‘as a man.’ ” He adored and idealized women and described himself as forever stunned and stupefied by their beauty. Among his fellow writers, Pasternak was known for his flings; women were drawn to him. Zinaida said that after the war Pasternak was showered by notes and unexpected visits from young women she chased out of the yard. Pasternak called them “the ballerinas.” One of them sent him a note that she wanted to give birth to a Christ fathered by Pasternak.

Ivinskaya was twice married and had, by her own account, many passing relationships. Her first husband hanged himself in 1940 when he was thirty-two, after she had an affair with the man who would become her second husband. “Poor Mama mourned,” remarked Olga’s daughter, Irina, but her sorrow did not last very long; the forty-day mourning period had scarcely passed when “a guy in a leather coat turned up at the doorstep.” Ivinskaya’s second husband died of an illness during the war but not before informing on his mother-in-law (possibly to get her out of the crowded apartment), who then spent three years in the Gulag for making a slanderous remark about Stalin.

In 1946, Ivinskaya lived with her mother and stepfather; her two children, eight-year-old Irina and five-year-old Dmitri, one by each husband; and her many beloved cats. The fifty-six-year-old Pasternak offered a release from a cramped world and an entrée into Moscow’s salons. “I longed for recognition and wanted people to envy me,” said Ivinskaya. She was seductive and devoted, clingy and calculating. Pasternak was a very big catch.

Ivinskaya had read Pasternak’s poems since she was a girl; she described herself as a fan meeting her idol. “The magician, who had first entered my life so long ago, when I was 16, had now come to me in person, living and real.” Ivinskaya’s daughter would later nickname Pasternak “Classoosha,” an affectionate diminutive of the word classic, and one mother and daughter came to share when referring to the writer.

The romance began as an old-fashioned courtship. Because both Pasternak and Ivinskaya had family at home, the couple had no private retreat. Pasternak would show up at Novy Mir at the end of the workday, and he and Ivinskaya would meander through the streets, talking at great length, before he would bid her farewell at her apartment building.

“I’m in love,” Pasternak told a friend, who asked how this would affect his life. “But what is life?” Pasternak responded. “What is life if not love? And she is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person. And now this golden sun has come into my life, it is so wonderful, so wonderful. I never thought I would still know such joy.” He hated growing old and treated his birthdays as days of mourning, disdaining any attempt to celebrate. This unexpected romance was a time-stopping elixir.

The ritual of walking and talking continued until April when Ivinskaya’s family went out of the city for the day. “As newlyweds spend their first night together [Boris] and I now had our first day together. He was borne up and jubilant over this victory.” That day, Pasternak inscribed a collection of his verse: “My life, my angel. I love you truly. April 4, 1947.”

The early affair, punctuated by unkept promises to end the romance because of the obvious domestic complications, found its way into some of Zhivago’s poetry:

Don’t cry, don’t purse your swollen lips.

Don’t draw them together like that.

Moscow was soon chattering about the deliciously scandalous liaison, and Pasternak’s female friends—some of whom had their own strong feelings for the poet—were less than enamored with Ivinskaya. Some would never trust her. The writer Lydia Chukovskaya, who worked with Ivinskaya at Novy Mir, remarked of one evening that the couple’s “faces could be seen side by side. Her make-up was a dreadful sight next to his natural face. A “pretty but slightly fading blonde,” commented the literary scholar Emma Gerstein, remarking on how, during one reading, she “hurriedly powdered her nose, hiding behind a cupboard.” However, the young poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko who saw her at a Pasternak reading called her “a beauty.”

Zinaida found out about the affair in the winter of 1948 when she found a note sent by Ivinskaya to Pasternak while cleaning his study. Initially she said she felt guilty and that it was all her fault. It also seemed to her that after the war, “in our village community, [the men] started to leave the old wives and replace them with younger ones.” Zinaida confronted Ivinskaya in Moscow, telling her that she didn’t give a damn about their love and she wasn’t going to allow her family to be broken up. She gave Ivinskaya a letter from Pasternak announcing the end of the affair. Ivinskaya’s children overheard conversations that “Mom had tried to poison herself,” her daughter recalled.

Pasternak’s sense of loyalty to Zinaida and their son became a strain as he vacillated between family and flame. The prospect of a second divorce, a third marriage, and all the potential excruciating chaos may have been more than Pasternak wished to endure. The couple huddled in doorways to argue. Ivinskaya returned home furious from these rows and took down Pasternak’s picture. “Where’s your pride, Mama?” asked her daughter after the picture had been put back up yet another time. Ivinskaya’s mother harangued both her daughter and Pasternak about Olga’s status as a mistress, not a wife. “I love your daughter more than my life,” Pasternak told her, “but don’t expect our life to change outwardly all at once.” The affair, at one point, appeared to be over. In a letter to his cousin in August 1949, Pasternak confessed that he had “formed a deep new attachment,” but, he wrote, “since my relationship with [Zinaida] is a genuine one, sooner or later I had to sacrifice the other. Strangely enough, so long as my life was filled with agony, ambivalence, pangs of conscience, even horror, I easily bore it and even took pleasure in things that now, when I have made peace with my conscience and my family, reduce me to a state of unmitigated dreariness: my aloneness, my precarious place in literature, the ultimate pointlessness of my literary efforts, the strange duality of my life ‘here’ and ‘there.’ ” He imagined at one point that he could get Zinaida, Olga, and his first wife, Yevgenia, to sit together happily on the veranda of the dacha with him. “He never wanted to cause anyone grief, but he did,” said a friend.

By 1949, Pasternak was already a figure of some international renown, even if he was banished to the edges of literary life in Moscow. Cecil Maurice Bowra, who held the Oxford Chair of Poetry, had nominated Pasternak for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, an honor that was repeated in 1947 and 1949. Bowra had also included seventeen poems by Pasternak in A Second Book of Russian Verse, which he had edited and was published in London in 1948. An American edition of Pasternak’s Selected Writings appeared in New York in 1949. One of the leading academics in the West called Pasternak “the greatest of Russian poets.” And in July 1950, the International Conference of Professors of English wrote to the Soviet ambassador to Britain to invite Pasternak to Oxford and said, “It appears to us beyond all doubt that the most eminent man of letters … in the Soviet Union today is Boris Pasternak.”

The Kremlin leadership, locked in a global ideological struggle with the West, was exquisitely sensitive to any foreign depiction of Soviet culture and expended great national energy on projecting the country’s intellectual achievements. Simultaneously, the government was pressing an increasingly sinister campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” a policy that had an ugly anti-Semitic complexion. There were persistent rumors that Pasternak would be picked up by the secret police; Akhmatova at one point phoned from Leningrad to check that he was safe. A senior investigator in the prosecutor’s office in 1949 said there were plans to arrest Pasternak. When Stalin was informed, he started to recite “Heavenly color, color blue,” one of the Baratashvili poems that Pasternak had translated and read in Tbilisi in 1945. And then Stalin said, “Leave him, he’s a cloud dweller.”

Ivinskaya enjoyed no such protection; she was a surrogate who could be used to strike directly at her lover. The same pitiless logic was applied to Akhmatova, whose husband and son were both arrested separately in the second half of 1949 while she was physically untouched. On October 9, 1949, the secret police burst into Ivinskaya’s apartment. Nearly a dozen uniformed agents, working through the blue haze of their cigarette smoke, searched the apartment, setting aside for seizure any book, letter, document, or scrap of paper that mentioned Pasternak. Ivinskaya was taken almost immediately to secret-police headquarters—the fearsome Lubyanka building, where she was strip-searched, had her jewelry and bra taken from her, and was placed in a dark, stultifying isolation unit. She was left to stew in her own anxiety for three days before she was moved in with fourteen other female prisoners. The crowded cell was illuminated with harshly bright lamps to ensure that the women were sleep-deprived and disoriented in advance of nighttime interrogations. Ivinskaya recalled that “the prisoners began to feel that time had come to a halt and their world had collapsed about them. They ceased to be sure of their innocence, of what they had confessed to, and which other prisoners they had compromised apart from themselves. In consequence, they signed any raving nonsense put before them.”

Among Ivinskaya’s cellmates was Trotsky’s twenty-six-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra, who had just finished her studies at the Institute of Geology and was accused of copying an illicit poem. Long after Alexandra had left, Ivinskaya continued to remember her desperate wailing as she was taken away to be sent to a camp in Kazakhstan. Another woman who befriended Ivinskaya was a doctor at the Kremlin hospital who had attended a party where incautious remarks were made about Stalin’s mortality.

Two weeks after her arrest, the guards called Ivinskaya out of her cell and led her down several long corridors past closed doors from behind which muffled cries of distress escaped. She was finally placed inside a cupboardlike compartment that rotated and opened into an anteroom. A group of agents fell silent as she appeared, and stood aside as she was ushered into a large office. Behind a desk covered in green baize was Stalin’s minister of state security, Viktor Abakumov, another of the Leader’s violent henchmen. Abakumov led SMERSH, an acronym for “Death to Spies,” during the war. The military counterintelligence unit, which set up blocking positions immediately behind the front lines, killed Soviet soldiers who attempted to retreat. The unit also hunted down deserters and brutally interrogated German prisoners of war. Before torturing his victims, Abakumov was known to unroll a bloodstained carpet to save the sheen on his office floor.

“Tell me now, is Boris anti-Soviet or not, do you think?” began Abakumov, dressed in a military tunic buttoned to the bulging neck.

Before Ivinskaya could reply, Abakumov continued, “Why are you so bitter? You’ve been worrying about him for some reason! Admit it now—we know everything.”

At that moment, Ivinskaya still didn’t realize who was questioning her, and she pushed back with none of the caution an encounter with a monster like Abakumov would demand.

“You always worry about a person you love. As regards whether Boris Leonidovich is anti-Soviet or not—there are too few colors on your palette, only black and white. There is a tragic lack of half-tones.”

The books and materials seized from Ivinskaya’s apartment were piled on the desk in front of Abakumov. The KGB’s accounting of its haul from Ivinskaya’s apartment included: poems by Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Lydia Chukovskaya (to my dear O.V. Ivinskaya); a diary (30 pages); various poems, (460 pages); a “pornographic” poem; various letters (157 pieces); photos of Ivinskaya; and some of her own poems. Among these items was the small red volume of poetry that Pasternak had inscribed after the couple first made love in 1947.

“I would suggest you think very carefully about this novel Pasternak is passing around to people at the moment—at a time when we have quite enough malcontents and enemies as it is,” said Abakumov. “You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel?”

Ivinskaya protested and began to describe the completed part of the novel before she was interrupted.

“You will have plenty of time to think about these questions and how to answer them. But personally I would like you to appreciate that we know everything, and that your own as well as Pasternak’s fate will depend on how truthful you are. I hope that next time we meet you will have nothing to conceal about Pasternak’s anti-Soviet views.”

Abakumov then looked to the guard. “Take her away.”

The subsequent questioning was led by a much more junior official, Anatoli Semyonov, who, like his boss, did not employ physical violence with Ivinskaya. He charged that Ivinskaya was planning to escape abroad together with her lover. He said Pasternak was a British spy, had Anglophile attitudes, and repeatedly used the analogy that Pasternak had sat at the table with the British and Americans “but ate Russian bacon.” For his inquisitors, the fact that Pasternak had family in England and had held several meetings with the British diplomat Isaiah Berlin in 1946 was evidence enough of his disloyalty. Interrogation now became a nightly ordeal, until it went on so many weeks, it became routine, “quite humdrum.”

“How would you characterize Pasternak’s political sentiments? What do you know about his hostile work, his pro-English sentiments, his intention to commit treason?”

“He does not belong to the category of people with anti-Soviet sentiments. He did not have any intention to commit treason. He always loved his country.”

“But in your home we confiscated a book of Pasternak’s works in English. How did it get there?”

“That book I got from Pasternak, that’s true. It is a monograph on his father, the painter, that was published in London.”

“How did Pasternak get it?”

“Simonov [the acclaimed war poet and editor of Novy Mir] brought it to him from a trip abroad.”

“What more do you know about Pasternak’s ties with England?”

“I think he once got a parcel from his sisters, who are living there.”

“What sparked your relationship with Pasternak? He is, after all, a lot older than you.”

“Love.”

“No, you were joined together by your shared political views and treasonous intentions.”

“We never had such intentions. I loved and love him as a man.”

Ivinskaya was also accused of speaking ill of Surkov, although the transcript—which no doubt bowdlerized some of the language and threats of the KGB official—misspelled the loyal poet’s name.

“Facts testified to by witnesses show that you systematically praised the works of Pasternak and contrasted it with the work of patriotic writers such as Surikov and Simonov, whereas the artistic methods of Pasternak in depicting Soviet reality are wrong.”

“It is true that I speak highly of him, and hold him up as an example to all Soviet writers. His work is a great asset to Soviet literature, and his artistic methods are not wrong but just subjective.”

“You suggested that Surikov does not have any literary skills and that his poetry is merely printed because it is in praise of the party.”

“Yes, I think those mediocre poems compromise the idea. But Simonov I always considered a talented man.”

Ivinskaya was told to write a summary of Doctor Zhivago, and when she began to describe it as the life of a physician and intellectual in the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, her interrogator scoffed. “You must simply say that you have actually read this work and that it constitutes a slander on Soviet life.” At one point, Semyonov expressed bewilderment at the poem “Mary Magdalene” and the possibility that it might refer to Ivinskaya. “What era does it refer to? And why have you never told Pasternak that you’re a Soviet woman, not a Mary Magdalene, and that it’s simply not right to give such a title to a poem about a woman he loves?” On another night, he questioned the romance itself. “What have you got in common? I can’t believe that a Russian woman like you could ever really be in love with this old Jew.” When one session was interrupted by some loud clanging in the distance, Semyonov smiled: “Hear that? It’s Pasternak trying to get in here! Don’t worry, he’ll make it before long.”

When Pasternak learned of Ivinskaya’s arrest, he called a mutual friend, who found him sitting on a bench near the Palace of Soviets Metro station. He was crying. “Everything is finished now. They’ve taken her away from me and I’ll never see her again. It’s like death, even worse.”

Several weeks into her detention, Ivinskaya said, it became obvious to her jailors that she was pregnant. Her treatment improved marginally. She was allowed to sleep longer, and salad and bread were added to her diet of porridge. The exhausting interrogations continued but to little avail for Semyonov—Ivinskaya did not break and refused to sign anything that would condemn Pasternak.

She probably became pregnant in late summer, when the couple reconciled after a long break. Pasternak wrote about the moment in the poem “Autumn”:

You fling off your dress

As a coppice sheds its leaves.

In a dressing gown with a silk tassel

You fall into my arms.

(Akhmatova railed at these love poems: “About the gown with the tassels, how she falls in his arms, that’s about Olga, I can’t stand it. At 60, one should not write about these things.”)

Ivinskaya was eventually told to prepare to meet her lover. She was torn between the fear that he was being abused in some nearby cell and joy that she might be able to exchange a few words with him, perhaps even embrace him. Ivinskaya was signed out of the Lubyanka, placed in a wagon with blacked-out windows, and driven to another secret-police facility just outside the city. She was led down into a basement, where she was abruptly pushed through a metal door that shut loudly behind her. It was hard to see. The smell was odd. Beneath her feet water pooled on the whitewashed floors. As Ivinskaya’s eyes adjusted to the semidarkness she saw bodies on a series of tables, each covered with gray tarpaulin. “There was the unmistakable sweetish smell of a morgue. Could it be that one of these corpses was the man I loved?”

Ivinskaya was left locked inside the prison morgue for some time, but the effort to terrorize, or reduce her to some state of despair, failed. “I suddenly felt completely calm. For some reason, as though God had put it in my mind, it dawned on me that the whole thing was a monstrous hoax, and that Borya could not possibly be here.”

Trembling from the cold damp of the morgue, she was led back to her interrogator. “Please forgive us,” said Semyonov. “We made a mistake and took you to the wrong place altogether. It was the fault of the escort guards. But now prepare yourself: We are waiting for you.”

Ivinskaya was next subjected to a ritual of Soviet interrogation: a staged confrontation with a witness who had been primed, almost certainly after torture, to offer evidence of her treachery. The man brought into the room was Sergei Nikiforov, her daughter Irina’s elderly English teacher. Nikiforov had been arrested shortly before Ivinskaya. He looked vacant and unkempt.

“Do you confirm the evidence you gave yesterday that you were present at anti-Soviet conversations between Pasternak and Ivinskaya?”

“Yes, I do. I was present,” Nikiforov said.

Ivinskaya started to object but was told to shut up.

“Now you told us that Ivinskaya informed you of her plan to escape abroad together with Pasternak, and that they tried to persuade an airman to take them out of the country in a plane. Do you confirm this?”

“Yes, that is so.”

“Aren’t you ashamed, Sergei Nikolayevich?” shouted Ivinskaya.

“But you’ve confirmed it all yourself, Olga Vsevolodovna,” he replied.

It was clear then to Ivinskaya that Nikiforov had been induced to provide false evidence after he was told that she had already confessed. Years later, Nikiforov wrote to Ivinskaya: “I have pondered for a long time whether to write to you. In the end, the conscience of an honest man … prompts me to account for the situation in which I put you—believe me, against my will, given the conditions then existing. I know that these conditions were familiar to you, and that to some extent they were experienced by you as well. But they were of course applied to us men more forcefully and severely than to women. Before our meeting at that time, I had repudiated two documents, even though I had signed them. But how many people are able to go boldly, and uprightly, to the scaffold. Unfortunately, I do not belong to their number, because I am not alone. I had to think of my wife and shield her.”

Ivinskaya was driven back to the Lubyanka in what she described as a state of nervous shock after the gruesome theater of the morgue and the draining confrontation with Nikiforov. She said she was suddenly racked with pain and taken to the prison hospital. She was in her fifth month. “Here Borya’s and my child perished before it even had a chance to be born.”

Ivinskaya said that her family had learned of her pregnancy from a cellmate who was released, and they, in turn, had told Pasternak. Word of the miscarriage, however, did not immediately reach them. In the spring of 1950, Pasternak was told to report to the prison by the secret police and he expected to be handed the baby.

“I have told [Zinaida] that we must take it in and care for it until Olya comes back,” he told a friend, adding that his wife made “a terrible scene.”

At the Lubyanka, Pasternak was given a bundle of books and letters. He at first refused to accept them and wrote a letter of protest to Abakumov. It did no good. On July 5, 1950, Ivinskaya was sentenced to five years in a hard-labor camp “for close contact with persons suspected of espionage.”