The CIA's Favorite Novel - Christian Caryl / The National Interest

THE NATIONAL INTEREST
JUNE 25, 2014


                                     the CIA's favorite novel 
                                                 by Christian Caryl

                                                            Boris Pasternak

Why the CIA helped sneak Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union -- and how the censor ultimately won.

CHRISTIAN CARYL
June 25, 2014

Peter Finn and Petro Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbiden Book ( New York: Pantheon Books, 2014, 369 pp., 826. 95

WE LIKE to think ourselves as creatures of causality.  We cling to the belief that our choices will have predictable effects on the course of our lives.  But that's somewhat that illusory.  And the illusion is even more pronounced in dictatorship, where the powers that be have then own views about the vagaries of individual fate.

When Boris Pasternak handed the manuscript of his novel Doctor Zhivago to the representatives of an Italian publisher in the spring of 1956, he almost certainly didn't envision the chain of events that this simple act would set in motion.  He wasn't planning on the book becoming a global literary sensation.  He probably didn't suspect that he would prompt an elaborate covert action ny the Central Intelligence Agency, whose opeartions saw his novel as the perfect opportunity for a cultural drone strike, exposing for all the world to see the Soviet Communist Party's  prodigious contempt for genuine creativity.

There was, however, one thing that Pasternak foresaw quite accurately the storm that was about to break.  His decision to have the book published overseas, by passing the party's entrenched mechanisms of artistic control, was bound to trigger a vicious reaction from the Soviet leardship.  He had seen enough to know.  Born in 1890, he had weathered revolution, civil war and Stalin's terrors relatively unscatted  --  but in this respect he was an extraordinary exception.  Already established in the 1920's as one of the great Russian poets of his generation he had watched as his most illustrious contemporaries were goaded into suicide ( Vladimir Maiakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva),  sent to die in the gulag ( Osip Mandelstam), or forced to endure public humiliation and the killing or improsonment of their lived ones.  ( Anna Akhamatova.)

Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, the authors of this remarkable biography of Pasternak's  novel and the global scandal it spwaned, deftly illuminate this background.  As they explain, Pasternak's former next  --  door neighboor, the novelist Boris Pilynak, " was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head in April 1938, " Isaak Babel, the great chronicler of Jewish life in the Black Sea city of Odessa ( from which both of Pasternak's parents hailed), met the same end two years later. Finn and Couvée put the number of Soviet writers who were either executed or died in labor camp for various alleged infractions after 1917 at nearly 1, 500.

 I'm not sure when this precise figure comes from, but surely it's on the low side, considering the vast reach of the scythe that out down marry of the leading intellectuals among the USSR's various ehnich groups in the 1980's and 1940's  ( Much depends, I guess, on how the Soviet regime defined the word" writers.") So Pasternak can hardly be acuused of hysteris when he predicted the worst.  On that Sunday morning in May, as Pasternak took his leave from Sergis D'Angelo the visiting Italian Communist whom he had just entrusted with the manuscript, he said, " You are hereby invited to my execution."

It didn't quite come to that --  partly because the immense publicity stirred up by the affair around the book made it virtually impossible for the Politburo to have Pasternak packed off to the uranium mines.  In that respect, for all of her self-professed ignorance of political intrigue, Dr Zhivago's author showed a shrewd sense of timing.  The URSS in the spring of 1956 was still a Communist dictatorship, but it was'nt the same as it had been, say, in 1949, when Stalin's henchman Andrei Zhdanov launched a vicious public campaign against Akhamatova ( famously dubbed
 " half whore, half nun" by Zhdanov) and the satirist Michail Zoschenko, Akhamatova's son Lev Gumilar, whose father had been shot by the Bolcheviks for allegedly counterrevolutionary activities, was dispatched to the camps  --  for the second time. 

Stalin died in 1953.  His successors embarked on a cautious political opening that came to be known, somewhat optimistically, as the " thaw." Millions of prisonners returned home from the camps.  And in February 1956, just a few months before D'Angelo's visit,  Nikita Krushchev had taken matters one dramatic step further by dennouncing Stalin's " cult of personality" to a closed audience of top ranking Communist Party officials.  The party faithfull were stunned by Krushchev's tales of his predecessor's viviousness and caprices : served members of the audience had heart attacks.  For many Soviet citizens, of course, this " news" about Stalin wasn't news at all .  For them, this tentative excorcism of the dictator's ghost prompted a collective sigh of relief. []

    CHRISTINE KARYL

 < vIet-studies.info  >