Chelmsford Public Library

The Zhivago affair, the Kremlin, the CIA, and the battle over a forbidden book, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 325-335) and index

contains biographical information

illustrations

index present

non fiction

The Zhivago affair

bibliography

858366308

Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

the Kremlin, the CIA, and the battle over a forbidden book

Drawing on newly declassified files, this is the story of how a book forbidden in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout paid a visit to Russia's greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the manuscript of Pasternak's first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak believed his novel would never be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as irredeemable--but he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, it was widely published in translation. Then the CIA smuggled a Russian-language edition into the Soviet Union. Copies were sold on the black market and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend, and Pasternak found himself in no small trouble. But his funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government in order to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the Soviet writer-dissident.--From publisher description

Prologue :"This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." -- "The roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off." -- "Pasternak, without realizing it, entered the personal life of Stalin." -- "I have arranged to meet you in a novel." -- "You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel?" -- "Until it is finished, I am a fantastically, manically unfree man." -- "Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture." -- "If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well, I must say we have a different view of it." -- "We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain." -- "We'll do it black." -- "He also looks the genius: raw nerves, misfortune, fatality." -- "There would be no mercy, that was clear." -- "Pasternak's name spells war." -- "I am lost like a beast in an enclosure." -- "A college weekend with Russians" -- "An unbearably blue sky" -- "It's too late for me to express regret that the book wasn't published."