KZBlog

OK, this post has nothing to do with Kazakhstan per se and the story is already 2 years old. But 2008 marked the 50th anniversary of Boris Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for Dr. Zhivago. Because the Nobel Prize committee seals its records for 50 years, we look forward to the records being made public this month and getting a confirmation.

According to a book by Ivan Tolstoy, The Laundered Manuscript, the CIA helped win Pasternak the Nobel Prize. Pasternak, better known as a poet in Soviet Russia, finished his novel, Dr. Zhivago in 1955. Set during the Russian Revolution, the famous love story espouses anti-Soviet ideals such as individualism and fighting against the politics and culture of the times. Pasternak realized that the novel could cause him serious problems in the Soviet Union and his wife, afraid of the gulag, urged him not to publish it.

However Pasternak sent the manuscript to Novy Mir, the State literary magazine. The government, according to records released in 2001, saw the manuscript as a threat:

Boris Pasternak’s novel is a malicious libel of the USSR,” wrote Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov in an August 1956 memo to members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In a memo of its own, the KGB offered the opinion that “a typical feature of his work is estrangement from Soviet life and a celebration of individualism.”

Pasternak also shared the manuscript with Sergio D’ Angelo, a Moscow-based Italian radio broadcaster and acquaintance of Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was also a member of the communist party. The author also gave typed copies to Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher and to a French specialist in Slavic Studies Helene Peltier.

The communist party pressured Feltrinelli not to publish the book, even forcing Pasternak to write telegrams urging him not to go forward. However Pasternak did manage to send secret letters assuring the publisher that these telegrams were not sincere. In one such letter, he wrote

how happy he was that the Italian was not “fooled by those idiotic and brutal appeals accompanied by my signature (!), a signature all but false and counterfeit insofar as it was extorted from me by a blend of fraud and violence.”

“We shall soon have an Italian ‘Zhivago,’ French, English and German ‘Zhivagos’ — and one day perhaps a geographically distant but Russian ‘Zhivago’!”
From the Washington Post

The novel was published in Italian in November 23, 1957 and was an instant best-seller. Fulfilling the author’s prediction, it was translated into French, English and German. While Pasternak had been nominated for a Nobel Prize for his poetry every year from 1946 to 1950, Albert Camus nominated him for the novel in 1958.

However, the Nobel Prize can only be awarded for an original work, not a translation. And no Russian copy existed or was likely to exist due to the Soviet objections to the novel. Enter the CIA, who in the Great Game we call the Cold War was happy to embarrass the Soviet Union when possible.

According to Ivan Tolstoy, relative of Leo Tolstoy, a letter by a CIA agent describes how the CIA photocopied the manuscript without Pasternak’s knowledge:

[Tolstoy] says the CIA — aided by the British — stole a copy from a plane that was forced to land in Malta.

While passengers waited for two hours, agents took the manuscript from a suitcase, photographed it and returned it. The CIA then published the Russian edition in Europe and America simultaneously.

“They avoided using paper which could be identified as Western-made. They chose special fonts commonly used in Russia and printed chapters in separate locations to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.”…”Pasternak’s novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson,” Tolstoy said in a telephone interview from Prague, where he works as a Russian commentator for the U.S. government-funded radio stations. The novelist knew nothing of the CIA’s action, according to Tolstoy and the writer’s family.

Carlo Feltrinelli, son of Giangiacomo, wrote a similar story in his memoir Feltrinelli: A Story of Riches, Revolution, and Violent Death, saying his father had always suspected that the US had been involved in the publication of a Russian version.

Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958. He had hoped to go to Stockholm to receive the prize, but the Kremlin would not allow it. Pasternak’s first telegram to the Nobel Prize Committee read: “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” The Kremlin however put pressure on his mistress and the inspiration for Larissa, Olga Ivinskaya. Four days later, Pasternak wrote to Stockholm, “I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure.”

While he was expelled from the Writer’s Union and denounced by his colleagues, some believe that the publicity kept Pasternak out of the gulag. Pasternak’s, Yevgenii, contends that the writer’s age and poor health were more important factors. His father died at age 70 of cancer in 1960, two years later.
After his death, , “Ivinskaya and her daughter were charged with receiving “illegal” royalties from the publication of Doctor Zhivago abroad. Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour in Siberia, her daughter to three. An international uproar led to Ivinskaya’s release four years early.”

In 1988 the novel was published for the first time in the Soviet Union and Yevgenii received the prize in 1989 on behalf of his father. However Yevgenii says that while receiving the prize made his father extremely happy, he had no idea of the CIA’s involvement. And there is no doubt that the novel would have eventually have been published in the USSR and received the prize it richly deserved.