It all comes down to questions of fairness.  On January 27, 2007, a journalist by the name of Peter Finn published in the Washington Post an interview with Ivan Tolstoy, a literary scholar distantly related to the famous writer.  The subject of the interview was Tolstoy’s The Laundered Novel, a product of his ten-year investigation into the circumstances surrounding the publication of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.  Tolstoy, wrote Finn, had revealed “in a forthcoming book that the CIA secretly arranged for the publication of a limited Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago in 1958 to help Pasternak secure the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.”

Looking under “T” in the index of Peter Finn’s and Petra Couvée’s volume, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, one finds Leon Trotsky and Palmiro Togliatti, but no sign of Ivan Tolstoy.  His book is duly listed in the Bibliography, of course, as not to have done so would constitute a literary equivalent of criminal negligence, but apart from this (and two citations in the Notes to the volume) it is as though the man—of whom Finn wrote in 2007 that “Tolstoy offers the first detailed account of what would rank as perhaps the crowning episode of a long cultural Cold War”—had never existed.

For a reviewer of a book such as this one, a serpentine of intrigue that recedes into a vortex of conjecture while biting its own tail, a sense of fairness is not the same as churlishness or pedantry.  It is a necessary barometer, gauging the atmospheric conditions that prompted the authors, instead of translating Tolstoy’s 2010 book into English and supplementing his text with their commentary and an overview of whatever CIA archival materials have since been declassified, to slap together a volume lacking a coherent thesis.

“Did the CIA, to spite the Russians, get Boris the Nobel?” is what the reader of this book really wants to know.  In 2007, Tolstoy answered in the affirmative.  In 2014, Finn and Couvée duck the question.

That the question would be explosive, emotionally as well as politically, is already abundantly clear from the original Washington Post article.  “‘It is a detail hardly worth mentioning, a cheap sensation,’ said Yevgeny Pasternak, the author’s 84-year-old son and an editor of his collected works, in an interview at his Moscow apartment,” reported Finn.  “‘I can add that my father knew nothing about this game.  There is no doubt he would have won the prize anyway . . . ’”

But would he have?  The 1969 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, if my memory does not fail me, contains no mention of Marina Tsvetayeva, a poet whose genius approached Pasternak’s in the 1920’s and, by his own admission, eclipsed it by the early 1930’s.  Émigré literary critics, such as Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky, recognized in Pasternak the sort of poet that appears on earth once in a millennium, but émigré literary critics usually work as short-order cooks and lack the wherewithal to travel to Stockholm to lobby the Nobel committee.  And the official Soviet position with regard to Pasternak—which might have made the difference, in terms of getting the poet noticed in the West, had it remained what it had been before Stalin came to power—was changing.

Pasternak was born in 1890 and was approaching 30 when his verse collections My Sister Life and Themes & Variations were published and perceived by those in the know as that new testament of Russian prosody in which Vladimir Mayakovsky had played the part of John the Baptist.  With Mayakovsky (born 1893 and aged 24 in 1917), Tsvetayeva (born 1892), Akhmatova (born 1889), and Mandelstam (born 1891), he thus belonged to the last generation of Russian poets and writers to establish itself in the public eye still under the ancien régime.  Then, in 1917, came the apocalypse, an epochal conflagration of which he wrote:

Our land has been smudged by the glare.

Your nest, do you recognize it, darling?

O, my nestling!  My leaf, are you scared?

Why keep beating, my shy silky starling!

At first the gods of the new regime took a benign view of the poet for whom every shred of earthly existence—which was now “our” existence, “our new Soviet life”—was a spur to exultation.  Benevolently, they conceded that ecstasy constituted acceptance, and if a “Soviet poet” chose to follow William Blake in seeing “a world in a grain of sand,” that was fine, provided the innocent did not forget that the world is there for workers to unite in and the sand is there for mixing cement.  After all, the byword of the new gods in the Kremlin, toiling to turn the country into a vast torture chamber, was happiness—and Pasternak’s poetry was not merely happiness; it was a pagan, orgiastic ode to joy, a glossolalia of primordial pleasure in which the words themselves were becoming almost indistinct.  They might have preferred Soviet propaganda, but they settled for propaganda of creation:

And the gardens, the lakes, the fences,

Boiling tears to a white outpour

Of creation—so passion dispenses

What condensed in the human core.

It was to this begrudging acceptance of Pasternak’s usefulness to the regime’s image that Stalin gave vent when he ordered his henchmen to “leave that cloud dweller in peace.”

Eventually the benevolence ran out.  By the time World War II began, Pasternak was alive—unlike most of his peers, with Mandelstam dying in the camps, Mayakovsky shooting himself through the heart, and Tsvetayeva choosing to hang herself rather than starve to death—but, like Akhmatova, very much in the shadows.  Military marches had become the one permitted form of poetic expression, and odes to nightingales were a far cry from that.  The chances of anybody in the West—I mean, in Stockholm—thinking of Pasternak as a star in the constellation of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Goethe, which doubtless he was, were lottery chances.  So when an eccentric British academic, Sir Maurice Bowra, nominated Pasternak for the prize in 1946, one could almost hear the grim Swedes laughing all the way in Oxford.

Pasternak’s own talent, meanwhile, had begun to ebb.  He realized this already in the beginning of the 1930’s and, dejected and distraught, lapsed into a kind of feverish hibernation, only occasionally emerging into the light to publish some clumsy squib vaguely relevant to the regime’s preoccupations of the moment.  By the time he began work on the novel that would become Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak was an invalid—not literally, of course, but compared with what he had been in the summer of My Sister Life.  The joyful songster had spent too long in the Soviet cage.  It had made him deaf—or at least tone deaf.

The initial impetus behind Doctor Zhivago, which I uncovered by chance while researching for a Pasternak biography back in the 1990’s, gives some idea of the extent to which the poet had by then, metaphorically speaking, lost his hearing.  Gone With the Wind, whatever its merits, is hardly Buddenbrooks or Á la recherche du temps perdu, to say nothing of such works of genuinely innovative prose by Pasternak’s contemporaries in Russia as Evgeny Zamyatin’s We or Yuri Olesha’s Envy.  Nonetheless, the book’s blockbuster success in 1936, and a subsequent global triumph of its screen version in 1939, set Pasternak on a course of glaringly derivative bellelettrism, whose putative destination would be a Russian civil-war saga, or an “epic drama romance,” as TV Guide might put it.  It is hardly surprising that the world at large would become aware of Pasternak’s existence not in 1929, when he was still a poet of genius, not in 1958, when he got his Nobel, but in 1965, when David Lean’s screen adaptation of Doctor Zhivago became the eighth highest-grossing film of all time.  It was in the Technicolor image of Julie Christie à la russe in a fur hat that the novel, as it were, found itself a cover.

Into the tragic narrative of deterioration, delusion, and despair that Pasternak’s life had become walked the CIA.  Informed that the novel would not be published in Russia, Pasternak had sent it to Feltrinelli in Italy for publication abroad, and the scandal that followed—complete with newspaper editorials referring to the author as Judas—could not fail to draw the attention of the boys at Langley.  Counting on Pasternak to stand up to mounting pressure—Olga Ivinskaya, his mistress since 1946 and the Julie Christie of the film, had been released from prison only a few years before, and a new arrest seemed imminent—they seized on the opportunity for a political investment.  As a Nobel Prize could not be awarded to the author of an unpublished manuscript, they would print the Russian text of the controversial novel in Brussels clandestinely, under the auspices of an émigré front organization, and have copies delivered to Stockholm along with the translations into European languages which were being masterminded by the foreign-rights department of Feltrinelli in Milan.

Unmentioned, I repeat, by the authors of the study that I’m ostensibly reviewing here, Ivan Tolstoy had this to say about the CIA edition of Doctor Zhivago, issued under the imprint of The Hague-based academic publisher Mouton, upon seeing it for the first time:

While the binding was unmistakably Mouton, or at least a perfect replica of their standard issue, nothing else was suggestive of the respected academic publisher.  The title page, which said “Feltrinelli,” had been pasted in with glue.  The font was unusual for a Western printing press; the errors in the text were quite appalling.  The execution was so sloppy, in fact, I felt confident a thread leading to its true provenance would be easy to find.

I, too, recall a similar reaction on seeing that clumsy pastiche, with “Boris Leonidovich Pasternak” glaring at me like a spook in a white trench coat.  No native speaker would have used an author’s patronymic on the title page of a book.

Tolstoy got wind of the clandestine operation as long ago as 1989:

Working as a freelancer with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich, I met a colleague, Grigory Danilov, who in the 1950’s had worked as an editor with the Central Union of Postwar Emigres (CUPE), a European subsidiary of the CIA.  He casually mentioned that Zhivago had been among the union’s printing projects.  “You must be mistaken,” I said, surprised.  “CUPE never published Zhivago.”  But no, he insisted, he had typeset it himself.

Finn and Couvée never manage to make the detective story that has fallen in their lap as immediate, and as immediately believable, as this reminiscence.  Perhaps more significantly, they do not fully understand who Pasternak was, at one with both the Swedish Academy and the CIA in thinking of him as the author of Doctor Zhivago—which is about as accurate as thinking of Beethoven as the author of Wellington’s Victory.

My father once said that the distinction bestowed on Pasternak by the Swedish Academy adorned him as a frock-coat button might a marble kouros by Praxiteles.  To this I might add that if anything could make that kind of culture clash less of an absurdity, it’s his having written Doctor Zhivago.

 

[The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée (New York: Pantheon Books) 352 pp., $26.95]