It was just before noon, two hours after they initially met, that Pasternak stood at his garden gate and wished the two young men goodbye. As they prepared to leave, Boris looked at Vladirmirsky and D’Angelo with ‘an expression of benevolent irony’, before saying: ‘You are hereby invited to take part in my own execution.’
Early that evening, Olga was returning from a productive visit to Moscow, after doing yet another round with publishers in the city. Boris hurried along the road to meet her from the train. She was buoyed up. Novy Mir had confirmed its intention to publish some extracts from the novel. Before she could deliver this cheering news, Boris was saying excitedly to her:
I had a visit today, Olia, from two young people who arrived here at the house while I was working. One of them was very pleasant – handsome, youthful, and charming … You would have been delighted by him! And, you know, he had such an extraordinary name: Sergio D’Angelo. He came here with someone who is supposedly a member of our Soviet Embassy in Italy – I think he’s called Vladimirov. They said that they had heard the announcement on Moscow Radio about my novel and that Feltrinelli, one of the biggest publishers in Italy, was interested in it. D’Angelo is Feltrinelli’s emissario – of course, that’s his private part-time job. He’s actually a member of the Communist Party, and he is here in an official capacity with the Italian section of Moscow Radio.
Boris ‘obviously realised he had done something a little odd’, Olga recalled, ‘and was worried about how I would react. From his manner, which was even somewhat ingratiating, I could see that he was pleased and at the same time uneasy, and very anxious for my approval.’
Far from congratulating him for handing over the manuscript, Olga was furious. ‘What have you done?’ she said reproachfully, not giving in to his blandishments. ‘Just think how they’ll go for you now! I’ve been in prison once, remember, and already then, in the Lubyanka, they questioned me endlessly about what the novel would say! Krivitski [a member of the Novy Mir editorial board] has good reason for saying the journal can only publish chapters from it. It’s because they can’t accept it all, of course – they simply want to leave out the awkward parts and publish what they needn’t be afraid to print. You know how they always try to cover themselves! I’m really amazed you could do this!’
‘Really now, Olia, you’re overstating things,’ Boris remonstrated weakly. ‘It’s nothing at all. Just let them read it. If they like it, let them do what they want with it – I said I didn’t mind!’ ‘But Boria,’ Olga shouted. ‘That was giving them permission to publish, don’t you understand? They will certainly seize on it! There’s bound to be a great furore you’ll see.’
Olga, with the traumatic experience of the gulag still fresh in her memory, was not being intentionally prophetic. She knew the great interest Semionov, her interrogator in the Lubyanka, had taken in the still unwritten novel and his suspicions that it would be an expression of literary opposition. She was aware that Goslitizdat’s promise to publish the book had been in an atmosphere of growing social liberalisation, but the Hungarian uprising in the autumn of 1956 prompted Moscow to once again tighten the screws, leaving Pasternak and his novel out in the cold.
Boris was put out by Olga’s reaction. ‘Well then, Olia, you must do what you think best, of course,’ he said. ‘You can even phone this Italian – because I am not going to make any move without you – you can phone this Italian and ask him to give the novel back, if you’re so upset about it. But in that case we should at least play the fool a little; “It’s just like Pasternak” tell him, “the way he has given you his novel, but what do you think yourself?”’ But Olga knew full well that Boris had made up his mind. After spending twenty years crafting an opus that was so close to his heart, he wanted it to be published. And if it could not be done at home, then let it come out in the West.
The copy that he gave to Sergio D’Angelo was not the only one smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He also gave copies to Ziemowit Fedecki (his friend, and a Polish translator); the Oxford academics Isaiah Berlin and Professor George Katkov, to circulate in England; as well as Hélène Peltier and Jacqueline de Proyart (both French Slavic scholars who later collaborated on the French translation of the novel). Yet foreign publication before a Russian edition was not an outcome he had previously considered or entertained. If it wasn’t for the Italian ‘angel’ it is highly unlikely that Doctor Zhivago would have gained such international traction.
Ironically, this created the only occasion where Zinaida and Olga were united. Both lived in fear of the novel being published and considered Boris, as Stalin had once referred to him, to be ‘a holy fool’.
The day after D’Angelo’s visit, Pasternak gave another copy of the manuscript to Fedecki, whom he had known since 1945, when Fedecki went to Moscow as a press spokesman for the Polish embassy. The encounter was witnessed by the Polish poet Wiktor Woroszylski. Together the men walked from the train station, through the charming countryside past meadows of silver birch to Pasternak’s dacha, tracing D’Angelo and Vladimirsky’s steps the previous day. Boris invited them inside and over tea, gave them his manuscript. ‘This is more important than poems. I have worked on this for a long time,’ he told his guests, handing Fedecki ‘two thick, bound folios’.
Woroszylski recalled: ‘We looked at the doorway – in it, Zinaida Nikolevna was standing, tall, massive, slightly hunched over. We did not hear her walk in, but felt her presence. She looked at Yamomir [Ziemowit Fedecki] with displeasure: “You must know that I am against this! Boris Leonidovich is suffering from thoughtlessness: yesterday he gave a copy to the Italians, today to you. He does not realise the danger and I must look after him.”
‘“But, Zinaida Nikolaevna,” the poet replied, “everything has changed. It is about time to forget about fears and live normally.”’
A friend of Boris’s told Olga that he witnessed a similar conversation at the Big House, between Pasternak and an Italian scholar, Ettore Lo Gatto. Gatto had written a history of Russian literature and the Russian theatre. During their discussion, Boris said that he was ready to face any kind of trouble, as long as the novel appeared. When Zinaida snapped: ‘I’ve had enough of such trouble,’ Boris coldly responded: ‘I am a writer. I write in order to be printed.’
Sergio D’Angelo took his literary treasure to Germany, flying to East Berlin and taking a room in a hotel in the west of the city, where he rang Feltrinelli in Milan to ask for instructions. He had not been searched when he left Moscow, and the manuscript remained wrapped and undisturbed in his suitcase. Feltrinelli, perhaps more intuitive to the potentially explosive nature of this precious cargo, decided to fly to Germany the following day to collect the manuscript. The following morning, at the small hotel in Joachimstaler Strasse, near the elegant shopping streets, the Zhivago manuscript was passed like contraband from one suitcase to the other in the privacy of D’Angelo’s room.
The two men then enjoyed two days wandering around Berlin, shopping, eating at outdoor restaurants and chatting about D’Angelo’s initial impressions of Soviet life. ‘At one point, Feltrinelli asked me if there were any prostitutes in Moscow,’ D’Angelo recalled. ‘When I told him that I had noticed their presence around the larger hotels (where they also used to spy on foreigners) he seemed very surprised and disillusioned.’ The following morning, before the communist publisher flew back to Milan, he embarked on an urgent shopping mission to buy a pair of binoculars for his yacht.
Feltrinelli, who did not read Russian, sent the manuscript to a translator as soon as he returned from Berlin. Pietro Zveteremich, an Italian Slavist, was asked to review the novel for potential publication. His verdict: ‘Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture.’
The day after D’Angelo’s visit, Olga had taken a taxi immediately back to Moscow to see Nikolai Bannikov, Boris’s friend and the editor of his forthcoming poetry anthology that Goslitizdat was planning to publish, along with an introduction of autobiographical
notes. Part of Olga’s frustration when she learned that Boris had handed over the novel was that Bannikov would be furious, putting paid to the publication of the volume of poetry.
She was right. Bannikov was indeed angry and alarmed, crying out: ‘But what has he done!’ Olga discussed with him the only solution; they must find a way to publish the novel first in Russia. She then went to see another editor, called Vitashevskaya, who was higher up the chain of command at Goslitizdat, at her apartment. Olga found it strange that Vitashevskaya, who had once been the commandant of a forced labour camp, had now been given a job as an editor. Olga told her what had happened: ‘Vitashevskaya expressed great sympathy: “I tell you what, Olenka,” she said in a soft, purring voice – she was a woman of enormous bulk, covered in rolls of fat – “let me show the novel to someone high up. It is quite possible that everything will then fall into place.”’
When an exhausted Olga returned to Potapov Street, she was given a sealed envelope by the building attendant. It was a note from Bannikov that read: ‘How can anyone love his country so little? One may have one’s differences with it, but what he has done is treachery – how can he fail to understand what he is bringing on himself and us as well?’
From the viewpoint of Boris’s friends and editors, his action was treacherous only to the extent that it could scupper their efforts at having his work published in the Soviet Union. Upon their discovery that the novel had been sent abroad, the hierarchy of the Writers’ Union was alarmed, as plans for a Soviet edition had not come to fruition. Senior Soviet officials, such as Dmitrii Polikarpov, the head of the Culture Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party – ‘the watchdog for ideological purity’ – were concerned that, should an expurgated version of Doctor Zhivago be agreed by a Soviet journal while the Italians published the full text, a politically embarrassing situation might ensue.
The next morning, Olga returned to Peredelkino to show Boris the note. He said that if she was so upset by him handing the novel over and if their friends reacted so badly, she should go and try and get it back from D’Angelo, and gave her the Italian’s Moscow address.
D’Angelo’s apartment was in a large building near the Kiev train station. Olga was taken aback when his wife, Giulietta, opened the door, a staggering beauty with film-star good looks. She was ‘long-legged, dark, with ruffled hair, a sculpted face, and eyes of astonishing blueness’. As she spoke poor Russian and Olga spoke no Italian, they had a comical scene of expansive hand gestures. Yet both were intuitive to what had happened; Olga understood that Giulietta was trying to tell her that her husband had never intended to cause any problems for Boris.
After over an hour of ‘much more noise and gesticulation than meaning’, the dashing and charismatic D’Angelo appeared. ‘He was indeed young and handsome,’ wrote Olga. ‘A tall man with jet-black hair and delicate features such as one sees on icons.’ She was further impressed as he ‘spoke Russian magnificently, with only a slight accent’. Nodding sympathetically while Olga explained how serious the ramifications would be for Pasternak if the novel was published in Italy, she beseeched him to return the manuscript.
‘You know it is too late,’ he replied. ‘The novel is already with the publisher. Feltrinelli has already managed to read it and says that he will certainly publish it, come what may.’
Seeing Olga’s immediate distress, D’Angelo continued: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll write to Giangiacomo, or even speak to him on the phone. He is my personal friend, and I will be sure to tell him how alarmed you are by this, and perhaps we will be able to find a solution. But you must realise that a publisher who has obtained a novel will be reluctant to part with it! I don’t think he will give it up so easily.’
Olga begged him to ask Feltrinelli to delay publication abroad until a Russian edition had appeared first. If D’Angelo did indeed speak to Feltrinelli, it only seemed to hasten the publisher’s desire to obtain the novel and secure the rights. In mid-June Feltrinelli wrote to Boris to thank him for the opportunity to publish Doctor Zhivago. A courier hand-delivered a letter, setting out royalties and foreign rights, plus two copies of a contract. If Boris had any genuine desire to stop publication, this was his moment to act. Yet, in full view of the potential danger that lay ahead for him, he displayed no second thoughts. He signed the contract. According to D’Angelo, who visited the author again at Peredelkino, Pasternak considered the contract ‘the least important’ of his concerns.
Characteristically, Boris put his art before commercial considerations. He needed money, yet knew that it was wholly unlikely that he would ever be allowed to receive foreign currency from royalties in Russia. Although he wrote to Feltrinelli that he was not completely uninterested in money, he was aware that geography and politics would make it impossible to receive royalties. Nevertheless, he took a brazen and literally life-threatening publish-and-be-damned approach, writing to his publisher on 30 June: ‘If its publication here, promised by several of our magazines, were to be delayed and your version were to come before it, I would find myself in a tragically difficult situation. But this is not your concern. In the name of God, feel free to go with the translation and the printing of the book, and good luck! Ideas are not born to be smothered at birth, but to be communicated to others.’
Feltrinelli had struck literary gold in securing a publishing coup that would earn him millions. (He went on to sell the film rights of Doctor Zhivago to MGM for $450,000.) Paradoxically, it was as a capitalist publisher that this Marxist millionaire scored his greatest success, with Doctor Zhivago, and a year later with Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. The Leopard had previously been rejected by every significant Italian publisher.
Boris’s nephew, Charles Pasternak, met Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and his third wife, the German photographer Inge Schoenthal, in 1963. Inge was the mother of Feltrinelli’s son and heir Carlo. The Feltrinellis were in Oxford to visit Charles’s mother, Josephine Pasternak, for lunch. ‘I will never forget Feltrinelli,’ said Charles. ‘He was without doubt the most elegant and charming man I have ever met. He dressed superbly, with that understated, exquisite Italian style.’ Feltrinelli, who married four times, was a playboy with a keen eye. An astute player in every sense, he was no mere dilettante.
When the Kremlin heard about the contract with Feltrinelli, KGB surveillance around Pasternak tightened. On 24 August the KGB general and head of the secret police, Ivan Serov, wrote a long memo informing the highest command of the Communist leadership of the manuscript’s delivery to Feltrinelli. He noted that Pasternak had authorised the rights to be assigned to publishers in England and France.
The KGB had intercepted a parcel that Pasternak had sent to a French journalist, Daniil Reznikov, in Paris. In a letter, Boris had written that permission to publish in the Soviet Union had not been granted: ‘I realise perfectly well that [the novel] cannot be published now, and that this is how it is going to be for some time, perhaps forever.’ Noting the likelihood of foreign publication, he continued: ‘Now they will tear me limb from limb; I have this foreboding, and you shall be a sorrowful witness to this event.’
A week later, the Central Committee’s Culture Department prepared a detailed report on the novel. The book was denounced as a hostile attack on the October Revolution and a malicious libel of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, while Boris was castigated as a ‘bourgeois individualist’. After criticising Doctor Zhivago at great length, the memorandum concluded: ‘The novel by B. Pasternak is a perfidious calumny against our revolution, and against our entire way of life. It is obvious that this work, which is not only ideologically unsound, but also anti-Soviet, can never be allowed to be published. In light of the fact that B. Pasternak has given his novel to a foreign publishing house, the Culture Section of the CPSU Central Committee will take the necessary steps, through its friendly relationships with other Communist parties, to prevent this defamatory book from being published abroad.’
Still trying to get publication of th
e novel authorised in Russia, Olga was ‘racing around Moscow like a frantic chicken’. Poor Olga was in an unenviable position. As Pasternak’s emissary she was sent to deal with the Moscow officials hostile to her cause, as well as remaining loyal to her beloved Boris and his book. She went to see Vadim Kozhnevnikov, the chief editor of Znamia, the journal that had already published some of the verses from Doctor Zhivago. They also had a copy of the novel, which she assumed Kozhnevnikov had read. When she appealed to the editor, he sighed: ‘How typical of you to get mixed up with the last romantic in Russia.’ Comrade Dmitrii Polikarpov was a good friend of his, Kozhnevnikov added. He would arrange for Olga to visit Polikarpov and she must report back what had happened. Shortly afterwards, Olga received a call from the Central Committee to tell her that a pass had been arranged for her to see the head of the Culture Department.
A bleary-eyed and haggard Polikarpov met with Olga in the grim, official Moscow buildings. He insisted that Olga get the manuscript back from the Italians. Olga remonstrated that they probably would not return it and the only answer was to publish in the Soviet Union first, as swiftly as possible. ‘No,’ Polikarpov replied. ‘We must get the manuscript back, because it will be very awkward if we cut out some chapters and they print them. The novel must be returned at all costs.’
After several further conversations with D’Angelo, she went to see Polikarpov for a second time. She told him that she had learned that Feltrinelli had kept the manuscript only to read it, but had stated that he would not part with it. He was ready to take responsibility for this and that the ‘crime’ would be his. Olga bravely reported to Polikarpov that Feltrinelli did not believe that the Russians would ever publish the manuscript and that he felt it would be an even greater crime to withhold a masterpiece from the world.
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