Unsurprisingly, an enraged Polikarpov demanded that Olga tear the note up in front of him. He then demanded that Pasternak and Olga must come and see him and Surkov the following day. Two days running the foursome met. Pasternak was told in no uncertain terms that he must send a telegram to Feltrinelli demanding the return of the manuscript. Failure to do so could lead to ‘very unpleasant consequences’.
A telegram was produced, written by Polikarpov and Surkov, which Boris was expected to sign. It read:
I have started rewriting the manuscript of my novel Doctor Zhivago, and I am now convinced that the extant version can in no way be considered a finished work. The copy of the manuscript in your possession is a preliminary draft requiring thorough revision. In my view it is not possible to publish the book in its current form. This would go against my rule, which is that the definitive draft of my work may be published. Please be so kind as to return, to my Moscow address, the manuscript of my novel Doctor Zhivago, which is indispensable to my work.
Pasternak was given two days to sign the telegram, or told that he would be arrested. Despite considerable pressure from Olga, who legitimately feared that Boris would be signing their death warrant if he did not send the telegram, to the fiercely proud Boris, this was akin to a death of his creative integrity anyway.
Olga again was left terrified for her life. She went to see D’Angelo, keen to enlist his help in persuading Boris that he must sign the telegram within the next day at all cost. ‘This was no easy task,’ D’Angelo recalled. ‘Anyone who knew Pasternak at all well was aware how warm, kindly, sensitive and broad-minded he was, but also how proud, and how easily moved to anger and indignation.’ Pasternak rejected their entreaties, furiously shouting at D’Angelo and Olga that nothing entitled them to speak to him in favour of this move. They clearly did not respect him, he thundered, and were ‘treating him like a man without dignity’. What on earth would Feltrinelli think of him, he railed, after he had just written to say that the publication of Doctor Zhivago was the main aim of his life? Wouldn’t he think him either a fool or a coward?
Eventually D’Angelo managed to calm and convince Boris that sending the telegram would not mean any loss of face for him in Feltrinelli’s eyes. After all, Feltrinelli would not believe the telegram to be genuine, as it would be written in Russian, when Boris had told him to only heed correspondence written in French. Also, it was already too late to stop publication, as many Western publishers had made photocopies of the original manuscript and foreign rights contracts had been signed.
On 21 August the telegram was signed and sent. Immediately Polikarpov informed the Central Committee and suggested that they send a copy of it to the Italian Communist Party to further pressure Feltrinelli not to publish. When a senior official in the Italian Communist Party angrily waved the telegram in the publisher’s Milan office, Feltrinelli refused to back down.
Later that day, Boris wrote to Irina, who was on holiday in Sukhumi, Georgia’s subtropical beach resort:
Irochka, my treasure,
You have written the most wonderful letter to your mother. She has just read it to me and we are full of admiration. An amazing storm is building against me here but so far, thank God, no bolt of lightning has hit me yet. Because you are not here with me and because you cannot advise me, I was left with no choice but to send a telegram to F asking him amongst other things to slow down his actions. The grumble of thunder was deafening. Your mother will explain everything when you get back. She is sending you a bit of money and will try to send more later on if she is able to. As for you, I hope you are keeping as cheerful as you are in your letter. Don’t deny yourself anything and accept these kisses as a goodbye.
Your BP
Olga also included a letter along with Boris’s, which was written, according to Irina, in a ‘nonchalant tone’. Olga described the meeting with Surkov and Polikarpov, adding that it was only due to her diplomacy that the whole situation was kept under control: ‘Boris came with me and gave them all sorts of lectures as he always does. I was standing behind him, armed with my valerian and camphor drops while he was holding forth. All eventually came back to normal again. While in the middle of this storm, Boris kept on saying in the most touching way: “Shame Irochka is not here. She would have been a great support.” I can assure you he was serious.’
The Italian newspaper L’Unità reported that at a press conference in Milan on 19 October, Surkov had said: ‘Pasternak has written to his Italian publisher asking him to return the manuscript for revision. As I have read yesterday in the Corriere and today in the Espresso, Doctor Zhivago will nevertheless be published against the author’s will. The cold war thus invades literature. If this is artistic freedom as understood in the West, then I must say that we have a rather different view of it.’
Weeks later, Boris wrote to his sister Lydia in English, sending the letter via Rome with Sergio D’Angelo. Its strange, stilted form was deliberate. Pasternak had chosen to write in English because his Russian letters frequently disappeared in the post. He purposefully made it confusing due to ‘the need for anonymous content’. There was a necessity, he later wrote to Lydia, for this ‘broken language’. She understood that his post was being intercepted and monitored, even though he asked her to ‘write in your ordinary Russian manner to me’.
1 November 1957.
Peredelkino,
the country house near Moscow
My dear, we have started the disappearing of my letters in the case of their importance. This one will get to you on indirect foreign ways. That is the reason, why I write it in English.
The fulfilment of my secretest dreams, I hope, approaches; the publication of my novel abroad only in translation at first, to my sorrow; in original, some day.
I had pressures to endure here of late, nuisance, menaces, in order to stop the appearance of the novel in Europe. I was forced to sign absurd, false, invented telegrams and letters to my editors. I signed them in the hope, which has not deluded me, that these persons, the unheard baseness of the counterfeit being so transparent, will disregard the feigned demands, – what justly they fortunately did. My triumph will either be tragical or unobscured. In both cases it is joy, victory, I could not have done it alone.
Here must be said about the share, about the part that takes in my last ten years of life Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya, the Lara of the novel, who has undergone four years of imprisonment for me (from 1949) for the sole crime of being the nearest friend of me.
She does enormously much on my behalf. She relieves me from the vexing negotiations with the authorities, she takes the blows of such conflicts on herself. She is the only soul I confer with on what is the tense of age or on what is to be done, or thought, or written, and so on. A translation of her from Rabindranath Tagore was erroneously ascribed to me; it was the only time I left the mistake unobjected.
Zeneide, the mild, terrible, calling forth perpetual compassion, childish-dictatorial and tearful creatress and authoress of the house and garden and the four seasons and our Sunday parties and our family life and domestic establishments is not the woman to suffer hard by another one or ever to betray herself of being aware of it and tolerating it.
And so life goes on, darkened by peril, pity and dissembling – inexhaustible, fathomless, splendid.
You will be so ingenious as to guess, what to touch and what not to touch in your Russian post answer.
I embrace you most tenderly, Your B.
The next day, 2 November, Pasternak wrote to Feltrinelli, thanking him for the imminent Italian publication. He expressed his desire that this would lead to a series of translations: ‘But we shall soon have an Italian Zhivago, French, English, and German Zhivagos – and, perhaps, one day geographically distant, yet Russian, Zhivagos!!’
On 10 November, L’Espresso published the first instalment of a series of extracts from the novel. It was no coincidence that they chose almost exclusively the anti-Soviet passages. On the 22nd the first editio
n of the novel appeared in Italian, under the title Il Dottor Zivago. Feltrinelli held a grand reception at the Hotel Continental in Milan. Le tout Milan attended the glamorous book launch. The first print run of 6,000 copies sold out immediately. It was followed by two other print runs in eleven days. Feltrinelli had achieved his aim. Doctor Zhivago was a controversial bestseller. Its progress around the world had begun.
9
The Fat is in the Fire
In the first six months after its November debut, Doctor Zhivago was reprinted eleven times in Italian. In the following two years it appeared in twenty-three other languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi, Gujarati, and in Oriya, spoken in the state of Orissa. But not in Russian, the author’s native tongue.
On 22 December 1957, Boris wrote to Nina Tabidze: ‘You can congratulate me. Zh[ivago] was published in Italy early in December. In January it will be published in England, and then in Paris, in Sweden, in Norway, and West Germany. Every edition coming before spring. My attitude was dual, as I couldn’t be utterly sincere in my attempts to stop the realisation of my most cherished wish and prevent it. A blind opportunity presented itself, and my dream was realised though I was forced to do a lot to prevent it.’
In his letter to his sisters on 14 August 1956, Boris was preoccupied with finding the right translator to do the novel justice in English. No mean feat, given his exacting standards:
A very good translator must be found (an Englishman who is a gifted writer, with a perfect command of Russian), because this thing can’t be translated by any-old-how, amateurishly, using whatever resources come to hand. But even then, even if an ideal translator exists, with a perfect command of the literary language, he’ll still need advice from experts in Russian folklore and a variety of ecclesiastical nuances and texts, because there’s a lot of this sort of thing in the novel, and it’s not just in the form of passing references and borrowings which a dictionary or reference-book could explain, but of new formations arising in a live, creative manner against a real and authentic background, in other words everything that would be clear to a knowledgeable person, in a new perspective, different from what has gone before.
Boris had previously asked Josephine and Lydia to send the manuscript to the Russian Jewish émigré, and friend of Bowra and Berlin, George Katkov. When Katkov visited Pasternak in Peredelkino the following month, Boris implored him to ensure the book’s translation and publication in England. Katkov mentioned that the Zhivago poems would present a spectacular challenge for a translator, and suggested Vladimir Nabokov for the task. ‘That won’t work,’ replied Boris. ‘He’s too jealous of my position in this country to do it properly.’ It apparently infuriated Nabokov that in the West he was being compared to Pasternak. Both men had written hugely successful and controversial books at a similar time. Lolita was published in 1955, Doctor Zhivago two years later, when it knocked Lolita off the top of the American bestseller list. In 1958 Nabokov would refuse to critique Doctor Zhivago, claiming it would be a ‘devastating review’ and in the 1960s called the novel ‘vilely written’. ‘Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing,’ Nabokov sneered. ‘Clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences …’ In a further low blow, he insisted that ‘Pasternak’s mistress’ must have written it.
Katkov now approached Isaiah Berlin’s protégé, Max Hayward, a gifted linguist and Oxford University research fellow who had worked as a translator at the British embassy in Moscow. His language skills were so fine that Russians who met him assumed he was a native speaker, though his family hailed originally from Yorkshire. To help speed up the process, Manya Harari, the co-founder of Harvill Press, a division of the publishers Collins in London, aided Hayward with the translation. An émigrée from a wealthy St Petersburg family, Harari had moved to England with her family during the First World War. She would become a staunch defender and ally for Olga after Boris’s death.
On 8 July 1957, Harari wrote to Mark Bonham Carter, the publisher at Collins: ‘I have written to Max Hayward to try and discover in what state the translation will reach us and to ask him for more of it. I certainly don’t think he means merely to produce a draft. But I do think somebody will have to look over what he turns in and it is difficult to judge at this stage how much actual polishing up it will need.’ Harari had written informing Hayward that Collins were ready to sign a contract with him for translation, as they had almost finished their contractual negotiations with Feltrinelli. After discussing the fee that Collins proposed to pay him – two guineas per thousand words, ‘on the low side for Russian’ – Harari debated the technical difficulties of translating the book: the collection of Zhivago poems presented a real headache:
As for the poetry – I have not yet approached anyone and I don’t see how I can until some transliterations have been made. I tried one day to transliterate one of the poems myself and saw how terribly difficult it is. I suppose the ideal solution would have been for you to transliterate the poems and get poets such as Auden and some others to put the finishing touches (except for a few which had better be left to Bowra entirely.) But the last thing we want is to hold you up in translation of the prose – the sooner the book is ready the better.
So we must find some other solution. Perhaps Katkov will transliterate some? This, incidentally, will provide a way of paying him something for his share of work on the book – which is otherwise difficult to define!
Harari and Hayward worked on alternate chapters of the 160,000-word novel, then reviewed each other’s work. ‘Max would read a page in Russian, and then write it down in English without looking back … both translators then cross-checked and agreed their combined version against the original.’
On 23 July 1957, Harari wrote to Bonham Carter: ‘As to the poetry at the end of the book, Max now suggests that it should be left out, and I must say I am inclined to agree with him. The problems of getting the right translators, not offending Bowra, and getting it all done in reasonable time, seem enormous, and the novel can perfectly well stand on its own feet without the poems, which could always be published separately if the success of the novel were to warrant it. The most pressing thing is obviously to publish the novel as soon as possible.’
Doctor Zhivago was published in England the following September, with the Zhivago collection of poems included. The Oxford dons had done Pasternak justice, rising spectacularly to the formidable challenge of transforming ‘Yury Zhivago’s’ poems into English.
While official publication of the novel was making its way around world territories, Pasternak had no idea that the book was also leading a dramatic covert life worthy of a spy thriller. The Russian-language manuscript of Doctor Zhivago arrived at the CIA headquarters in Washington DC in early January in the form of two rolls of microfilm. British intelligence provided this copy of the novel. In a memo to Frank Wisner, who ran the clandestine operations for the CIA, the head of the agency’s Soviet Russia division described the book as ‘the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death’.
The CIA became interested in producing a Russian edition of the novel as part of its international efforts to distribute works that could counter communist ideology. Doctor Zhivago was ideal; partly because of the ban placed on Zhivago in the Soviet Union and partly because rumours about the poet’s nomination for the Nobel Prize, which had long circulated in the West, were intensified with the Italian publication.
As part of a Cold War initiative, the American and British intelligence services agreed that Doctor Zhivago should be published in Russian, but the British requested that it be done in the United States of America. The CIA also calculated that a Russian-language edition produced in the United States would be more easily dismissed in the Soviet Union as propaganda. They decided that if it were published in
a small European country then it would be seen as more credible.
The CIA’s involvement in printing a Russian-language edition was to draw global attention to the book; but in an internal memo written shortly after the novel appeared in Italy, CIA staff recommended that the novel should be considered for worldwide acclaim and honours such as the Nobel Prize. Their role in operations involving Doctor Zhivago was backed at the highest level of government. The Eisenhower White House gave the CIA exclusive control over the novel’s ‘exploitation’. The Americans feared that if the Russians knew the hand that they were playing it could backfire disastrously on Pasternak and his family. The CIA was ordered from on high to promote the book ‘as literature, not as cold-war propaganda’. Books, however, became weapons. If a piece of literature was banned in the USSR for challenging ‘Soviet reality’, the agency wanted to ensure it was in its citizens’ hands.
In 1956, the CIA funded the creation of the Bedford Publishing Company in New York. Its brief was to translate Western literary works and publish them in Russian. Isaac Patch, the first head of Bedford Publishing, said of its covert work: ‘The Soviet public, who had been subject to tedious propaganda, was starved for Western books. Through our book program we hoped to fill the void and open up the door to the fresh air of liberty and freedom.’ Among the books they translated and distributed were James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nabokov’s Pnin and Orwell’s Animal Farm. The CIA even planned to set the Russian text in the United States, using an unusual Cyrillic font that could not be traced back to the Americans. One suggestion had been to have the imprint of Goslitizdat on the title page. The American publisher Felix Morrow was put in charge of publication. He worked with Rausen Brothers, a printer in New York, specialising in Russian texts.
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