The CIA chose as its vehicle for distribution the Brussels World’s Fair – ‘Expo ’58’ – which ran from 17 April to 19 October 1958, and which was expected to receive over 18 million visitors. Forty-two nations, including, for the first time, the Vatican, exhibited at the 500-acre site north-west of Brussels, and Belgium issued 16,000 visas to Soviet visitors. ‘This book has great propaganda value, not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication,’ declared a memo to all the branch chiefs of the CIA Soviet Russia Division; ‘we have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by a man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.’
During the summer of 1958, the CIA had been under pressure to get copies published in time for the World’s Fair. In the end, they collaborated with the Dutch intelligence service, the BVD (Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst). The reproduction of Doctor Zhivago produced by Felix Morrow was passed to Ruud van der Beek, the leader of the Dutch branch of the anti-communist group Paix et Liberté. In July, Van der Beek visited Mouton Press in The Hague with the text ready to be photo-printed and requested a thousand copies. The person he dealt with was Peter de Ridder, one of Mouton’s representatives. De Ridder tried to contact Feltrinelli for permission but the publisher was unreachable – holidaying in Scandinavia. De Ridder decided to press ahead, regardless. He tried to protect Feltrinelli’s claim to exclusive copyright by printing ‘Feltrinelli-Milan 1958’ on the title page in Cyrillic. He omitted to include a Feltrinelli copyright notice. The use of Pasternak’s full name, including ‘Leonidovich’ on the title page, further suggested that the book had been produced by a non-native speaker, as Russians would not use the patronymic on a title page.
In the first week of September, the first Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago was printed in The Hague. The books, dated 6 September 1958, bound in pale blue-linen, and wrapped in brown paper, were taken to the home of Walter Cini, the CIA officer in The Hague. Two hundred copies were then sent to the Washington headquarters. The rest were dispatched to CIA stations across Western Europe – 200 to Frankfurt, 100 to Berlin, 100 to Munich, 25 to London and 10 to Paris. The largest package was sent to Brussels for the World’s Fair.
As Doctor Zhivago clearly could not just be handed out at the American Pavilion, the CIA arranged an ingenious ally. The nearby Vatican Pavilion agreed to distribute the novel. Russian-speaking priests and lay volunteers – ‘ladies with pointed noses and a blessed smile’ – handed out religious literature, including bibles, prayer books – and some Russian literature. Three thousand Soviet tourists visited the Vatican Pavilion over the fair’s three months. The presence of Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, on loan from the Louvre, was also a big part of the lure for Russian visitors, attracting key members of the intelligentsia, scientists, scholars, writers, engineers, collective-farm directors and city mayors.
The CIA triumphed in its aim. Their ‘sponsored’ edition of the novel made its way into the hands of Soviet citizens. At the end of each day, scores of the book’s distinctive blue linen dust-jackets could be found littering the fair-ground floor, the novels having been torn down the spine and stuffed into pockets, making the literary contraband easier to hide. Copies were soon exchanging hands on the black market for around 300 roubles, almost a week’s wages for the average Soviet worker.
Later press reports suggested that Russian sailors had smuggled the book into the Soviet Union aboard the ship Gruzia and that the Soviet ambassador to Belgium had been removed as a result of events at the Brussels World’s Fair. A CIA memo of 9 September 1958 concluded: ‘This phase can be considered completed successfully.’
On the 19th, Pasternak wrote to his sisters in Oxford: ‘Is it true that an original Russian edition has also appeared? There are rumours that it’s on sale at an exhibition in Brussels?’
In the Soviet Union, there had been no official comment in the months following Italian publication. Party figures, including Khrushchev, were fully aware of the international response to the novel and the preparation of various translations. Polikarpov’s department was kept up to date via press cuttings from Western media coverage. It is ironic that in Russia Pasternak depended on his translation work for an income because of the official silence and hesitant attitude towards him, while Feltrinelli had a lucrative bestseller on his hands.
Several of Pasternak’s translations were published that year: Schiller’s Maria Stuart became the standard translation for Soviet productions of the play. But with the bleak outlook for publication of his novel in Russia in the spring, anxious about his dwindling finances, he suggested to Goslitizdat that they reissue his Shakespeare translations.
The huge strain Boris had been under precipitated a recurrence of his previous illness, with new urological complications, acute pain and a raging temperature. At one point a blood analysis suggested cancer, but this was not confirmed. In the end, a trapped spinal nerve was diagnosed. Hospital treatment was required but nothing suitable was available. The preceding year someone in the Writers’ Union ruled that Pasternak was ‘unworthy’ of treatment in the Kremlin Hospital. And so for the first week of his illness he was forced to remain at Peredelkino, where he read Henry James and listened to the radio between bouts of agonising pain. It took a week of agitating by his family, friends and medical experts before a bed was found for him in the Kremlin clinic. On 8 February 1958 he was carried out of Peredelkino on a stretcher through the heavy snow, blowing kisses to Zinaida, his sons and friends.
Irina observed that towards the end of 1958 and beginning of 1959 it seemed that Boris’s ‘youth just deserted him’. His former vigour drained away and ‘one day he was unrecognisable, grey, distorted. He had become old; he was aching all over. Even his hands, so fine, so lively and astonishingly alive, just slumped down on his knees right in the middle of a monologue.’
As Doctor Zhivago’s international success gained momentum, Pasternak was inundated with postal correspondence from abroad containing reader’s ecstatic responses, congratulations and press cuttings. This in some ways revived him. By autumn, the Peredelkino postwoman was ferrying up to fifty pieces of post a day up the path to the dacha. It became a source of exasperation between Olga and Irina that Boris squandered so much time trying to respond to all this correspondence. But after years of enforced isolation, he felt exhilarated and touched by all these messages of support and goodwill.
Since his return from hospital, Boris had feared a relapse. He was required to exercise his leg daily and would sometimes walk around Peredelkino for two to three hours at a time. He also began to work in his study, standing at a bureau, to avoid long periods sitting. That spring and summer he received many visitors, both the expected and the uninvited, from Russia and abroad. In September the Oxford don Ronald Hingley dined at Peredelkino with Boris and Zinaida. He described how Zinaida, ‘elderly and clad in black’, was silently courteous, but tacitly conveyed her displeasure at these foreign contacts who both protected and compromised her husband. Hingley also noticed how Pasternak was seemingly nonchalant about the constant government surveillance. Yet he watched his host stiffen as a black limousine used by the security police passed slowly down the narrow lane, almost halting by the gate of dacha No 3.
On 12 May 1958, Boris wrote to Josephine:
When D[octor] Zh[ivago] comes out in England, and if you read anything interesting and newsworthy about it, please send me cuttings and write a few words about anything you discover or hear about it (even if it’s bad). Don’t fear for any consequences for me, excepting only the possibility that what you send may not reach me.
I kiss you warmly, and Fedia, and all your family. After these last two illnesses, and with the continuing pain in my leg and the constant possibility of an acute relapse, I have lost my confidence in the time I have left to me; I just don�
�t know how long I have got – not to mention the permanent (though just temporarily eased) political threat to my position, which also makes it impossible to imagine firm ground beneath my feet.
Alexander Gladkov said of Pasternak at this time: ‘I sensed a kind of defiance, the defiance of a very lonely, desperate writer who had grown tired of his own loneliness and despair.’ In December, just after the Italian publication of Doctor Zhivago, Gladkov saw Boris at a performance of Faust by the visiting Hamburg Theatre in Moscow. ‘During the interval he was mobbed by a crowd of foreign newspapermen,’ recalled Gladkov.
One of them thrust a copy of his own translation of Faust into his hands and they all started taking photographs. The earlier Pasternak would have thought it an unseemly comedy, but this new Pasternak stood there obediently in the foyer of the theatre, posing book in hand before the journalists while the flash-bulbs popped away. He evidently thought he had to do this for some reason or other, since I cannot imagine it gave him any pleasure. He had been overtaken by world fame but seemed none the happier for it – one could see the strain in the awkward way he stood there, and in the expression of his face. He looked more of a martyr than a conquering hero.
During the summer of 1958, rumours had been mounting that Pasternak would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lars Gyllensten, the Nobel Committee secretary, maintained that Pasternak was put forward for the Nobel Prize each year from 1946 to 1950, in 1953 and in 1957. Albert Camus devoted attention to Pasternak in his acceptance speech in 1957 and nominated him for the prize the following year. This would be Boris’s eighth nomination.
In May, Pasternak wrote to Kurt Wolff, his American editor at Pantheon Books, with whom he had struck up a correspondence: ‘What you write about Stockholm will never happen, because my government will never give its agreement to any distinction for me. This and much else is grievous and sad. But you will never guess how insignificant is the place that these characteristics of the era occupy in my existence. And on the other hand, it’s precisely these insurmountable fatalities that give life momentum, depth, and earnestness, and make it quite extraordinary – sovereignly joyful, magic, and real.’
On 6 October, Boris wrote to Josephine, again in stilted English: ‘If the N[obel] prize of this year (as sometimes the rumour goes) will be assigned to me, and the necessity for me comes to go abroad (all the matter is still absolutely dark to me) I can see no means not to try and not to want to take with me O[lga] in the voyage, if the permission is only to be obtained, not to say about the probability of my own travel. But, seeing the difficulties, connected with the N. pr., I hope it will be conferred to other competitor, to A Moravia, I believe.
On 23 October the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize for Literature would be awarded to Boris Pasternak ‘for his important contribution to contemporary lyric poetry, as well as to the great tradition of the Russian prose-writers’. Foreign news correspondents flocked to the gates of Boris’s dacha, cameras poised, despite persistent rain. When the newsmen asked for his reaction, he replied: ‘To receive this prize fills me with great joy, and also gives me great moral support. But my joy today is a lonely joy,’ as the camera shutters clicked.
‘In one photograph we see BL reading the official telegram from the Swedish Academy,’ narrates Olga. ‘In another he sits bashfully with raised glass, replying to the congratulations of Kornei Chukovsky and his granddaughter, and of Nina Tabidze … And then, in a photograph taken only about twenty minutes later, he is sitting at the same table, with the same people, but, heavens above, looking so woebegone, his eyes sad and his mouth turned down at the corners.’
What had happened in the intervening twenty minutes? Zinaida, who had refused to get out of bed that morning when Boris first heard he had been awarded the prize, declaring ‘nothing good can come of this’, was busy downstairs baking: it was her Russian name day. She was trying to ignore the brouhaha of the foreign correspondents outside, when suddenly Fedin, the new secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, turned up. Without acknowledging Zinaida he walked past her brusquely and upstairs to Pasternak’s sanctuary. When he left fifteen minutes later all was silent. Zinaida rushed upstairs and found Boris passed out on the wrought-iron bed in his study.
Fedin had come to tell Pasternak that if he didn’t renounce the prize a public campaign would be immediately launched against him. Apparently Polikarpov was waiting next door, at Fedin’s house. The Central Committee had decided that since Fedin had some influence with Boris, he should be the one to tell him of the party’s decision. ‘I’m not going to congratulate you because Polikarpov is at my place and he’s demanding that you renounce the prize,’ Fedin had told Boris.
‘Under no circumstances,’ Boris replied. He asked Fedin to give him some time. And then he fainted.
When Boris regained consciousness he hurried across the lane to see another neighbour, Vsevolod Ivanov, a writer of popular adventure stories, to ask his advice. ‘Do what seems right to you; don’t listen to anyone,’ Ivanov told him. ‘I told you yesterday and I say it again today; You’re the best poet of the era. You deserve any prize.’
An infuriated Polikarpov meanwhile returned to Moscow.
Boris decided to send a telegram of thanks to the Academy. ‘He was happy, thrilled with his conquest,’ remembered Kornei Chukovsky, who on hearing that Pasternak had been awarded the Prize had hastened with his granddaughter to Peredelkino to congratulate the writer in person. ‘I threw my arms around him and smothered him with kisses.’ Chukovksy proposed a toast, which was captured by Western photographers in one of the photos Olga described. Later, anxious that his embrace of Pasternak might endanger him and his family, Chukovsky, who had been the victim of an earlier traumatic slander campaign, wrote a hasty note to the authorities denying that he was ‘aware that Doctor Zhivago contained attacks on the Soviet system’.
Boris excused himself from his visitors and went upstairs to send his telegram to the Academy. It read: ‘Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed. Pasternak.’ When he had finished writing it, Chukovsky and his granddaughter accompanied Boris part of the way on his walk to see Olga at the Little House. As Zinaida had been nothing but critical over the prize, Boris explained to Chukovsky as they walked, he would not be taking her to Stockholm for the official prize-giving ceremony.
Boris arrived at the Little House in ‘an agitated state’, remembers Olga. He described Fedin’s unexpected visit and explained that the demands from on high insisted that he must ‘repudiate’ the prize and the novel. He told Olga that he had already sent a telegram of thanks to Stockholm and did not see how he could possibly agree to repudiating his novel. He then rang Irina in Moscow to recount the whole day’s events.
‘Ah you know already,’ Boris said to Irina, in a disappointed tone. ‘I have just rung your grandmother and her [new] husband, Sergei Stepanovich answered, so I told him and he didn’t even congratulate me. It’s starting. The fat is in the fire now. Fedin has been round and tells me I must give it up. He looked as though I’d committed a crime, and didn’t congratulate me … Only the Ivanovs did. What marvellous people they are! Tamara Vladimirovna gave me a great kiss – what a nice woman. But those others … I wouldn’t speak to Fedin. Was I right?’
Irina later wrote: ‘I was probably one of the first people he had told that he would accept the prize and the consequences that would come with it. Mother must have been beside herself. The panic which overtook his entourage must have been the source of great suffering. This crossed my mind very quickly. I answered with exaggerated cheerfulness without expressing any of my concerns. “Of course, of course! Tell them all to go away, the miserable, wretched slaves.” “Yes? So, I am right?” BL repeated joyfully.’
After leaving Boris earlier in the day, Chukovsky had called on Fedin, who warned him, ‘Pasternak will do us all great harm with all of this. They’ll launch a fierce campaign against the intelligentsia now.’ Chukovsky was served with a notice to atten
d an emergency meeting of the Writers’ Union the next day. A courier had gone from house to house in Peredelkino with summonses for the writers in the village. After Vsevolod Ivanov received his he collapsed. His housekeeper found him lying on the floor. Diagnosed with a possible stroke, he remained bedridden for a month.
When the courier arrived at the Pasternak dacha, Boris’s ‘face grew dark; he clutched at his heart and could barely climb the stairs to his room’. He began to experience pain in his arm, which felt as if it ‘had been amputated’. Chukovsky wrote: ‘There would be no mercy, that was clear. They were out to pillory him. They would trample him to death just as they had Zoshchenko, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Mirsky and Benedikt Livshits.’
When Kurt Wolff in America heard about the Nobel Prize award, he wrote immediately to Boris. ‘In this case (genius) is being recognised as such. Your book is being read and loved for its remarkable lyric-epic-ethical qualities. (In six weeks, 70,000 copies – that is fantastic – and by the end of the year it will be 100,000 more.)’ Wolff added that he was reserving rooms for him in Stockholm for the Nobel Prize ceremonies in December.
‘On Saturday 25th October, it all began,’ wrote Olga. Radio Moscow immediately denounced ‘the award of the Nobel Prize for a mere mediocre work such as Doctor Zhivago’ as ‘a hostile political act directed against the Soviet State’. Two whole pages of Saturday’s edition of Literaturnaya Gazeta were devoted to a denunciation of Pasternak. The newspaper printed in full the damning 1956 rejection letter written by the editors of Novy Mir, along with a leading article and open letter from the newspaper’s editors. Accusations included: ‘the life-story of a malignant petty bourgeois … open hatred for the Russian people … a paltry, worthless and vile piece of work … a rabid literary snob …’ Many Muscovites were reading about Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel Prize for the first time. The newspaper’s print run of 880,000 ran out within a few hours. The impact of the award on public opinion in Moscow, especially among the intelligentsia, was immense. The award was ‘the only topic’ of conversation in the capital. The election of Cardinal Angelo Roncalli to the papacy, the death in Leningrad of the eminent physiologist Leon Orbeli, or even the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics to three Soviet scientists received scant attention.
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