The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book

by Peter Finn

  In 1946, Ivinskaya lived with her mother and stepfather; her two children, eight-year-old Irina and five-year-old Dmitri, one by each husband; and her many beloved cats. The fifty-six-year-old Pasternak offered a release from a cramped world and an entrée into Moscow’s salons. “I longed for recognition and wanted people to envy me,” said Ivinskaya. She was seductive and devoted, clingy and calculating. Pasternak was a very big catch.

  Ivinskaya had read Pasternak’s poems since she was a girl; she described herself as a fan meeting her idol. “The magician, who had first entered my life so long ago, when I was 16, had now come to me in person, living and real.” Ivinskaya’s daughter would later nickname Pasternak “Classoosha,” an affectionate diminutive of the word classic, and one mother and daughter came to share when referring to the writer.

  The romance began as an old-fashioned courtship. Because both Pasternak and Ivinskaya had family at home, the couple had no private retreat. Pasternak would show up at Novy Mir at the end of the workday, and he and Ivinskaya would meander through the streets, talking at great length, before he would bid her farewell at her apartment building.

  “I’m in love,” Pasternak told a friend, who asked how this would affect his life. “But what is life?” Pasternak responded. “What is life if not love? And she is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person. And now this golden sun has come into my life, it is so wonderful, so wonderful. I never thought I would still know such joy.” He hated growing old and treated his birthdays as days of mourning, disdaining any attempt to celebrate. This unexpected romance was a time-stopping elixir.

  The ritual of walking and talking continued until April when Ivinskaya’s family went out of the city for the day. “As newlyweds spend their first night together [Boris] and I now had our first day together. He was borne up and jubilant over this victory.” That day, Pasternak inscribed a collection of his verse: “My life, my angel. I love you truly. April 4, 1947.”

  The early affair, punctuated by unkept promises to end the romance because of the obvious domestic complications, found its way into some of Zhivago’s poetry:

  Don’t cry, don’t purse your swollen lips.

  Don’t draw them together like that.

  Moscow was soon chattering about the deliciously scandalous liaison, and Pasternak’s female friends—some of whom had their own strong feelings for the poet—were less than enamored with Ivinskaya. Some would never trust her. The writer Lydia Chukovskaya, who worked with Ivinskaya at Novy Mir, remarked of one evening that the couple’s “faces could be seen side by side. Her make-up was a dreadful sight next to his natural face. A “pretty but slightly fading blonde,” commented the literary scholar Emma Gerstein, remarking on how, during one reading, she “hurriedly powdered her nose, hiding behind a cupboard.” However, the young poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko who saw her at a Pasternak reading called her “a beauty.”

  Zinaida found out about the affair in the winter of 1948 when she found a note sent by Ivinskaya to Pasternak while cleaning his study. Initially she said she felt guilty and that it was all her fault. It also seemed to her that after the war, “in our village community, [the men] started to leave the old wives and replace them with younger ones.” Zinaida confronted Ivinskaya in Moscow, telling her that she didn’t give a damn about their love and she wasn’t going to allow her family to be broken up. She gave Ivinskaya a letter from Pasternak announcing the end of the affair. Ivinskaya’s children overheard conversations that “Mom had tried to poison herself,” her daughter recalled.

  Pasternak’s sense of loyalty to Zinaida and their son became a strain as he vacillated between family and flame. The prospect of a second divorce, a third marriage, and all the potential excruciating chaos may have been more than Pasternak wished to endure. The couple huddled in doorways to argue. Ivinskaya returned home furious from these rows and took down Pasternak’s picture. “Where’s your pride, Mama?” asked her daughter after the picture had been put back up yet another time. Ivinskaya’s mother harangued both her daughter and Pasternak about Olga’s status as a mistress, not a wife. “I love your daughter more than my life,” Pasternak told her, “but don’t expect our life to change outwardly all at once.” The affair, at one point, appeared to be over. In a letter to his cousin in August 1949, Pasternak confessed that he had “formed a deep new attachment,” but, he wrote, “since my relationship with [Zinaida] is a genuine one, sooner or later I had to sacrifice the other. Strangely enough, so long as my life was filled with agony, ambivalence, pangs of conscience, even horror, I easily bore it and even took pleasure in things that now, when I have made peace with my conscience and my family, reduce me to a state of unmitigated dreariness: my aloneness, my precarious place in literature, the ultimate pointlessness of my literary efforts, the strange duality of my life ‘here’ and ‘there.’ ” He imagined at one point that he could get Zinaida, Olga, and his first wife, Yevgenia, to sit together happily on the veranda of the dacha with him. “He never wanted to cause anyone grief, but he did,” said a friend.

  By 1949, Pasternak was already a figure of some international renown, even if he was banished to the edges of literary life in Moscow. Cecil Maurice Bowra, who held the Oxford Chair of Poetry, had nominated Pasternak for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, an honor that was repeated in 1947 and 1949. Bowra had also included seventeen poems by Pasternak in A Second Book of Russian Verse, which he had edited and was published in London in 1948. An American edition of Pasternak’s Selected Writings appeared in New York in 1949. One of the leading academics in the West called Pasternak “the greatest of Russian poets.” And in July 1950, the International Conference of Professors of English wrote to the Soviet ambassador to Britain to invite Pasternak to Oxford and said, “It appears to us beyond all doubt that the most eminent man of letters … in the Soviet Union today is Boris Pasternak.”

  The Kremlin leadership, locked in a global ideological struggle with the West, was exquisitely sensitive to any foreign depiction of Soviet culture and expended great national energy on projecting the country’s intellectual achievements. Simultaneously, the government was pressing an increasingly sinister campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” a policy that had an ugly anti-Semitic complexion. There were persistent rumors that Pasternak would be picked up by the secret police; Akhmatova at one point phoned from Leningrad to check that he was safe. A senior investigator in the prosecutor’s office in 1949 said there were plans to arrest Pasternak. When Stalin was informed, he started to recite “Heavenly color, color blue,” one of the Baratashvili poems that Pasternak had translated and read in Tbilisi in 1945. And then Stalin said, “Leave him, he’s a cloud dweller.”

  Ivinskaya enjoyed no such protection; she was a surrogate who could be used to strike directly at her lover. The same pitiless logic was applied to Akhmatova, whose husband and son were both arrested separately in the second half of 1949 while she was physically untouched. On October 9, 1949, the secret police burst into Ivinskaya’s apartment. Nearly a dozen uniformed agents, working through the blue haze of their cigarette smoke, searched the apartment, setting aside for seizure any book, letter, document, or scrap of paper that mentioned Pasternak. Ivinskaya was taken almost immediately to secret-police headquarters—the fearsome Lubyanka building, where she was strip-searched, had her jewelry and bra taken from her, and was placed in a dark, stultifying isolation unit. She was left to stew in her own anxiety for three days before she was moved in with fourteen other female prisoners. The crowded cell was illuminated with harshly bright lamps to ensure that the women were sleep-deprived and disoriented in advance of nighttime interrogations. Ivinskaya recalled that “the prisoners began to feel that time had come to a halt and their world had collapsed about them. They ceased to be sure of their innocence, of what they had confessed to, and which other prisoners they had compromised apart from themselves. In consequence, they signed any raving nonsense put before them.”

  Among Ivinskaya’s cellmates was Trotsky’s
twenty-six-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra, who had just finished her studies at the Institute of Geology and was accused of copying an illicit poem. Long after Alexandra had left, Ivinskaya continued to remember her desperate wailing as she was taken away to be sent to a camp in Kazakhstan. Another woman who befriended Ivinskaya was a doctor at the Kremlin hospital who had attended a party where incautious remarks were made about Stalin’s mortality.

  Two weeks after her arrest, the guards called Ivinskaya out of her cell and led her down several long corridors past closed doors from behind which muffled cries of distress escaped. She was finally placed inside a cupboardlike compartment that rotated and opened into an anteroom. A group of agents fell silent as she appeared, and stood aside as she was ushered into a large office. Behind a desk covered in green baize was Stalin’s minister of state security, Viktor Abakumov, another of the Leader’s violent henchmen. Abakumov led SMERSH, an acronym for “Death to Spies,” during the war. The military counterintelligence unit, which set up blocking positions immediately behind the front lines, killed Soviet soldiers who attempted to retreat. The unit also hunted down deserters and brutally interrogated German prisoners of war. Before torturing his victims, Abakumov was known to unroll a bloodstained carpet to save the sheen on his office floor.

  “Tell me now, is Boris anti-Soviet or not, do you think?” began Abakumov, dressed in a military tunic buttoned to the bulging neck.

  Before Ivinskaya could reply, Abakumov continued, “Why are you so bitter? You’ve been worrying about him for some reason! Admit it now—we know everything.”

  At that moment, Ivinskaya still didn’t realize who was questioning her, and she pushed back with none of the caution an encounter with a monster like Abakumov would demand.

  “You always worry about a person you love. As regards whether Boris Leonidovich is anti-Soviet or not—there are too few colors on your palette, only black and white. There is a tragic lack of half-tones.”

  The books and materials seized from Ivinskaya’s apartment were piled on the desk in front of Abakumov. The KGB’s accounting of its haul from Ivinskaya’s apartment included: poems by Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Lydia Chukovskaya (to my dear O.V. Ivinskaya); a diary (30 pages); various poems, (460 pages); a “pornographic” poem; various letters (157 pieces); photos of Ivinskaya; and some of her own poems. Among these items was the small red volume of poetry that Pasternak had inscribed after the couple first made love in 1947.

  “I would suggest you think very carefully about this novel Pasternak is passing around to people at the moment—at a time when we have quite enough malcontents and enemies as it is,” said Abakumov. “You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel?”

  Ivinskaya protested and began to describe the completed part of the novel before she was interrupted.

  “You will have plenty of time to think about these questions and how to answer them. But personally I would like you to appreciate that we know everything, and that your own as well as Pasternak’s fate will depend on how truthful you are. I hope that next time we meet you will have nothing to conceal about Pasternak’s anti-Soviet views.”

  Abakumov then looked to the guard. “Take her away.”

  The subsequent questioning was led by a much more junior official, Anatoli Semyonov, who, like his boss, did not employ physical violence with Ivinskaya. He charged that Ivinskaya was planning to escape abroad together with her lover. He said Pasternak was a British spy, had Anglophile attitudes, and repeatedly used the analogy that Pasternak had sat at the table with the British and Americans “but ate Russian bacon.” For his inquisitors, the fact that Pasternak had family in England and had held several meetings with the British diplomat Isaiah Berlin in 1946 was evidence enough of his disloyalty. Interrogation now became a nightly ordeal, until it went on so many weeks, it became routine, “quite humdrum.”

  “How would you characterize Pasternak’s political sentiments? What do you know about his hostile work, his pro-English sentiments, his intention to commit treason?”

  “He does not belong to the category of people with anti-Soviet sentiments. He did not have any intention to commit treason. He always loved his country.”

  “But in your home we confiscated a book of Pasternak’s works in English. How did it get there?”

  “That book I got from Pasternak, that’s true. It is a monograph on his father, the painter, that was published in London.”

  “How did Pasternak get it?”

  “Simonov [the acclaimed war poet and editor of Novy Mir] brought it to him from a trip abroad.”

  “What more do you know about Pasternak’s ties with England?”

  “I think he once got a parcel from his sisters, who are living there.”

  “What sparked your relationship with Pasternak? He is, after all, a lot older than you.”

  “Love.”

  “No, you were joined together by your shared political views and treasonous intentions.”

  “We never had such intentions. I loved and love him as a man.”

  Ivinskaya was also accused of speaking ill of Surkov, although the transcript—which no doubt bowdlerized some of the language and threats of the KGB official—misspelled the loyal poet’s name.

  “Facts testified to by witnesses show that you systematically praised the works of Pasternak and contrasted it with the work of patriotic writers such as Surikov and Simonov, whereas the artistic methods of Pasternak in depicting Soviet reality are wrong.”

  “It is true that I speak highly of him, and hold him up as an example to all Soviet writers. His work is a great asset to Soviet literature, and his artistic methods are not wrong but just subjective.”

  “You suggested that Surikov does not have any literary skills and that his poetry is merely printed because it is in praise of the party.”

  “Yes, I think those mediocre poems compromise the idea. But Simonov I always considered a talented man.”

  Ivinskaya was told to write a summary of Doctor Zhivago, and when she began to describe it as the life of a physician and intellectual in the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, her interrogator scoffed. “You must simply say that you have actually read this work and that it constitutes a slander on Soviet life.” At one point, Semyonov expressed bewilderment at the poem “Mary Magdalene” and the possibility that it might refer to Ivinskaya. “What era does it refer to? And why have you never told Pasternak that you’re a Soviet woman, not a Mary Magdalene, and that it’s simply not right to give such a title to a poem about a woman he loves?” On another night, he questioned the romance itself. “What have you got in common? I can’t believe that a Russian woman like you could ever really be in love with this old Jew.” When one session was interrupted by some loud clanging in the distance, Semyonov smiled: “Hear that? It’s Pasternak trying to get in here! Don’t worry, he’ll make it before long.”

  When Pasternak learned of Ivinskaya’s arrest, he called a mutual friend, who found him sitting on a bench near the Palace of Soviets Metro station. He was crying. “Everything is finished now. They’ve taken her away from me and I’ll never see her again. It’s like death, even worse.”

  Several weeks into her detention, Ivinskaya said, it became obvious to her jailors that she was pregnant. Her treatment improved marginally. She was allowed to sleep longer, and salad and bread were added to her diet of porridge. The exhausting interrogations continued but to little avail for Semyonov—Ivinskaya did not break and refused to sign anything that would condemn Pasternak.

  She probably became pregnant in late summer, when the couple reconciled after a long break. Pasternak wrote about the moment in the poem “Autumn”:

  You fling off your dress

  As a coppice sheds its leaves.

  In a dressing gown with a silk tassel

  You fall into my arms.

  (Akhmatova railed at these love poems: “About the gown with the tassels, how she falls in his arms, that’s about Olga, I can’t stand it.
At 60, one should not write about these things.”)

  Ivinskaya was eventually told to prepare to meet her lover. She was torn between the fear that he was being abused in some nearby cell and joy that she might be able to exchange a few words with him, perhaps even embrace him. Ivinskaya was signed out of the Lubyanka, placed in a wagon with blacked-out windows, and driven to another secret-police facility just outside the city. She was led down into a basement, where she was abruptly pushed through a metal door that shut loudly behind her. It was hard to see. The smell was odd. Beneath her feet water pooled on the whitewashed floors. As Ivinskaya’s eyes adjusted to the semidarkness she saw bodies on a series of tables, each covered with gray tarpaulin. “There was the unmistakable sweetish smell of a morgue. Could it be that one of these corpses was the man I loved?”

  Ivinskaya was left locked inside the prison morgue for some time, but the effort to terrorize, or reduce her to some state of despair, failed. “I suddenly felt completely calm. For some reason, as though God had put it in my mind, it dawned on me that the whole thing was a monstrous hoax, and that Borya could not possibly be here.”

  Trembling from the cold damp of the morgue, she was led back to her interrogator. “Please forgive us,” said Semyonov. “We made a mistake and took you to the wrong place altogether. It was the fault of the escort guards. But now prepare yourself: We are waiting for you.”