by Peter Finn
The full fury of the authorities was about to be unleashed, but in Pasternak’s home the celebration continued as more friends came to toast him and celebrate Zinaida’s name day. “No one foresaw the imminent catastrophe,” Chukovsky wrote in his diary.
On Saturday morning, Muscovites snapped up copies of Literaturnaya Gazeta as word spread in the city about an extraordinary attack on Pasternak. The newspaper printed in full the 1956 rejection letter written by the editors of Novy Mir, and it was accompanied by a long editorial brimming with insults under the headline “A Provocative Sortie of International Reaction.” For ordinary readers, many of whom were learning about Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel Prize for the first time, it was a feast of delicious detail about the novel’s sins. Rarely were readers provided such unexpurgated descriptions and quotes from a piece of banned literature. By 6:00 a.m. people were lining up to buy copies of Literaturnaya Gazeta. The newspaper had a circulation of 880,000 and it sold out within a few hours.
The editorial read: “The internal emigrant Zhivago, faint-hearted and base in his small-mindedness, is alien to the Soviet people, as is the malicious literary snob Pasternak—he is their opponent, he is the ally of those who hate our country and our system.”
Repeatedly, Pasternak was called a “Judas” who had betrayed his homeland for “thirty pieces of silver.” The “Swedish litterateurs, and their inspirers from across the Atlantic,” turned the novel into a Cold War weapon. After all, the readers of Literaturnaya Gazeta were told, Western critics didn’t think much of Doctor Zhivago. Negative reviews from Germany, the Netherlands, and France were quoted to make the point that “many Western critics expressed themselves quite openly on its modest artistic merits.” But when such an “arch-intriguer” as the owner of The New York Times extolled the novel for “spitting on the Russian people,” Doctor Zhivago was guaranteed ovations from the enemies of the Soviet Union. The novel and “the personality of its author became a golden vein for the reactionary press.”
“The honor conferred on Pasternak was not great,” the editorial concluded. “He was rewarded because he voluntarily agreed to play the part of a bait on the rusty hook of anti-Soviet propaganda. But it is difficult to hold this ‘position’ for long. A piece of bait is changed as soon as it goes rotten. History shows that such changes take place very quickly. An ignominious end waits for this Judas who has risen again, for Doctor Zhivago, and for his creator, who is destined to be scorned by the people.”
Around the city, bureaucrats took their cues from the newspaper and a drumbeat of condemnation began to dominate radio and television broadcasts. At the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute, the director told the students that they would have to attend a demonstration against Pasternak and sign a letter denouncing him that would be published in Literaturnaya Gazeta. He said their participation was a “litmus test.” But despite the threats, many students balked at condemning Pasternak. As administrators went through the dorms, some hid in the toilets or the kitchen, or didn’t answer their doors. Three students in Leningrad painted “Long Live Pasternak!” on the embankment of the river Neva. In Moscow, only 110 of about 300 Literary Institute students signed the letter, a remarkable act of defiance. Also, only a few dozen people from the student body attended the institute’s “spontaneous demonstration,” as administrators later described it. It was led by Vladimir Firsov, a budding poet, and Nikolai Sergovantsev, a critic. The group walked to the nearby Union of Soviet Writers building, and their handmade posters picked up on the anti-Semitic tone of the Literaturnaya Gazeta editorial. One placard depicted a caricature of Pasternak “reaching for a sack of dollars with crooked, grasping fingers.” Another said: “Throw the Judas out of the USSR.” They handed a letter to Konstantin Voronkov, a playwright and member of the union board, and said they planned to go to Peredelkino to continue the protest in front of Pasternak’s house. Voronkov advised against it until an official decision was made to increase pressure on Pasternak.
Inside the union’s palatial headquarters about forty-five writers who were also members of the Communist Party held a meeting about Pasternak. The comrades expressed their “wrath and indignation” and there was general agreement that Pasternak should be expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers—the ultimate sanction, as it would deprive him of the ability to earn a living and could also threaten his state-provided housing. A number of writers, including Sergei Mikhalkov, author of the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, went further and said Pasternak should be expelled from the Soviet Union. There was also criticism of Surkov for allowing the situation to get out of control; at the time he was away at a sanitarium and didn’t participate in any of the debates surrounding the Nobel Prize. A number of writers felt that Pasternak should have been expelled when it was learned he had given his manuscript to a foreigner. They deluded themselves into believing that if the Novy Mir rejection letter had been printed earlier it would have prevented Pasternak from winning the Nobel Prize, since “the progressive press all over the world would not have let it happen.” A formal decision on expelling Pasternak was put on the agenda for a meeting of the union’s executive on Monday.
Pasternak, as a matter of habit, didn’t read the newspapers but the scale and vehemence of the campaign was inescapable. Le Monde correspondent Michel Tatu visited Pasternak with a couple of other journalists after the appearance of the harsh Literaturnaya Gazeta editorial. It had been raining for six days and they found Peredelkino desolate and melancholy. Pasternak, however, was in good spirits and they talked in the music room. Pasternak tried to speak French, not very well, but he enjoyed the effort. He told the reporters that the Nobel Prize was not only a joy but a “moral support.” He added that it was a solitary joy.
Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Party, weighed in next with a long personal attack on Pasternak that was written by one of its more notorious journalists, David Zaslavsky. Both Lenin and Trotsky had dismissed Zaslavsky, an anti-Bolshevik before the revolution, as a hack. “Mr. Zaslavsky has acted only as a scandal monger,” said Lenin. “We need to distinguish a slanderer and scandal monger from an unmasker, who demands the discovery of precisely identified facts.” But under Stalin, the Pravda journalist was a favored hatchet man. Zaslavsky and Pasternak also had history. In May 1929, Zaslavsky began his career as a provocateur when he used the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta to accuse Mandelstam of plagiarism. Pasternak, Pilnyak, Fedin, Zoshchenko, and others signed a letter defending Mandelstam and calling him “an outstanding poet, one of the most highly qualified of translators, and a literary master craftsman.” The return of the seventy-eight-year-old Zaslavsky from semi-retirement to attack Pasternak gave the Pravda article “an especially sinister nuance.”
The piece was headlined: “Reactionary Propaganda Uproar Over a Literary Weed.”
“It is ridiculous, but Doctor Zhivago, this infuriated moral freak, is presented by Pasternak as the ‘finest’ representative of the old Russian intelligentsia. This slander of the leading intelligentsia is as absurd as it is devoid of talent,” Zaslavsky wrote. “Pasternak’s novel is low-grade reactionary hackwork.”
The novel, he continued, “was taken up triumphantly by the most inveterate enemies of the Soviet Union—obscurantists of various shades, incendiaries of a new world war, provocateurs. Out of an ostensibly literary event they seek to make a political scandal, with the clear aim of aggravating international relations, adding fuel to the flames of the ‘cold war,’ sowing hostility towards the Soviet Union, blackening the Soviet public. Choking with delight, the anti-Soviet press has proclaimed the novel the ‘best’ work of the current year, while the obliging grovelers of the big bourgeoisie have crowned Pasternak with the Nobel Prize.…
“The inflated self-esteem of an offended and spiteful Philistine has left no trace of dignity and patriotism in Pasternak’s soul,” Zaslavsky concluded. “By all his activity, Pasternak confirms that in our socialist country, gripped by enthusiasm for the building of the radia
nt Communist society, he is a weed.”
The state’s giant propaganda machine was now working at full tilt, according to the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who was studying at the time in the Gorky Literary Institute. “The radio, from 5 in the morning until 12 at night, the television, the newspapers, the journals, magazines, even for children, were full of articles and attacks on the renegade writer.”
Pasternak’s friend Alexander Gladkov was in a barber shop on Arbat Square Sunday afternoon when Zaslavsky’s article was read out over the radio. “Everybody listened in silence—a sullen kind of silence, I would say. Only one chirpy workman started talking about all the money Pasternak would get, but nobody encouraged him to go on. I knew that cheap tittle-tattle of this kind would be much harder for Pasternak to bear than all the official fulminations. I had felt very depressed all day, but this silence in the barber’s shop cheered me up.”
Pasternak tried to laugh some of it off but “it was in fact all very painful to him.” On Sunday, Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, visited Pasternak with two fellow students from the Literary Institute, the young poets Yuri Pankratov and Ivan Kharabarov. Pasternak wasn’t happy to have visitors and made it clear he wanted to be alone. He said he was ready to “drink his cup of suffering to the end” as the three young people accompanied him along part of his walk. “One had the clear impression of his loneliness—a loneliness borne with great courage,” recalled Ivinskaya’s daughter. Pankratov recited some lines from one of Pasternak’s poems:
That is the reason why in early Spring
My friends and I foregather,
Our evenings are farewells
Our revelries are testaments,
So that suffering’s secret flow
Should warm the cold of being.
Pasternak was visibly moved, but the visit ended on a note of disappointment. Pankratov and Kharabarov explained that they were under pressure to sign the letter of denunciation at the Literary Institute and asked Pasternak what they should do. “Really now,” said Pasternak, “what does it matter? It’s an empty formality—sign it.”
“When I looked out the window I saw them skipping with joy as they ran off hand in hand,” Pasternak later told Yevtushenko, seeing their relief as a small betrayal. “How strange young people are now, what a strange generation! In our time, such things were not done.”
Other former friends hurried to distance themselves. The poet Ilya Selvinsky, who had previously called Pasternak his teacher, and Pasternak’s neighbor, the critic Viktor Shklovsky, sent telegrams of congratulations from the Crimea, where they were vacationing. But Selvinsky quickly followed it up with a letter when he read about the official reaction. “I now take it on myself to tell you that to ignore the view of the Party, even if you think it is wrong, is equivalent, in the international situation of the present moment, to deliver a blow at the country in which you live.” Selvinsky and Shklovsky then wrote to a local newspaper in Yalta and accused Pasternak of “a low act of treachery.”
“Why? The most terrible thing is I don’t remember anymore,” said Shklovsky many years later. “The times? Sure, but we’re the time, I am, millions like me. One day everything will come to light: the records of those meetings, the letters from those years, the interrogation procedures, the denunciations—everything. And all that sewage will also dredge up the stench of fear.”
The literary community was now “gripped by the sickening, clammy feeling of dread” and it led to a near-frenzy of condemnation. These inquisitorial feedings were an almost ritualistic part of the Soviet literary system that stretched back to Stalin. Error was followed by collective attack. The fallen writer was expected to respond with contrition and self-criticism before being welcomed back into the fold. Writers scurried to attack Pasternak. They were motivated by the need to survive within a system that could just as easily turn on them. Some despised Pasternak for his success and what they sensed or knew was his disdain for them. And others were true believers who were convinced that Pasternak was a traitor. The scale of the rhetorical assault and the global attention it drew was unprecedented. Moreover, Pasternak failed to follow the time-honored script.
The meeting of the executive of the writers’ union was scheduled for noon on Monday. Pasternak went into town early with Vyacheslav “Koma” Ivanov, his neighbor’s son. At Ivinskaya’s apartment, Ivanov, with the support of Olga and Irina, argued that Pasternak should not go to the meeting, which was likely to be an “execution.” Pasternak, who was pale and feeling ill, said he would instead send a letter to the meeting. It was written in pencil in a series of bullet points and Pasternak apologized in the text that it was “not as smooth and persuasive as [he] would like it to be.” It was also not apologetic:
“I still believe even after all this noise and all those articles in the press that it was possible to write Doctor Zhivago as a Soviet citizen. It’s just that I have a broader understanding of the rights and possibilities of a Soviet writer, and I don’t think I disparage the dignity of Soviet writers in any way.”
Pasternak described his attempts to have the book published in the Soviet Union, his requests to Feltrinelli to delay publication, and his unhappiness at the selective quotations from the book that had appeared in the Western press.
“I would not call myself a literary parasite,” he told his colleagues. “Frankly, I believe that I have done something for literature.
“I thought that my joy and the cheerful feelings I had when the Nobel Prize was awarded to me would be shared by the society I’ve always believed I am a part of. I thought the honor bestowed on me, a writer who lives in Russia and hence a Soviet writer, is an honor for all of Soviet literature.
“As for the prize itself nothing would ever make me regard this honor as a sham and respond to it with rudeness.”
He concluded by telling his colleagues that whatever punishment they might dole out would bring them neither happiness nor glory.
Ivanov rushed by taxi over to the writers’ union and a young man “with the cold eyes of a dutiful clerk” took the letter from him. The vestibule of the old union building buzzed with the sound of voices as writers arrived for the meeting in the White Hall. All the seats were taken and writers lined up along the walls. Pasternak’s letter was read, and greeted with “anger and indignation.” Polikarpov’s summary of the meeting for the Central Committee described the letter as “scandalous in its impudence and cynicism.”
Twenty-nine writers spoke and the rhetoric became increasingly pitched. The novelist Galina Nikolayeva compared Pasternak to the World War II traitor Gen. Andrei Vlasov who collaborated with the Nazis. “For me it is not enough to expel him from the Writers’ Union. This person should not live on Soviet soil.”
Nikolayeva later wrote a letter to Pasternak declaring her love for his early poetry but adding that she would not hesitate to “put a bullet through a traitor’s head.”
“I am a woman who has known much sorrow and I am not a spiteful person, but for treachery such as this, I would not flinch from it,” she wrote. Pasternak replied in a letter that said, “You are younger than I, and you will live to see a time when people take a different view of what has happened.”
The novelist Vera Panova’s speech was “harsh, very direct, hostile.” When Gladkov asked her later why she was so vicious she said she panicked, felt like it was 1937 again, and had to protect her large family.
Nikolai Chukovsky, Kornei’s son, also spoke at the meeting. “There is one good thing in this whole, shameful story—Pasternak has finally taken off his mask and openly acknowledged that he is our enemy. So let us deal with him as we always deal with our enemies.”
Chukovsky’s younger sister, Lydia, was appalled when she heard about his participation. She recalled in her diary that since her brother had tasted success with his novel Baltic Skies he increasingly had found his sister’s outspokenness “sharp, ill-considered, or even dangerous for him.” Nikolai wanted to protect his career in the Soviet literary
bureaucracy; Chukovsky had recently set up the translators’ section of the writers’ union.
The meeting dragged on for hours and some writers slipped out to smoke and argue. Alexander Tvardovsky, known as a liberal editor at Novy Mir, was sitting under the painting entitled Gorky Reading “The Girl and the Death” in the Presence of Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov when he was approached by Vadim Kozhevnikov, the editor-in-chief of the journal Znamya.
He teased Tvardovsky.
“Well, Sasha, tell me, didn’t you want to publish that novel?”
“That was before my time,” Tvardovsky replied. “But the former board did not want it either, and you know it.… Get out of here!”
“Why should I?”
“Because you lack conscience and honor.”
“Why do I lack conscience and honor?”
“Go [to hell].”
A gloomy-faced Polikarpov also prowled the halls. He seemed uncertain if expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers was the correct punishment. And a number of writers—Tvardovsky, Sergei Smirnov, and Konstantin Vanshenkin—told him they were opposed.
Both Smirnov and Nikolai Rylenkov would regret their dissent and would forcibly condemn Pasternak in the coming days.
The vote to expel Pasternak was “unanimous,” according to the official record, and a long, formal resolution stated that “the novel Doctor Zhivago, around which a propaganda uproar has been centered, only reveals the author’s immeasurable self-conceit coupled with a dearth of ideas; it is the cry of a frightened philistine, offended and terrified by the fact that history did not follow the crooked path that he would have liked to allot it. The idea of the novel is false and paltry, fished out of a rubbish heap.…
