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

by Peter Finn

  Radio Moscow responded on January 21. The English-language broadcast described the smuggling of cash and quoted from Feltrinelli’s letter in July in which he asked Ivinskaya not to let his contracts with Pasternak fall into the hands of the authorities or the Pasternak family. The report said that Ivinskaya had confessed, and it ended with an arch commentary that recalled Hamlet’s description of his mother: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” A week later the international broadcaster followed up and recapped the prosecution in a long commentary in Italian: “The dream of fantastic riches impelled her to crime and she began to trade Pasternak’s name, wholesale and retail. The more the author’s health declined, the greater grew the trade; even death did not stop business.”

  The report went on to detail what it described as “a whole conspiratorial system, similar to those usually described in thrillers. They had everything: a code language, clandestine meetings, aliases and even identification codes: an Italian currency note cut in half was used as identification token.”

  The broadcast concluded that “the last page of this sordid history is closed: the Moscow City Court, on behalf of millions of Soviet citizens whose land has been besmirched by these dregs of society, bought with dollars, lire, francs and marks, has pronounced sentence.”

  In the West, the story was far from over. The prosecution of Ivinskaya was seen as a continuation of the Nobel campaign against Pasternak. “People in the West will be justified in asking what one can expect, on the level of relations between states, from a regime which displays so little courage and generosity toward its own citizens and so little respect for the great culture of which—in many ways—it is the custodian,” wrote the retired American diplomat George Kennan in a letter to The New York Times. The Times of London concluded that the “radio statement is much too vindictive in its wording and too melodramatic to be swallowed whole.”

  The basis of the Soviet case against Ivinskaya was challenged. Feltrinelli released a statement on January 28: “As Boris Pasternak’s publisher I have preferred hitherto to refrain from making any statement, because I maintain that controversy in this matter does not help the persons involved in the case—not even the late author’s family. So gross, however, are the inaccuracies reported by the most varied sources that it is my duty to state today a fact of which I am personally aware.

  “I myself know that the 100,000 dollars, converted entirely or in part into rubles and transmitted to Moscow, came from funds at the disposal of Boris Pasternak in the West. The amount in question was withdrawn on a written order in the author’s own hand, dated 6th December 1959.”

  Feltrinelli said the order arrived in the West in March 1960.

  “In conclusion, it is my opinion that Olga Ivinskaya is not responsible either for the transfer of the sum or for its eventual destination. In the first place, the transfer order was given, I repeat, by Pasternak himself; secondly, it was Pasternak himself who wished that the sum converted into rubles should be sent, without distinction, either to himself or to Mrs. Ivinskaya.

  “Nor can one rule out that the wish of the author was, in fact to consider Olga Ivinskaya as his heiress. I trust therefore that the Soviet judicial authorities will take into account the circumstances which I have related, which are all confirmed by irrefutable documents.”

  D’Angelo also published a series of articles that included the text from Pasternak’s letters to him and contained “irrefutable proof to the effect that it was the author himself who requested and received the money.” And Nivat told reporters in Paris, “Knowing the ties between Boris Pasternak and Madame Ivinskaya, I know that she would never have undertaken anything without his initiative.” Through a friend Nivat asked Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who in 1958 was the first royal to visit the Soviet Union, to intervene. “Had Boris Pasternak, whom I loved as a father, still lived, this would not have happened,” he wrote.

  Surkov entered the fight with an interview in the French Communist daily, L’Humanité. He expressed surprise that he was getting letters from writers such as Graham Greene. “What, you intervene and demand the liberation of rogues of whom you know nothing? Now this is really a question of an illegal currency deal and is not connected with Pasternak, who was a great poet. His family, it must be said, has nothing to do with this sordid story. All these rumors offend the writer’s memory. If people abroad wish to respect his memory then they should not stir up mud around him, just because among his friends there was an adventuress.”

  Surkov also wrote to David Carver, the general secretary of International PEN, to say that Ivinskaya “advertised her intimacy with Pasternak” and “despite her advanced age (48) did not stop to have many parallel and frequent intimate relations with other men.”

  The following month, Surkov and Alexei Adzhubei visited Britain. They brought with them what they called documentary evidence proving Ivinskaya’s guilt, including photographs of bundles of rubles; a photograph of the now-famous half of Feltrinelli’s thousand-lira note; a letter from Feltrinelli to Ivinskaya; and a copy of a handwritten statement Ivinskaya gave to the KGB.

  “We have brought documents and letters which will give you absolute evidence that she was mixed up in some very dirty business, which could only harm Mr. Pasternak’s name,” said Adzhubei at a press conference in London.

  The Soviet officials in London had little understanding of how Ivinskaya’s alleged confession would be read in the West: “Everything in the accusation is the essential truth,” she wrote. “For my part, I dispute none of it. (Perhaps with the exception of details about which I myself may have become confused owing to my nervous condition.) On the other hand, I wish to thank the interrogator for his tact and correctness, not only in connection with me, but also with my archives, which have been carefully sorted, part of them returned to me, part delivered to the [literary archive], and nothing which I wanted to preserve destroyed.”

  Adzhubei demanded that British newspapers publish the documents “without comment whatsoever” and accused the British press of censorship when editors told him that this was not how journalism in the West was practiced. The British press also pointed out that none of this material had been published in the Soviet Union and noted that the case against Ivinskaya had been subject to an almost total news blackout.

  Surkov persisted in his efforts to cast Pasternak as a great poet who was exploited in his old age by Ivinskaya. And the state began to publish some of Pasternak’s work but not, of course, Doctor Zhivago. A literary committee “was formed a month after the poet’s death to arrange for the publication of his work of which all Russians are very fond,” Surkov announced. It was a mixed group of friends and family, including Vsevolod Ivanov, Ehrenburg, Zinaida and Pasternak’s sons, as well as some officials. Several months later, Surkov made a selection of Pasternak’s poetry for a collection to be published by Goslit, the state publishing house. Some of Pasternak’s family and friends objected to the choice of poems and the slimness of the volume, but Zinaida Pasternak was happy to see anything published and get some income. “I don’t care how it looks,” she said, “as long as they put it out quickly.”

  Zinaida was left in poor straits in the wake of Pasternak’s death. She spent a good deal of money on specialist care in the weeks before his death, and had no way to access the royalties that sat in bank accounts in the West. She suggested that the Soviet government repatriate and take all of the royalties if they would just give her a pension. “I’m a pauper,” she complained to Chukovsky.

  In August 1961, she asked Surkov if the family could transfer royalties held abroad for Pasternak’s poems and other works, but not from Doctor Zhivago, which they would reject for “moral reasons.” Surkov supported an effort to help her, noting in a memo to his colleagues that “she has practically no means of subsistence” and “has always been and is loyal to the Soviet power.” She “never approved” of Pasternak’s novel, he added.

  Polikarpov, the Central Committee bureaucrat in charge of cultural matte
rs, rejected any attempt to withdraw money from accounts held abroad, arguing that it could lead to “yet another anti-Soviet campaign in the reactionary press.”

  “It seems appropriate to stop discussing this issue,” he wrote.

  In 1966, a number of writers and artists wrote to the Politburo to ask for a pension for Zinaida, who had suffered a series of heart attacks since her husband’s death. Polikarpov blocked it, apparently because he “had a longstanding dislike for Zinaida … who he viewed as overly blunt and lacking in cultural refinement.”

  Zinaida never saw a ruble and died on June 28, 1966. She was buried next to her husband. Zinaida and Pasternak’s son, Leonid, died ten years later of a heart attack while sitting in his car near Manège Square in central Moscow. He was only thirty-eight.

  The money continued to pile up in Western Europe. In 1964, Feltrinelli sold the film rights to Zhivago to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $450,000. Feltrinelli insisted that the screenplay not misrepresent or distort “the author’s ideas in a way that might lead to their being attributed with a meaning and a political orientation that was not in conformity” with his intentions. In Hollywood, this was dismissed as posturing, and the film’s producer, Carlo Ponti, thought that Feltrinelli “didn’t give a damn, all he wanted was the money.” The film, starring Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, was directed by David Lean, and key scenes were shot in Spain and Finland. The movie was a major hit, and introduced vast numbers of people who had never read the novel to the story of Doctor Zhivago. The movie was banned in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Foreign Ministry protested to the United States embassy when American diplomats held private showings of Doctor Zhivago in their apartments. The ministry labeled the screenings “frankly provocative” and said the movie, like the book, “falsified Soviet history and the life of the Soviet people.”

  The film, like most adaptations, was not entirely faithful to the novel, and was criticized for its naïve rendering of history and its melodrama. But like the novel, the film had a huge impact on popular culture. Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara are still remembered in those roles, the cinematography was breathtaking, and the music of “Lara’s Theme” by Maurice Jarre remains instantly familiar. Adjusted for inflation, Doctor Zhivago is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.

  One Russian reader of Doctor Zhivago who changed his mind about the novel was Khrushchev. The Soviet leader was ousted in October 1964 by his colleagues, including Vladimir Semichastny, the former youth leader who compared Pasternak to a pig and had since risen to become chairman of the KGB. In retirement, Khrushchev’s son gave him a typewritten, samizdat copy, and he took a long time to read it. “We shouldn’t have banned it,” he said. “I should have read it myself. There’s nothing anti-Soviet in it.”

  In his memoirs, Khrushchev reflected, “In connection with Doctor Zhivago, some might say it’s too late for me to express regret that the book wasn’t published. Yes, maybe it is too late. But better late than never.”

  In October 1965, Mikhail Sholokhov, the candidate long favored by the Kremlin, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy said the award was “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he had given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people.”

  Sholokhov proved to be an ungracious winner. “I am the first Russian writer, the first Soviet writer to win the Nobel Prize,” he told a press conference in Moscow. “It is natural that I should feel proud. It did come rather late, however.”

  Pasternak, he said, “was just an internal émigré” and “I am not going to change my opinion of Pasternak just because he’s dead.”

  Sholokhov did change his opinion of the academy, which he had said was “not objective in its judgment of an individual author’s worth” when Pasternak won the prize. But in 1965, he “gratefully” accepted the honor.

  In Moscow, too, the academy was no longer depicted as a stooge of the West. “The fact that this bright talent has received the world’s recognition is estimated by Soviet writers as a victory of Soviet literature,” said Leonid Leonov, a Union of Soviet Writers official. “This is the rehabilitation of the Nobel Prize itself as an objective and noble recognition of literary talent.”

  The Swedish Academy’s rehabilitation did not last very long. In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had chronicled life in the Gulag, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Then, the Union of Soviet Writers said that “it is deplorable that the Nobel committee allowed itself to be drawn into an unseemly game that was not started in the interests of the development of the spiritual values and traditions of literature but was prompted by speculative political consideration.”

  Ivinskaya was released from prison in late 1964; Irina had been released two years earlier, also after serving half her sentence. While at the camp in Potma, Ivinskaya had written to Khrushchev to plead for clemency, particularly for her daughter, whom she described as “dying slowly right in front of my eyes.” In June 1961, The New York Times reported that Ivinskaya and her daughter were seriously ill and hospitalized. Irina was reported to have a stomach ulcer.

  “I am not saying that I am not guilty because I believe Pasternak was guilty,” wrote Ivinskaya at the start of the letter, dated March 10, 1961. Nor did she blame Pasternak, although she was frank in her descriptions of his involvement in the effort to bring in his royalties. “One cannot just present [Pasternak] as an innocent lamb,” she said, stating the plainest of facts. “This does not deceive anyone and neither does my ‘criminal case.’ ”

  In the long, rambling letter that sprawled over sixteen handwritten pages, Ivinskaya argued that the case against her was flawed, if not ludicrous. And she expressed disbelief that her daughter, “this girl,” was imprisoned—“and for what? Just for holding the suitcase … ?”

  Ivinskaya said she only learned at KGB headquarters that the receipt of money from abroad—even though such transactions weren’t particularly appealing—had damaged the state. She noted, as had her defense lawyers and Pasternak’s defenders in the West, that the author had received royalties from abroad for some time and the money helped support Pasternak and his family. Ivinskaya mentioned the Pasternak family’s purchase of a new car. “It was impossible not to know the money came from abroad,” she wrote.

  “I shared Pasternak’s life for 14 years and in most cases I shared not his royalties but all his misfortunes and the vicissitudes of his fate and very often in contrast to my beliefs,” she continued. “But I loved him and I did my best as my friends joked to shield him with my ‘broad back.’ And he believed that I was his closest and dearest person, the person whom he needed most.”

  She noted—as she would later in her memoir—that she intervened with D’Angelo to delay publication of Doctor Zhivago and that the Central Committee had asked her to stop Pasternak from meeting foreigners. In that, she had an even sterner ally in Zinaida Pasternak.

  Ivinskaya concluded that Pasternak would “turn in his coffin if he found out the terrible end of my life was caused by him.

  “Please return me and my daughter to life. I promise I will live the rest of my life so that it will be good for my country.”

  The letter was accompanied by a report from the camp commander on the “characteristics of the detainee.” Ivinskaya was described as conscientious, modest, and polite, and it was noted that she “correctly understands” the politics of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. But the commander added that “she feels her conviction was wrong, that she was convicted for a crime she did not commit.”

  Tendentious excerpts from Ivinskaya’s letter to Khrushchev were published in a Moscow newspaper in 1997 when Ivinskaya’s heirs were in a dispute with the State Archives of Literature and Art over some of Pasternak’s papers. The article, employing selective quotes, attempted to smear Ivinskaya as a KGB informer. The complete letter was not published. Unfortunately, the effort to damage Ivinskaya’s reputation largely succeeded, as the ar
ticle’s allegation was uncritically reproduced in the Western press. A reading of the full letter, which is available in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, simply doesn’t support the label of informer. The KGB, in its own secret assessment, described Ivinskaya as anti-Soviet. The letter is the plea of a desperate woman who tried to ingratiate herself to the Soviet leader—as did countless other inmates who sought mercy from the Kremlin.

  After her release, Ivinskaya resumed her career as a literary translator and started writing about her life. Her memoirs were taken out of the Soviet Union in 1976 by Yevtushenko and published under the title A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak. She died in 1995 at the age of eighty-three. Her daughter, Irina Yemelyanova, lives in Paris and has published two memoirs of her own.

  Sergio D’Angelo lives in Viterbo, Italy, and continues to write about the Zhivago affair and charm guests as easily as he did Pasternak. He unsuccessfully sued Feltrinelli for half of Pasternak’s royalties in the 1960s. He believed he had a claim to the money because of a note Pasternak had written, asking that D’Angelo be rewarded. D’Angelo had hoped to use the royalties to establish a literary prize in Pasternak’s name that would be “awarded to writers who have championed the cause of freedom.” The court battle was protracted and D’Angelo finally abandoned his appeal of a lower-court ruling. The English translation of his memoir is available online.

  In 1966, the Pasternak family, with the support of the Soviet authorities, began to negotiate a settlement with Feltrinelli over the royalties and the transfer of Pasternak’s money to the Soviet Union. “It seems to me that the time has come for frankness and loyalty, all the more fitting by way of a tribute to the memory of the late Poet,” Feltrinelli wrote to Alexander Volchkov, the president of the College of International Jurists in Moscow, and the Pasternak family’s representative. “The time is therefore ripe, in my opinion, for all of us to take a more open and straightforward step forward, including those who at the time showed no mercy to the noble figure of the late Poet.”