Doctor Zhivago was transformed during the Cold War from a Siberian soap opera into a worldwide symbol of resistance to tyranny. How a competent but unexceptional novel came to achieve this status is a story far more interesting than the book itself
Helen Andrews
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
by Peter Finn & Petra Couvée
Vintage, 2015, 368 pages, $22.99
Twilight of the Eastern Gods
by Ismail Kadare
Grove Press, 2014, 224 pages, $29.99
When Doctor Zhivago reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list in November, 1958, the book it displaced from the top spot was Lolita. Nabokov was not pleased. He did not think much of Boris Pasternak (left) as a novelist, and to make matters worse, he felt bound to keep his low opinion to himself for fear of seeming jealous. “Had not Zhivago and I been on the same ladder,” he griped in a private letter, “I would have been glad to demolish that trashy, melodramatic, false, and inept book, which neither landscaping nor politics can save from my wastepaper basket.”
Nabokov was right that Doctor Zhivago, as literature, is nothing to crow about—not that the author of Lolita was in a position to look down his nose at a book for owing its success to extra-literary considerations. Pasternak does not rank with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He nonetheless deserves to be classed with such perfectly creditable writers as, say, Margaret Mitchell. Indeed, Gone with the Wind may be the closest thing to an English-language equivalent of Doctor Zhivago: a sweeping romantic epic set against the backdrop of a civil war, with enough sympathy shown for the losing side to attract the ire of the politically correct. Both books transitioned very well to the big screen, and in neither case was that entirely a compliment to the literary quality of the source material.
Yet during the Cold War Doctor Zhivago was transformed from a Siberian soap opera into a worldwide symbol of resistance to tyranny. The story of how this occurred is the subject of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée.
pasternak PW coverThe book’s road to international fame began in 1956, when the Khrushchev thaw led Pasternak to hope that his newly completed first novel might find a Soviet publisher, despite its criticisms of Bolshevik excesses. His friend Kornei Chukovsky, who had more experience with the Moscow literary bureaucracy, was less naive. He knew that Doctor Zhivago would be suppressed, thaw or no thaw. But he also knew that Khrushchev would be wary of handing the West an easy propaganda victory. According to the gossip Chukovsky had gathered by September, “the current plan is as follows: to stem all nasty rumours (both here and abroad) by putting the novel out in three thousand copies—thereby making it inaccessible to the masses—and at the same time proclaiming that we are placing no obstacle in Pasternak’s path”.
