The Zhivago Affair

September 21, 2014 12:48 AM

The story of Dr Zhivago’s publication is, like the novel itself, a cat’s cradle, an eternal zigzag of plotlines, coincidences, inconsistencies and maddening disappearances. The book was always destined to become a ‘succès de scandale’, in Berlin’s words, but the machinations and competing energies that went into seeing it into print, on the one hand, and trying to stop it going to print, on the other, make it the perfect synecdoche for that feint, counterfeint round of pugilism we call the Cold War.

—The Writer and the Valet by Frances Stonor Saunders tells the story of Isaiah Berlin's part in publishing Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago while Michael Scammell details the CIA's role.
posted by Kattullus (10 comments total)

In dire financial straits I once sold a copy of Dr. Zhivago to a used bookstore. The buyer was firm on $8. "Come on, it's a first edition with a very good dust jacket!" says I. "But it's Pasternak," he replied with a withering condescension I've only ever since seen from cartoonish indie record store clerks on TV responding to inquiries about Depeche Mode or something.

(I took the eight bucks.)
posted by El Mariachi at 1:04 AM on September 21, 2014 [6 favorites]

In his youth Pasternak looked, Marina Tsvetaeva said, ‘like an Arab and his horse’.

Ouch. And yet, based on that photo, she's right.
posted by GrammarMoses at 4:20 AM on September 21, 2014

That was a great read, thanks for posting.
posted by smoke at 4:57 AM on September 21, 2014

There are many reasons why it's tragic that Stalin and his butchers were never arrested, deposed, tried and executed. Among them is the fact that we'll never really know why he was had such oddly personal favorites among artists. Pasternak lived while Babel was murdered; apolitical characters like Kharms were brutally killed while a counterrevolutionary like Bulgakov was the subject of elaborate cat-and-mouse games; the ardent Bolshevik Meyerhold was tortured to death while the bourgeois Stanislavsky was elevated to near-godhood. It's a very weird aspect of the Stalinist years, and we'll sadly never really know what was going on in the vozhd's thick head.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 7:58 AM on September 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Man, I love the LRB. I find myself pacing my reading of it so that it won't be too long after I finish one issue that the next one appears.

This article does such a good job of evoking the particular character of Stalin's terror. The creaking parquet flooring, the samovar just off the boil, light coming through net curtains, samizdat being passed under tables as every sound on the stairs might be presaging a midnight trip to the Lubyanka. It's the same mood that permeates The Master and Margarita and Karl Schlögel's '1937': the banality of existence with unknowable, unstoppable forces just out of sight, just - maybe - around the next corner.
posted by sobarel at 8:13 AM on September 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

Michael Scammell seems not to be aware of any requirement that a work be published in its original language to be eligible for the Nobel Prize:

As for the CIA, the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and the smuggling of copies into the Soviet Union contributed to the novel as a samizdat phenomenon, but it had nothing to do with Pasternak’s fame or him winning the Nobel Prize.

LRB's Frances Stonor Saunders appears to be better informed and is more convincing:

No matter, the CIA has already embarked on Operation Dinosaur, whose aim is to exploit Pasternak’s ‘heretical literary work’ for ‘maximum free world discussion and acclaim and consideration for such honour as the Nobel Prize’. According to a declassified memo quoted by Finn and Couvée in The Zhivago Affair, MI6 are ‘in favour and have offered to provide whatever assistance they can’.

Since the prize can’t be awarded for a work not published in its original language, the CIA prints an edition through a cut-out, or front, in Holland. This, the first ever appearance in Russian of the original text, deals with the Nobel Prize requirement. ...

One of many reasons I subscribe to the LRB, but no longer to the NYRB.
posted by jamjam at 9:55 AM on September 21, 2014

Agreed. I did like learning that the CIA have their edition of Dr Zhivago on display with Osama bin Laden's AK-47 in their private museum though. The last half-century has been weird.
posted by sobarel at 10:05 AM on September 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

I have never heard of a requirement that a work be published in its original language to be "eligible" for the Nobel Prize, and can't seem to find anything online about it either.

(The Literature prize isn't given to specific works anyway, but to an author's body of work.)
posted by kmz at 10:49 AM on September 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

And I just started reading The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn & Petra Couvée.

Thanks for reminding me that this book exists. I saw it awhile back and then forgot about it. Such rich history here.
posted by Fizz at 4:13 PM on September 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that original language business seemed weird to me as well. It sounds like while the article was interesting, the author got a pretty central fact wrong. I totally buy that the CIA was urging the Nobel committee to give Pasternak the prize– the committee generally likes thumbing nose at regimes that are imprisoning novelists– but that's a pretty important detail to get wrong.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:21 AM on September 22, 2014