“May it make its way around the world. You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”
These were the words of Boris Pasternak as he entrusted Italian literary talent agent Sergio D’Angelo with a copy of Doctor Zhivago, the book which became the CIA’s secret literary weapon against the Soviet Union.
Pasternak initially hesitated in giving D’Angelo the novel, likely remembering the ugly fate of his predecessors, such as the execution and exile of Pilnyak and Zamyatin. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Italian publisher for whom D’Angelo worked, would become one of the first to publish ‘Dr Zhivago’ in Italian, despite threats from the Italian Communist party and proposals from the Soviet authorities to instead publish a censored version of the novel within the Soviet Union itself.
Soviet authorities and publishing houses had refused to publish Doctor Zhivago, with the KGB claiming that his work was an “estrangement from Soviet life, and a celebration of individualism”. Upon discovering the novel two years later, the CIA stated that this was an “opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country”. In circulating the book, their goal was to contribute to the “cultural cold war” to undermine and challenge Soviet attitudes by propagating the idea of intellectual freedom within the Soviet Union and to foster anti-Soviet attitudes amongst the intelligentsia.
Censorship and repression visibly moulded the very shape and form of the book. When I wanted to read Doctor Zhivago, an internet search and a quick trip to Waterstones was all it took. The CIA, however, first read and received the book in the form of two rolls of film from MI6, with each page having been individually photographed by an unnamed British intelligence officer. Some received their copies from a small hidden library that Russian immigrant Catholics had created in Belgium during the first postwar world’s fair at the 1958 Brussels Universal and International Exposition. Several young Soviets would have been showered with miniature copies of the book, the books were thrown into the Soviet buses arriving at the 1959 World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship in Vienna. The CIA had printed these miniature copies on onion-skin paper, designed to be small enough to fit in pockets. The flood of these was so potent that Soviet customs officials would search specifically for them in travellers’ luggage. Others read the book through the efforts of those who would remove its cover, separate the pages, and hide them in their pockets.
Two simultaneous wars were playing out: one on the battlefield and one in the publishing houses. Stalin had announced ‘socialist realism’ as the only acceptable method of writing; all depictions of reality were obliged to be related to the spirit of communism and Marx. These writers were called upon to be the “engineers of the human soul”, helping to produce the “new Soviet man”. Censorship in the Soviet Union was often drastic, stringent, and arbitrary. A text about carrots was once banned because it detailed how carrots could be grown in individual plots of land, not just collectives.
Pasternak’s work, on the other hand, was described as a work of “symbolic realism”. There is an underlying humanism in the text, championing dignity and respect as integral human rights, completely independent of one’s beliefs or political affiliations. This was in direct opposition to the Communist principles of the prioritisation of the community over the individual. The novel does contain strong indictments of Stalin’s regime, for example when Zhivago’s close friend Dudorov claims that war was a blessing as a “purifying storm, a breath of deliverance…collectivisation was an erroneous and unsuccessful measure” and when Zhivago claims that “revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines that have gotten out of control, like a runaway train”. Despite these politically charged, evocative passages, the book was not full of potent invocations against socialism; its main sin was apathy and indifference towards politics.
Likely because Pasternak spent more than a decade writing the novel, the novel reflects changing attitudes towards the Revolution: at the beginning of the novel, the narrator is enthusiastic towards it, but gradually he begins to chart his disillusionment. The book itself charts Yuri Zhivago’s complex and intricate relationships, cast against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the atrocities of Stalin’s rule, including his affairs and his experiences of being forced to serve as a medical officer for Bolshevik partisans. It exists in a liminal place of unprecedented writing; it is neither the epic-style book about the Russian Revolution, nor is it the conventional romantic story.
Pasternak was not the political dissident he was perceived to be. He opposed Soviet ideology; however, “he was not at all a political man”. Doctor Zhivago is considered to be about something unique altogether. Stalin himself described him as a “cloud dweller” when he demanded that Pasternak’s name be taken off a list of those to be executed after he hung up the phone on Pasternak, failing to ascertain whether or not he was a supporter of Mandelstam (an anti-Stalinist writer). Pasternak’s ambiguous musings seemed neither to vindicate nor convict him.
Ironically, the CIA also issued intricate instructions on how the text should be interpreted, despite their claimed values of promoting free speech. When publishing Pasternak’s novel, John Maury, the Soviet Russia Division chief at the CIA, advised the public that “Dr Zhivago is an excellent springboard for conversations with Soviets on the general theme of ‘Communism versus Freedom of Expression”. The interpretation of the book itself was influenced by external circumstances, suggesting that books are rarely able to be read independently.
One could claim the book has been pigeon-holed into the category of political subversiveness, while discussion of its other themes of love, fate, and immortality, has been neglected. In several scholarly works produced about the CIA and Doctor Zhivago, little has ever been said about the contents of the book itself, other than vague descriptions of its anti-Soviet sentiments. His work is not politically, but philosophically and spiritually dissident; its political, subversive messages, could be interpreted as emphasised by the KGB to silence Pasternak, and by the CIA, to give him a voice.
Amidst the political and ideological discourse surrounding Doctor Zhivago, appreciation of the text as literature for literature’s sake is often neglected, thus raising several questions about literature itself: What are the purposes of literature? Must all literature be political propaganda? For some, it is a form of dissociation from the real world, whereas in this case, it was a direct link to the real world and the truth of oppressed voices. For Pasternak, the circumstances surrounding the book were equally as important as its contents; evidently and understandably, the CIA would have had no interest in its publication, had it not been for its ability to be used against the Soviets. Therefore, free speech must noe be concentrated solely in the power of publishing houses and governments, and the pathways through which voices can be heard must be diversified.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” is often quoted in such discussions regarding the power of literature, yet its preceding words are conveniently omitted. The full version reads: “Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword”. Under the rule of men not entirely great, Pasternak regrettably never received his deserved accolades while alive. The Soviet authorities suppressed any praise directed towards Pasternak, culminating in him being forced to decline his Nobel Prize in Literature, due to fears of exile or persecution.
Widely speculated, yet false, rumours that the CIA had organised the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian so that he would win a Nobel Prize, further undermined Pasternak’s literary prowess. While the CIA and the MI6 had a prominent role to play, we must not forget Pasternak’s bravery to write about reality, and his relentlessness in his drive for his novel to be published anywhere, in whichever language. He intentionally broke Soviet law and established a vital precedent for future authors to do what had once been unthinkable. Without Pasternak’s legacy, other silenced voices may never have been heard.
By Kavya Kapadia
