The Magical Chorus

The anti-Pasternak campaign was organized in the worst Stalin traditions: denunciations in Pravda and other newspapers; publication of angry letters from “ordinary Soviet workers,” who had not read the book; hastily convened meetings of Pasternak’s colleagues, at which fine poets like Vladimir Soloukhin, Leonid Martynov, and Boris Slutsky were forced to censure an author they respected. Slutsky, who in his brutal, prose-like poems had created an image for himself of courageous soldier and truth-lover, was so tormented by his anti-Pasternak speech that he later lost his mind.

On October 29, 1958, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League, dedicated to the Komsomol’s fortieth anniversary, its head, Vladimir Semichastny, attacked Pasternak before an audience of 14,000 people, including Khrushchev and other Party leaders. Semichastny first called Pasternak a “mangy sheep” who pleased the enemies of the Soviet Union with “his slanderous so-called work.” Then Semichastny (who became head of the KGB in 1961) added that “this man went and spat in the face of the people.” And he concluded with “If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did” because a pig “never shits where it eats.”¹³ Khrushchev applauded demonstratively.

News of that speech drove Pasternak to the brink of suicide. It has recently come to light that the real author of Semichastny’s insults was Khrushchev, who had called in the Komsomol leader the night before and dictated the lines about the mangy sheep and the pig, which Semichastny described as a “typically Khrushchevian, deliberately crude, unceremonious scolding.”¹⁴

Pasternak responded to the state insult with a poem in which he wrote that he could not stand seeing those “porcine mugs” in the newspapers anymore. This was an obvious attack on Khrushchev, with more in the poem:

The cult of personality is stripped of its majesty,

But the cult of noisy phrases is in force

And the cult of pettiness and impersonality

Has increased perhaps a hundredfold.

This poem was not published then, but Pravda ran two tortured letters of repentance, one of them addressed to Khrushchev, in which Pasternak announced his “voluntary refusal” of the Nobel Prize and admitted the mistake of Doctor Zhivago.¹⁵ I remember the depressing impact of the letters even though they were clearly written under duress.

In the meantime, pressure on Pasternak kept increasing. Public humiliation was not enough for Khrushchev, he wanted the writer on his knees. The excuse for a new push was the publication in The Daily Mail of a translation of Pasternak’s poem “The Nobel Prize,” smuggled out by a British journalist:

Like a beast in a pen, I’m cut off

From my friends, freedom, the sun,

But the hunters are gaining ground.

I’ve nowhere else to run.

Pasternak was called in for questioning at the office of the General Prosecutor of the USSR, where he was threatened with arrest for “activity, consciously and deliberately intended to harm Soviet society.” This was qualified by the General Prosecutor as a “particularly dangerous state crime,” which, by law, could be punishable by death.

It’s unlikely that Khrushchev intended to have Pasternak executed, but he did think it acceptable to terrorize the sixty-eight-year-old poet without even replying to his letters. This total failure of communication with the new ruler dispirited Pasternak, who complained bitterly, “Even the terrible and cruel Stalin did not think it beneath him to grant my requests about prisoners and on his own initiative called me to discuss them.”¹⁶

For Pasternak, the only escape from the horror he so powerfully expressed in the poem “The Nobel Prize” was, it seems, death, which came on May 30, 1960. But even his funeral on June 2 in Peredelkino, a writers’ colony near Moscow, was turned into yet another political confrontation. As Veniamin Kaverin noted, “I had read Briusov on Tolstoy’s funeral, and I was amazed by the similarity with Pasternak’s burial. The same sense of the total breach between government and people.”¹⁷

Valery Briusov wrote in 1910 that the tsarist authorities, in trying to avoid antigovernment demonstrations, had done everything possible to strip the farewell to Tolstoy of its national significance. Several thousand people accompanied Tolstoy’s coffin in Yasnaya Polyana to its final resting place—in Briusov’s opinion, “an infinitesimal number.” Fifty years later, around two thousand came to Pasternak’s grave, but in the present conditions that number seemed huge and unprecedented—this became the first mass unofficial funeral ceremony in Soviet history.

Tolstoy’s death was the main topic for the Russian press then, but this time, besides a minuscule notice about the death of “Literary Fund member” Pasternak, nothing seeped into the Soviet newspapers. But word of mouth went into action, and the solemn and worshipful crowd in Peredelkino symbolized the birth of public opinion and the rudiments of civil society in the Soviet Union.

For the first time the intelligentsia was not afraid of either the secret police or the foreign correspondents: both groups photographed and filmed the event, each for its own goals, and that was symbolic, too. Pasternak’s funeral, like Tolstoy’s, had turned into a media show, but this time it happened—also a first in Soviet history—thanks to the efforts of the Western side, which eagerly sought and magnified the tiniest signs of dissidence in the Soviet monolith.

As the former KGB chief Semichastny complained in 2002: “This was an attempt of the Western intelligence services to publicize one of our first dissidents…. The seed took. Several years passed and the ‘baton’ was picked up by such laureates of the Nobel Prize as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Joseph Brodsky.”¹⁸

The Central Committee of the Communist Party received intelligence information that copies of Doctor Zhivago, published in Russian in the West, “will be offered to Soviet tourists, various experts and seamen traveling abroad, and will be smuggled into the Soviet Union via ‘existing channels.’”¹⁹ When the Soviet delegation arrived in Vienna for the pro-Communist World Festival of Youth and Students in 1959, they had been instructed about possible “provocations” and were panicked to discover their tour bus literally stuffed with paperback copies of the novel. Their experienced KGB sitters gave them practical advice: “Take them, read them, but don’t even try to bring them home.”²⁰

Doctor Zhivago was not published in the Soviet Union until Gorbachev’s glasnost; in 1988, Novy Mir printed it in two million copies, giving rise to a small industry of scholarly studies. But it did not become a truly popular work, even though Pasternak had intended it to be accessible to unsophisticated readers. In survey after survey, the Russian public names Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and The Quiet Don by Sholokhov as the best Russian novels of the century, not Doctor Zhivago.

In 1965, Sholokhov at last received the Nobel Prize, seven years after Doctor Zhivago. Many years of political maneuvering preceded the award. The first time Sholokhov was