INTRODUCTION
I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by a something of an immaterial unknown and unknowable wind.
—BORIS PASTERNAK
Letter (in English) to Stephen Spender, August 22, 1959
1
The first edition of Doctor Zhivago, the major work of one of the most important Russian writers of the twentieth century, was an Italian translation published in 1957. The next year translations of the novel into English and a number of other languages appeared and Russian-language editions were published in Italy and the United States. But it would take another thirty years and the reforms of perestroika before the novel could be published in Russia. Those circumstances and all that determined them made the reception of the book highly problematical at the time of its appearance.
Pasternak had spent ten years, from 1946 to 1955, writing Doctor Zhivago. He considered it the work that justified his life and his survival, when so many of his fellow Russians had perished during the first decades of the century from war, revolution, famine, forced labor, and political terror. After Stalin’s death in 1953 came a period known as the Thaw, when there was a general easing of the mechanisms of repression and ideological control. The ban then in place on Pasternak’s work (he had been in and out of favor time and again over the years) was lifted, and in 1954 he was able to publish ten poems from Doctor Zhivago in the journal Znamya (“The Banner”), where the title of the novel was mentioned for the first time. In January 1956, he sent the completed work to Novy Mir (“New World”), the most liberal of Moscow literary magazines, and it was also under consideration by Goslitizdat, the state publishing house.
In March 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party and virtual head of the government, made a “secret speech” to the twentieth party congress denouncing the crimes of Stalin. This speech, which immediately became known all over the world, seemed to herald a further opening up of Soviet society. But in fact the thaw was brief. Stirrings of liberation following Khrushchev’s speech, especially in such satellite countries as Hungary and Poland, worried the party leadership and caused them to tighten the controls again. The Poznan protests at the end of June were crushed by military force, as were the Polish and Hungarian uprisings later that same year.
The chill made itself felt in literary circles as well. In September 1956, the editors of Novy Mir returned the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to Pasternak with a detailed letter explaining that the spirit of the novel, its emotional content, and the author’s point of view were incompatible with the spirit of the revolution and the Marxist ideology that was the theoretical foundation of the Soviet state.
Pasternak was not surprised by the rejection. He had anticipated it, and in anticipation had even taken an extraordinary step, which surprised and outraged the Soviet authorities when they learned of it. In May 1956, an Italian Communist journalist by the name of Sergio d’Angelo visited Pasternak at his country house in Peredelkino, a writers’ village near Moscow. He had heard about the existence of Doctor Zhivago and offered to place it with the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (also a Communist) for publication in Italian translation. According to d’Angelo’s account, Pasternak, after hesitating for a moment, went to his study, brought out a copy of the novel, and handed it to him with the words: “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.” Since 1929, when Evgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak were vilified in the press for publishing their works abroad, no Soviet writers had had direct dealings with foreign publishers. Zamyatin had been forced to emigrate, and Pilnyak had eventually been shot. Pasternak knew that very well, of course, but he was intent on seeing Zhivago published abroad, if it could not be published at home, and was prepared to face the wrath of the authorities.
When publication of the Italian translation was announced for the fall of 1957, the news caused great uneasiness in the Soviet literary bureaucracy. Pressure was put on Pasternak to make Feltrinelli return the manuscript for revision, telegrams were sent to Milan, and finally, in October 1957, Alexei Surkov, the head of the Writers’ Union, went to Italy to speak with the publisher in person. But Feltrinelli refused to delay the novel’s release and had already licensed translation rights to publishers in other countries. As Lazar Fleishman wrote in Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics:
Nothing promoted the swift growth of interest in Doctor Zhivago more than these clumsy attempts to prevent its publication. The novel became an international sensation even before its release. Its first printing of 6,000 was sold out on the first day, November 22. Prospective publications in other European languages promised to become similar bestsellers. The release of the Italian translation was accompanied by a deluge of articles and notices in the European and American press … No work of Russian literature had received such publicity since the time of the revolution.
In the spring of 1958, rumors began to circulate that Pasternak was a likely candidate for that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In fact, his name had been mentioned for the prize a number of times before. The Nobel Committee’s attention was not drawn to him solely because of Doctor Zhivago. But the novel, and the politics of the Cold War, certainly had much to do with his nomination this time. On October 23, 1958, it was announced that the prize had indeed been awarded to Pasternak. The Swedish Academy’s telegram cited him “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyric poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.”
The next day the head of the Moscow section of the Writers’ Union, Konstantin Fedin, who was Pasternak’s friend and neighbor in Peredelkino, and who had spoken enthusiastically of Zhivago when he first read it in 1956, called on him and tried to persuade him not to accept the prize because of its political implications. But Pasternak refused to be persuaded. He sent a telegram of acceptance to the Swedish Academy that read simply: “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” On October 25, the attacks on him
