PETER FINN and PETRA COUVÉE
Harvill Secker, 2014, 352 pages, $35 (hb)
Both the KGB and the CIA thought they had the measure of
Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel, Doctor
Zhivago. As Finn and Couvée recount,
the Kremlin feared it (as an attack on their rule) and the White House
celebrated it (as a condemnation of all things socialist). Both were right.
A Russian poet who was sympathetic to the Bolshevik
revolution, Pasternak became disillusioned with Soviet Russia after the show
trials of Old Bolsheviks and the mass repression of the late 1930s. His short-lived attempt to ‘think the
thoughts of the era, and to live in tune with it’, including his poetry lauding
Stalin, was abandoned.
At age 65, Pasternak’s passive opposition went public with his
first novel, Doctor Zhivago, about
the doctor-poet, Yuri Zhivago (Pasternak’s alter ego), and his love affair with
the nurse, Lara Antipova, during the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil
war.
Doctor Zhivago first
saw the light of day, in 1957, thanks to a wealthy and dissident member, and
financier, of the Italian Communist Party, who arranged for Pasternak’s
manuscript to be smuggled out of Russia.
Courtesy of British spies, the CIA gained access to the manuscript
of Doctor Zhivago, which, particularly
after Pasternak’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, became a star exhibit in
the Agency’s clandestine publishing arm.
This million dollar operation (including the CIA’s own printing press
which produced ‘black’ editions) subsidised, translated and disseminated
anti-communist books to the Soviet bloc (touring Moscow Philharmonic members,
for example, hid pages of Doctor Zhivago
in their sheet music).
The CIA recognised the propaganda potential of Doctor Zhivago for its ‘intrinsic
message’ (‘a cry for the freedom and dignity of the individual’ or, as an
anti-communist placard in the US put it, ‘Troubled by communism? Then consult
Dr. Zhivago’) as well as for the ‘circumstances of its publication’ – the censorship
and vociferous harassment of a writer forced to decline the Nobel Prize. The 1965 Hollywood film starring Omar Sharif
and Julie Christie added cinematic melodrama and malign Marxist murderers of
the Tsar’s family to the West’s cultural offensive.
Although Pasternak was unhappy with being turned into Cold
War fodder in the West, he had left himself open to such treatment. Doctor
Zhivago transfers Pasternak’s disgust with Stalinism to a distaste for the early
revolutionary period, implying that Stalinist tyranny was the direct outcome of
Bolshevik-led socialist revolution even though the monolithic and repressive nature
of the regime did not take shape until a decade after the revolution.
This familiar political revisionism marrs the political
integrity of Pasternak, and, not that you know it from the authors’ failure to analyse
Doctor Zhivago as a political and
literary work, it also infects the artistic virtues of the novel. The fate of all the novel’s characters is one
of misery, despair and death at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Love and humanity is defeated in a
historically and psychologically simplistic battle between the sensitive and
the evil, the individual and the collective.
The CIA got the novel right but it was the crushing of the socialist
revolution by Stalin which enabled Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to be turned into the cultural servant of
capitalism.
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