The CIA's favorite novel.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book - Book review

Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014), 368 pp., $26.95.

We like to think of ourselves as creatures of causality. We cling to the belief that our choices will have predictable effects on the course of our lives. But that's somewhat illusory. And the illusion is even more pronounced in dictatorships, where the powers that be have their own views about the vagaries of individual fate.

When Boris Pasternak handed the manuscript of his new novel Doctor Zhivago to the representative of an Italian publisher in the spring of 1956, he almost certainly didn't envision the chain of events that this simple act would set in motion. He wasn't planning on the book becoming a global literary sensation. He probably didn't suspect that he would win a Nobel Prize for Literature. And he certainly never dreamed that he would prompt an elaborate covert action by the Central Intelligence Agency, whose operatives saw his novel as the perfect opportunity for a cultural drone strike, exposing for all the world to see the Soviet Communist Party's prodigious contempt for genuine creativity.

There was, however, one thing that Pasternak foresaw quite accurately: the storm that was about to break. His decision to have the book published overseas, bypassing the party's entrenched mechanisms of artistic control, was bound to trigger a vicious reaction from the Soviet leadership. He had seen enough to know. Born in 1890, he had weathered revolution, civil war and Stalin's terrors relatively unscathed--but in this respect he was an extraordinary exception. Already established in the 1920s as one of the great Russian poets of his generation, he had watched as his most illustrious contemporaries were goaded into suicide (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva), sent to die in the gulag (Osip Mandelstam), or forced to endure public humiliation and the killing or imprisonment of their loved ones (Anna Akhmatova).

Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, the authors of this remarkable biography of Pasternak's novel and the global scandal it spawned, deftly illuminate this background. As they explain, Pasternak's former next-door neighbor, the novelist Boris Pilynak, "was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head in April 1938." Isaak Babel, the great chronicler of Jewish life in the Black Sea city of Odessa (from which both of Pasternak's parents hailed), met the same end two years later. Finn and Couvee put the number of Soviet writers who were either "executed or died in labor camps for various alleged infractions" after 1917 at nearly 1,500.

I'm not sure where this precise figure comes from, but surely it's on the low side, considering the vast reach of the scythe that cut down many of the leading intellectuals among the USSR's various ethnic groups in the 1930s and 1940s. (Much depends, I guess, on how the Soviet regime defined the word "writer.") So Pasternak can hardly be accused of hysteria when he predicted the worst. On that Sunday morning in May, as Pasternak took his leave from Sergio D'Angelo, the visiting Italian Communist whom he had just entrusted with the manuscript, he said: "You are hereby invited to my execution."

It didn't quite come to that--partly because the immense publicity stirred up by the affair around the book made it virtually impossible for the Politburo to have Pasternak packed off to the uranium mines. In that respect, for all of his self-professed ignorance of political intrigue, Doctor Zhivago's author showed a shrewd sense of timing. The USSR in the spring of 1956 was still a Communist dictatorship, but it wasn't the same as it had been, say, in 1949, when Stalin's henchman Andrei Zhdanov launched a vicious public campaign against Akhmatova (famously dubbed "half whore, half nun" by Zhdanov) and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. Akhmatova's son Lev Gumilev, whose father had been shot by the Bolsheviks for allegedly counterrevolutionary activities, was dispatched to the camps--for the second time.

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