 |
Frances Stonor Saunders is the author of Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.
Frances
Stonor Saunders on the ‘Zhivago’ Story Isaiah
Berlin was on
his honeymoon – he married late – when he first read Dr Zhivago.
It was
the evening of Saturday, 18 August 1956, and he had just made the short
journey
back to Moscow from the village of Peredelkino, where he had spent the
day with
Boris Pasternak. Pasternak’s dacha was part of a complex set up on
Stalin’s
orders in 1934 to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers. One
of
them, Korney Chukovsky, described the scheme as ‘entrapping writers
within a
cocoon of comforts, surrounding them with a network of spies’.
Periodically,
and usually at night, the NKVD would turn over a dacha and bundle its
resident
into a waiting car. Pasternak’s immediate neighbour and friend, Boris
Pilnyak,
was arrested in October 1937, removed to the Lubyanka, and killed with
a single
bullet to the back of the head. The same fate awaited Isaac Babel, who
was
taken from Peredelkino in May 1939. There were others, less well known,
but
equals in the manner of their death. How
Pasternak survived
the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. ‘It is surprising
that I
remained whole during the Purges,’ he wrote in 1954. ‘You cannot
imagine the
liberties I allowed myself. My future was shaped in precisely the way I
myself
shaped it.’ Nadezhda Mandelstam (whose husband, Osip, became ‘camp
dust’ in
1938) put it down to a combination of sheer luck and Pasternak’s
‘incredible
charm’. Others wondered whether Stalin had personally ordered him to be
spared
– ‘Leave him alone, he’s a cloud dweller’ – after gifting him what were
called,
in the political slang of the day, ‘madman’s papers’. True, Pasternak
had
written some boilerplate patriotic verse during the Second World War,
‘civic
poetry’ that encouraged some party hacks in the belief that he had
finally
found ‘the correct path’. And the translations of Georgian poets were
known to
have pleased the Boss. But in the main, where others, fatally,
confronted
argument with argument, he replied with the reveries of a yurodivy,
a
holy fool, marking his distance from the idiom and events of his era to
the
point almost of vegetal insouciance (‘What century is it outside?’ he
asks in
one poem). In
his youth Pasternak
looked, Marina Tsvetaeva said, ‘like an Arab and his horse’. In
older
age, he looked the same. Sinewy and tanned from long walks and tending
his
orchard, at 66 he was still an intensely physical presence. This was
the
woodsman-poet who was waiting by the garden gate to greet his friend
Isaiah
Berlin, 19 years younger, bespectacled and pudgy, his indoor skin
betraying the
rigours of the Senior Common Room and the international diplomatic
circuit. ‘The
Foreigner
Visiting Pasternak at His Dacha’ is its own subgenre of intellectual
history.
Its principal theme is the excitement of discovering a lost generation
who,
like ‘the victims of shipwreck on a desert island’, have been ‘cut off
for
decades from civilisation’ (Berlin). The foreigner, moved by his role
as
witness to an impossible reality, records every detail of the
encounter: the welcome
(Pasternak’s handshake is ‘firm’, his smile ‘exuberant’); the walk (oh,
that
‘cool’ pine forest, and look, some dusty peasants); the conversation,
with
Pasternak holding forth ‘as if Goethe and Shakespeare were his
contemporaries’;
the meal, at which his wife, ‘dark, plump and inconspicuous’ (and often
unnamed), makes a sour appearance; the arrival of other members of the
Peredelkino colony, the dead undead; the toasts, invoking spiritual
companions
– Tolstoy, Chekhov, Scriabin, Rachmaninov. And finally the farewell at
the
gate, at which Pasternak disappears back into the dacha and re-emerges
with
sheaves of typescript. These are given to the visitor (‘the guest from
the
future’, as Anna Akhmatova put it), who is now tasked with the sacred
and thrillingly
immortalising responsibility of carrying Pasternak’s writings out of
this place
where the clock has stopped and into the world beyond. Berlin’s
reports of
his meetings with Pasternak, which cover two periods spanning a decade,
conform
to the conventions of the genre (not surprising, as he largely invented
it) but
his published account of his visit of 18 August 1956 is curiously short
on
colour, and there is no mention of his bride, Aline, who accompanied
him, or of
Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida. We learn only that the two men convened in a
lengthy
conversation, which must have vibrated amid the pine trees like some
strange
antiphon. Pasternak, Berlin once observed, ‘spoke slowly in a low tenor
monotone, with a continuous even sound, something between a humming and
a
drone’; Berlin’s voice was variously described as ‘a low, rapid
rumble’, ‘a
melting Russian river’, the ‘bubble and rattle’ of a ‘samovar on the
boil’. At
some point, Pasternak took Berlin into his study, where he thrust a
thick
envelope into Berlin’s hands and said: ‘My book, it is all there. It is
my last
word. Please read it.’ Berlin
and Aline
returned that evening to the British Embassy on Sofiyskaya Embankment,
where
they were guests of the ambassador. Berlin sat up all night reading the
typescript.
He was ‘deeply shaken’. He wept. Dr Zhivago was a ‘magnificent
poetical
masterpiece in the central tradition of Russian literature’, ‘a
personal avowal
of overwhelming directness, nobility and depth’. It was a ‘unitary
vision’ that
fused the broken vertebrae of Russian literature, a miraculous
retrieval of the
past in an age that had outlawed history. And
so Isaiah wept by
the bank of the Moskva River. (Forgive the over-reach, but the river
did run in
front of the embassy, and what we’re talking about here is not so much Dr
Zhivago, as the novel of the novel.) Directly opposite (truly),
behind the
walls of the Kremlin, the Soviet response to Dr Zhivago was
being
prepared. In an ‘important memo’, the foreign minister, Dmitry
Shepilov, was
working himself up to an ulcer. Pasternak’s concoction, he wrote, was
‘a
spiteful lampoon against the USSR’, and measures had to be taken ‘to
prevent
the publication of this anti-Soviet book abroad’. The memo, with
attachments
supplied by the KGB and the director of the Central Committee’s Culture
Department (who emphasised his revulsion at Pasternak’s ‘malicious
libel
against our revolution and our entire life’), was to be circulated to
the
highest party officials, including the Politburo and First Secretary
Nikita Khrushchev. The
last Russian to
publish a novel abroad without official sanction was Boris Pilnyak, and
in so
doing he had assigned himself his own bullet. In 1948, Pasternak warned
his
sisters in Oxford against printing some early chapters of Dr Zhivago,
which
he had sent them via an (unidentified) intermediary. ‘Publication
abroad would
expose me to the most catastrophic, not to mention fatal, dangers,’ he
wrote.
Since then, the Thaw (taken from the title of a novel by Ilya
Ehrenburg) had
ushered in a less chilling repertoire of punishments for writers who
wandered
from ‘the correct path’. Pasternak was nonetheless taking an enormous
risk in
offering his novel for publication outside the Soviet Union. But this
was his
resolve. He hadn’t given the typescript to Berlin to enliven a few
hours in his
Moscow bivouac, but in order that it should ‘travel over the entire
world’ and,
quoting Pushkin, ‘lay waste with fire the heart of man’. As
he tells it, Berlin
tussled with his conscience before reluctantly accepting the mission of
smuggling Dr Zhivago out of Russia. Indeed, a few days after
his
stirring all-nighter, he returned to Peredelkino, determined to rescue
the
author from his own intentions – Pasternak, he believed, was flirting
with
martyrdom and ‘probably did need to be physically saved from himself’.
At this
second meeting, Zinaida begged Berlin to dissuade her husband from
damaging
himself and his family. ‘Moved by this plea’, Berlin ventured an
alternative
solution to Pasternak: ‘I promised to have microfilms of his novel
made, to
bury them in the four quarters of the globe … so that copies might
survive even
if a nuclear war broke out.’ Pasternak, who was in no mood to be buried
alive
mid-sentence, rebuked his friend. He had spoken to his sons and they
were
prepared to suffer, just as he was (Zinaida’s suffering is not
mentioned). At
which point Berlin’s bubbling samovar came off the boil. He was, he
claims,
‘shamed into silence’. And
so Berlin left the
forest, his conscience quieted by Pasternak’s determination to break a
lance
for a greater prize than his own well-being. ‘I may not deserve to be
remembered as a poet,’ he had said, ‘but surely as a soldier in the
battle for
human freedom.’ Furthermore, he told Berlin that he had already given a
typescript to an agent of the Italian communist publisher Giangiacomo
Feltrinelli, and this copy was now in Milan (a fact that had been duly
noted by
the KGB, which was trying to get it back). Dr Zhivago had
already
crossed the line. The
question for
Berlin now was not whether but how to smuggle the manuscript out. He
could no
longer avail himself of diplomatic privilege, as he had done a decade
earlier
when he served as first secretary in the Moscow embassy. Then, shortly
after
meeting Pasternak for the first time, he had used the pouch to
exfiltrate an
early draft section of Dr Zhivago, sending it to his parents in
London
in October 1945 with instructions to keep it somewhere safe until his
return
(perhaps this was the ‘somewhat underground route’ alluded to by
Maurice Bowra,
Berlin’s key ally in establishing Pasternak’s reputation in the West).
Berlin’s
interest in Pasternak and other members of the lost tribe had not gone
undetected – throughout his posting he had been aware of being followed
– and
he was ever after burdened with the accusation of having endangered
them. ‘I
saw quite a lot of very remarkable people,’ he later told an
interviewer. ‘It
didn’t do them any good.’ This was something of an understatement. His
meeting
with Akhmatova at her apartment in Leningrad in November 1945 had
prompted
Stalin’s famous remark, ‘So our nun now receives visits from foreign
spies.’
Though Berlin always insisted he’d never been a spy, he was
sufficiently versed
in Soviet sensibilities to know that all diplomats were suspected of
intelligence-gathering, and that everybody they made contact with was,
ipso
facto, an intelligence source. The consequences for Akhmatova were
dire: her
apartment was bugged, she was denounced by the Central Committee of the
Communist Party, expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, and her son
Lev was
arrested for a third time. Berlin’s
1956 visit to
Russia was a further tutorial in the Soviet character. Moving among the
members
of the Politburo at an embassy reception – the ‘spy’ hiding prominently
in
plain sight – he found them ‘at once smooth and brutal, class-conscious
and
corrupt’. Here were the thieves of the Revolution, the same men who had
supported Stalin in his massacres. The visit reinforced his suspicion
that the
Thaw was overestimated in Western liberal circles. The Soviet Union, he
concluded, was still expansionist and repressive at heart. In this
climate,
it’s highly improbable that Berlin ever considered carrying Pasternak’s
manuscript out of Russia himself. The only secure option would be to
ask his
host and friend, the British ambassador William Hayter, to send Dr
Zhivago
to London in the bag. This might explain how the Foreign Office was
able to
copy the typescript onto two rolls of microfilm and hand it over to
MI6, which
in turn delivered it to the CIA, with dreadful consequences for
Pasternak. The
story of Dr
Zhivago’s publication is, like the novel itself, a cat’s cradle, an
eternal
zigzag of plotlines, coincidences, inconsistencies and maddening
disappearances. The book was always destined to become a ‘succès de
scandale’,
in Berlin’s words, but the machinations and competing energies that
went into
seeing it into print, on the one hand, and trying to stop it going to
print, on
the other, make it the perfect synecdoche for that feint, counterfeint
round of
pugilism we call the Cold War. Some punches were landed, of course,
reminding
the contestants that this was a real fight and not just a protracted
argument
about washing machines. But the Cold War was also a great engine of
false
realities, and the Zhivago Affair (as it immediately became known) is
the story
of how its protagonists became embroiled in these inventions and, more
controversially, enlarged them. * ‘I
am content to
observe, not interfere and have all my life been afraid above all of
being
involved,’ Berlin once told a friend. Impatient with this legend of
self-effacement, Pasternak’s sister Lydia (who lived in Oxford) moaned:
‘His
present power over literature, in fact over everything in every field,
is at
times almost disastrous, I do not know how he contrives to hold
everybody in
such constant awe and fear of his casual judgment.’ Her view is
supported by
Berlin’s own papers at the Bodleian, which show him to have been
energetically
meddlesome in the Dr Zhivago business from the moment he
returned from
his Moscow honeymoon. ‘I think I could probably procure the manuscript
somewhere, some time,’ he writes airily to an editor at Hamish Hamilton
who has
inquired about the novel. ‘But I cannot guarantee this of course. Do
not tell
anyone else about it at the moment, except Mark [Bonham Carter], of
course.’ He
adds that he hasn’t read the manuscript, so is unable to say whether
it’s a
work of genius. On the same day, he offers the same tease to Bonham
Carter, of
Collins Harvill: ‘It is possible that I myself may have a text in
England, but
it is none too certain, and we had better speak about this orally.’
Again, he
claims not to have read it. Publishers
can rarely
be relied on for their discretion, but why such subterfuge, and why the
trim
denial of having read the novel? Why didn’t Berlin simply say: I got
the
manuscript out, I know exactly where it is, I have read it and it’s a
masterpiece and it must be published both on its own merits and as a
strike
against the Soviets, who refuse to allow their greatest living writer
to be
heard in his own country? There are several possible explanations for
Berlin’s
coyness. One is that the ‘first’ smuggled typescript – 433 closely
typed pages
held together by twine and wrapped in newspaper – was in the hands of
Feltrinelli in Italy. Berlin feared that Feltrinelli might tamper with
the text
or even be dissuaded from publishing it (neither happened, though the
Soviets
did put their wayward comrade under huge pressure to return the
manuscript to
Moscow). Worse, Pasternak had granted all foreign rights to
Feltrinelli, so
legally the Oxford text couldn’t be published without his permission. Pasternak’s
game of
hide and seek with the Soviet authorities was creating endless
confusion and
delay among his foreign proxies. He seemed to be havering between
outright
provocation – telling one visitor that publishing the book abroad might
be a
‘means to bring pressure on the Soviets to publish the book in Russia
for fear
of looking tyrannous if they don’t’ – and a strategy of shaming the
Soviets
into publishing it first. He had submitted the novel to the state
literary
publisher Goslitizdat, and to the journal Novy Mir, in the
sincere belief
that it might be published (once the censor had taken his pound of
flesh). An
encouraging sign came just as Berlin visited in August 1956, with Novy
Mir’s
publication of the first instalment of Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not
by
Bread Alone, whose picaresque depiction of ‘the invisible empire’
of Soviet
bureaucracy made it wildly popular with Russian readers. But Novy
Mir
was less receptive to Pasternak’s novel, and within weeks of Berlin’s
departure
its editors sent a rejection letter explaining that no amount of
cutting or
revising would solve the problem of ‘the spirit of the novel’ and its
‘non-acceptance of the socialist revolution’. Goslitizdat turned it
down too. ‘You
can’t make an
omelette without breaking eggs’ was a favoured slogan in the vade-mecum
of
Bolshevism. By the end of 1957 there were at least six original,
non-identical
typescripts of Dr Zhivago in foreign hands, and chasing them
down is
like trying to make an egg from an omelette. The most conscientious
attempt so
far is Paolo Mancosu’s Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial
Adventures of
Pasternak’s Masterpiece, which includes in an appendix all the
relevant
correspondence from the Feltrinelli archive.1
This scholarly, scrupulously even-handed
work, published last year, has been unfairly eclipsed by The
Zhivago Affair:
The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, in
which the
journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée pick through a cache of
documents,
released to them by the CIA, that confirms the long extant rumour of
the
agency’s role in publishing the text in Russian.2
This rumour had already been investigated (it
took him twenty years) by Ivan Tolstoy, whose research was published in
Russian
in 2009 as The Laundered Novel: ‘Dr Zhivago’, between the KGB and
the CIA.
Tolstoy’s monograph, untranslated and lacking the prima facie evidence
procured
by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten
is
Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair,
published
in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who
had been
employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a
decade. Add to
these Evgeny Pasternak’s Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years, 1930-60
(1990), Sergio D’Angelo’s The Pasternak Affair: Memoirs of a Witness
(2006), and the ensuing, sulphurous arguments between these two, and
you end up
with a big almost-egg and a sinking feeling in your stomach (this is,
literally, an unwholesome business). In
all of these
thousands of pages devoted to the Zhivago affair, Berlin’s
testimony is
reprised without question. He is treated as an impeccable witness, the
humble
valet to Pasternak’s will, into whose hands fell one of the greatest
books of
the century as if by accident. Yet an exchange of letters in Berlin’s
papers,
to date overlooked, suggests a rather different scenario. In April
1956, Berlin
received from Martin Malia a detailed report of two separate meetings
with
Pasternak at Peredelkino. Malia was a Harvard academic on assignment in
Russia
for the Library of Congress, ostensibly to negotiate book exchanges.
(He may
have been doing more than that. In 1967 he was accused by the Russian
government of working for the CIA and told to leave the country.) On
arriving
in Moscow, he had immediately sought out Pasternak, who had confided
that he
had ‘sent out the first five parts’ of Dr Zhivago ‘via a friend
at the
New Zealand Embassy’, and was planning to give the later parts, which
he was
currently revising, ‘to some French students now at the University of
Moscow
for shipment out through the pouch’. Berlin’s reply is not in the file,
but a
later letter from Malia contains its echo: Berlin wanted more exact
details, in
particular to know how he might make contact with the French students. * Why
would Berlin the
observer – ‘I have no personal interest in this’ – press for this
information
if not to become involved? Most likely, on learning that the novel was
being
dispatched hither and thither through diplomatic bags, and knowing that
a
historic literary event loomed, he was eager to obtain a copy himself,
and made
arrangements to this end. A letter from Pasternak to his sisters in
Oxford,
dated four days before the visit of 18 August 1956, confirms that
Berlin’s
mission had already been agreed. ‘I’ll give B one copy,’ it reads. ‘He
promised
me that the typescript would be transcribed in multiple copies in
England … He
will look after this himself, you don’t need to worry about it.’ Why
go to such lengths
if Pasternak had already found ways to get the text out of Russia? If,
as
Berlin was to claim, Pasternak wanted ‘to speak across the heads of his
jailers
to the free world’, then surely a megaphone in New Zealand or France
would do
as well as anywhere? A speculative answer, covering the gnomic angle of
Berlin’s letters to the British publishers, is that he wanted to be at
the
centre of an intrigue. Indeed, he was a ganglion of secrets. ‘I know
all about
the situation – & perhaps a little more than all,’ he murmured
side-of-mouth to Edmund Wilson late in 1957. ‘There is a (secret)
Russian text
in Oxford, in the keeping of the sisters of the poet: they guard it
like
Cerberi … I have (secretly) got a microfilm of the Russian text to the
Widener
Library for safe-keeping, but they are not supposed to tell anyone.’ Berlin
had made a
significant intellectual and emotional investment in Dr Zhivago,
and he
too was guarding it like Cerberus. Like many Russians forced to
emigrate in the
wake of the Revolution (whose excesses he had witnessed as a boy in
Petrograd),
he couldn’t accept that Pushkin was gone and the light coming from
Tolstoy’s
country estate extinguished. In the USSR, there was no place for such
metaphysical antiquities, or for their heirs who, like Nabokov’s ‘gaunt
ladies
with lorgnettes’, sighed for a world that had been swept away. St
Paul’s,
Oxford and the Foreign Office couldn’t dispel in Berlin the
psychological
vulnerability of the diaspora, of ‘Russia Abroad’, that strange
in-between
place where, as Semyon Frank said, one had to ‘live and breathe in a
vacuum’. ‘Zhivago’,
in the
pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s
first
page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’
the
mourners are asked. ‘Zhivago’ is the reply, punningly suggesting ‘him
who is
living’. After his first reading of the draft early chapters, at the
British
Embassy in Moscow in 1945, Berlin felt that he had seen a flare sent up
from
the survivor of a cataclysm. Swept away by the novel’s defiant personal
claim
for the indomitable Russian soul, he was sure that Bolshevism’s
systematic
programme of turning Russia away from Western civilisation couldn’t be
completed as long as such writing existed. Before leaving his
diplomatic post,
he turned in a long memorandum – what he called, misleadingly, a
‘rambling
discourse on the Russian writers’ – containing extended resumés of his
meetings
with Pasternak, Akhmatova, Chukovsky and others. It was a founding text
of the Kulturkampf,
as important in its way as George Kennan’s Long Telegram (also written
in 1946)
was to the shaping of the political Cold War. In a letter accompanying
the
report, Berlin requested that it be treated as ‘confidential’ because
of ‘the
well-known consequences to the possible sources of the information
contained in
it, should its existence ever become known to “them”’. We’ll
call this next
chapter in the novel of the novel ‘The Alphabet Men’. It’s the bit
where the
CIA, MI6 and their little helpers at the FO, IRD, BBC, IOD, SRD, CCF,
RFE, RL,
VOA and BVD process the purloined microfilm of the Russian text into
‘combat
material’ for the Cold War.3
It’s 1958, Dr Zhivago has finally been
issued in Italian by Feltrinelli, and other translations are edging
their way
off the press in Britain, Germany and France. But Feltrinelli is
refusing the
rights to a Russian edition until Pasternak gives him the go-ahead.
Pasternak
hesitates, gambling on ever poorer odds that the novel might yet appear
in
Russia. Should this not be the case, and fearing a provocation too far,
he
explicitly requests that no eventual Russian language edition appear in
the
West under the auspices of any Russian émigré group or American entity.
No
matter, the CIA has already embarked on Operation Dinosaur, whose aim
is to
exploit Pasternak’s ‘heretical literary work’ for ‘maximum free world
discussion and acclaim and consideration for such honour as the Nobel
Prize’.
According to a declassified memo quoted by Finn and Couvée in The
Zhivago
Affair, MI6 are ‘in favour and have offered to provide whatever
assistance
they can’. Since
the prize can’t
be awarded for a work not published in its original language, the CIA
prints an
edition through a cut-out, or front, in Holland. This, the first ever
appearance in Russian of the original text, deals with the Nobel Prize
requirement. Encouraged by the success of this covert action, Operation
Dinosaur – authorised at the highest levels, which includes the White
House –
produces another, pocket-sized edition (‘more easily concealed’) for
distribution behind the Iron Curtain. Attributed to ‘an innocuous,
fictitious
publisher’, Société d’Edition et d’Impression Mondiale, and printed at
CIA
headquarters on thin bible stock, this miniature Dr Zhivago is
shipped
to Europe and handed out to anyone who might carry it into the Soviet
bloc
(among the various ‘pass throughs’ enlisted to this act of piracy we
find the
Holy See, that well-known upholder of the right of individuals to read
whatever
they please). By this means, Dr Zhivago crosses the line back
into
Russia. These
editions were
both thefts. As explained by the CIA, the operation was ‘intended to be
legal
but turned out to be illegal’ (you don’t make apologies when you hold
the moral
high ground). Internal inquiries were made about international
copyright law,
but legality proving inconvenient, the decision was taken to ‘do it
black’.
However, an escrow account was set up in Pasternak’s name for his share
of the
royalties, ‘if he is ever in a position to use them’. What, one
wonders, did
the CIA do with its share? No
amount of money –
not even the Nobel Prize, which was announced on 23 October 1958 –
could
compensate for the shitstorm into which Pasternak was now thrown. As a
CIA
analysis quoted by Finn and Couvée reads, ‘so long as his impact was
contained
within the Soviet Union, it could be tolerated; when it came to appear
as a
chosen vessel of Free World cold war, it had to be crushed.’ For the
spooks,
this was hardly an unexpected outcome. It was only after Not by
Bread Alone
was published in English in 1957, and trumpeted as an anti-Soviet novel
by the
Western media, that Dudintsev earned the full wrath of the regime. His
disavowal of the propaganda value of his book – he said it made him
feel as
though ‘a peaceable ship in foreign waters had been seized by pirates
and was
flying the skull and crossbones’ – didn’t placate the authorities. He
was
shunned, banned and harried into poverty. So, too, Pasternak was
vilified as a
traitor, denigrated in a massive official campaign as a ‘literary
weed’, a
‘superfluous man’, a ‘mangy sheep’, a ‘pig’ who ‘has soiled the place
where he
has eaten’. Driven
nearly to
suicide, on 29 October Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize. ‘I couldn’t
recognise my father when I saw him that evening,’ his son Evgeny
recalled.
‘Pale, lifeless face, tired painful eyes, and only speaking about the
same
thing: “Now it all doesn’t matter, I declined the Prize.”’ Two days
later, he
was hounded out of the Union of Soviet Writers, whose members
petitioned the
Politburo to strip him of his Soviet citizenship and exile him to ‘his
capitalist paradise’. The American Catholic writer and monk Thomas
Merton
pleaded with the union’s chief, Aleksey Surkov, to reverse the
decision,
arguing in a letter that Dr Zhivago was far less critical of
communism
than Khrushchev had been two years earlier in his speech denouncing
Stalin at
the Twentieth Party Congress. This startlingly obvious point was missed
by
everyone who jostled for a berth on the ship of fools.4 To
Pasternak, Merton
wrote: ‘For a long time I have been holding my breath in the midst of
the
turmoil of incomparable nonsense that has surrounded your name in every
part of
the world … You, like Job, have been surrounded not by three or four
misguided
comforters, but by a whole world of madmen … and seemingly very few of
them
have understood one word of what you have written. For what could be
more blind
and absurd than to make a political weapon, for one side or the other,
out of a
book that declares clearly the futility and malignity of tendencies on
every
side which seek to destroy man in his spiritual substance?’ Before this
letter
reached Pasternak, it was intercepted, photocopied and resealed, first
by the
CIA then by the KGB. While
the drama of
Pasternak’s excommunication was in progress, Oxford was a very tense
place. It
was from here that Berlin, since returning from Moscow in 1946, had
worked to
create a reputation – a vital ‘little corner’ of recognition – for
Pasternak in
the West. He operated largely behind the scenes (he once told George
Kennan
that he had refused to let the press quote a lecture ‘because I thought
if I
did, poor Pasternak etc would finally be shot’), while front of house
was his
colleague Maurice Bowra – Pasternak called them the ‘University B’s’ –
and left
and right of stage were Pasternak’s sisters, Josephine and Lydia, with
a small
cast of exiled Russian scholars. Inevitably, everyone fell out with
everyone
else and then made up again. But as the horror was unleashed on
Pasternak,
there were tears of anguish and bitter recriminations in his Oxford
court. ‘If
something awful
happens to Pasternak, I do not want to feel that anything I did could
have even
remotely contributed to it,’ Berlin wrote to a friend in late October.
Having
long positioned himself as a guardian of Pasternak’s interests, a role
that
increased the voltage of his own reputation and influence, he was now
faced
with the realisation that he might have made a serious miscalculation.
All
along, he had worried about ‘them’ – the KGB, the Politburo, the
hatchet men of
Soviet culture – but he had failed to factor in the danger from his own
side:
the Foreign Office, MI6 and all those cultural freedom experts
stationed behind
their typewriters, ready to serve up Dr Zhivago as a political
pamphlet. Berlin
made frantic
efforts to stem the flow of ‘vulgar propaganda’, much of which was
being
churned out by the fronts and ‘assets’ of MI6 and the CIA. He tried,
unsuccessfully, to dissuade the BBC from broadcasting instalments of
the novel
over the Russian Service (another theft, as the corporation hadn’t
secured the
rights), warning that ‘the danger to the poet was great and the
advantage, even
from the most extreme Cold War point of view, not very great, and that
playing
about with lives in this way was a hideous immorality.’ The broadcasts,
Berlin
later stated, were ‘perhaps the worst of all the acts of persecution on
our
part’. His attempt to convince Time magazine to abandon a cover
story on
Pasternak was also unsuccessful. The freedom army was marching under
the banner
of Dr Zhivago, and nothing could break its step. ‘Just because
someone
is prepared for a martyr’s crown, that doesn’t give one the right to
press it
on his brow,’ he wrote angrily. ‘The whole thing really is revolting.’
Reflecting on the scandal years later, Czesław Miłosz said that
Pasternak
‘found himself entangled in the kind of ambiguity that ought to be the
nightmare of every author. While he always stressed the unity of his
work, that
unity was broken by circumstances. Abuse was heaped on him in Russia
for a
novel nobody had read. Praise was lavished on him in the West for a
novel
isolated from his lifelong labours … In the last years of his life
Pasternak
lost, so to speak, the right to his personality, and his name served to
designate a cause.’ Dr
Zhivago
may be a great novel, but in the battlefield
of the Cold War it had to be great in order to be a powerful
weapon. Any
victory in a war of this kind is bound to be pyrrhic, and nobody
emerges from
it with much glory, not even Pasternak. We mustn’t lick all the paint
off our
gods, but his reputation is not, ultimately, enhanced by the thick
layer of
piety applied to him by his eager publicists in the West. As early as
1927,
Nadezhda Mandelstam had warned him: ‘Watch out, or they’ll adopt you.’
She was
referring to the Soviets, but she never had any truck with the
‘professional
humanists’ of the West either, and the warning could equally have
applied to
their blandishments. If Pasternak became a permanent protégé of the
West –
giving away ‘the wealth of his soul’ in the process, according to his
son
Evgeny – it was not only because he was deceived (and he was). It was
also down
to his stubborn insistence on making a grand gesture, on putting
himself
forward as the charismatic bearer of Russia’s tragic soul. ‘You
are invited to my
execution,’ Pasternak announced when he handed the typescript to
Feltrinelli’s
agent in May 1956 (other visitors at the time report similar
declarations). For
his friends Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, who had both lost
husbands
to the executioners, this self-dramatisation was rather distasteful.
According
to Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in late 1958, ‘everyone who knows
Pasternak
agrees that he positively wanted trouble. Apparently he had a
feeling of
guilt and a desire for martyrdom. He was personally liked and protected
by
Stalin, and so survived when many of his friends perished, and is now
ashamed
of this. So at least Isaiah [says].’ ‘He thinks that he might gain from
it the
halo of a victim,’ an Italian insider told the young literary editor
Italo
Calvino. It’s not that Pasternak hadn’t been courageous – there are
numerous
acts of selfless, indeed reckless concern for others – and he surely
didn’t
deserve to be saddled with a bad conscience. But in his ‘yielding
himself up’
there was, as Nadezhda Mandelstam sensed, a ‘secret desire’ to promote
himself.
He wanted, in his own words, ‘to suffer as all the true Russian poets
have
always suffered’. There were many people, friends as well as enemies,
who were
willing to help him. ‘It
is easier to save
a manuscript than a man,’ Nadezhda Mandelstam said. It’s an
uncomfortable
thought, but perhaps Pasternak didn’t want to be saved. The holy fool
in his
dacha, ‘cocooned in comfort’, singing paeans to the ‘joy’ of being
alive in
nature’s bosom while his neighbours were taken away, liquidated and
replaced –
all this rapture, this élan vital, left him no exit for his moral
indignation
at the break-up of the world around him. Life, he believed, was
superior to any
cause. He could never have been a journeyman in the Soviet
interpretation of
reality, but he became uncomfortable with the exemptions his
self-alienation
had granted him. With Dr Zhivago, privately for many years and
then very
publicly, he found the means to ‘touch the sores of the era with his
own hands’
(Nadezhda Mandelstam again). And it was this, his family believed, that
sent
him to an early grave. Pasternak
died on 30
May 1960. His last words were ‘Don’t forget to open the window
tomorrow.’ His
funeral was attended by thousands, many of whom defied the secret
police to
linger long after his coffin was lowered into the ground. A few months
later,
Berlin received from Pasternak’s French translator, Jacqueline de
Proyart, a
magazine spread with photographs of the obsequies. ‘They were meant to
move
me,’ Berlin confided to a friend, ‘but in fact produced a ghastly
effect. I
sent them back to her. The corpse, the coffin, the wife, the mistress,
the
whole thing has a nightmarish quality for me.’ If he did send it back,
he must
have received another copy
because the article is still there in his papers. |
