philamot's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
The book covers the history surrounding the writing, publication, and reception of the book Doctor Zhivago. While the actions of the CIA to distribute the book, and conversely, the efforts by the Kremlin to prevent distribution, do make up part of this story, promising a high-tension CIA v. Kremlin story seems like an oversell. The book reads more as the historical and cultural context to the writing of the novel, and then an account of the struggles experienced by Boris Pasternak during and after publication.
While I found the book on the whole an interesting look at one writer’s impact on both the literary world and his personal life, the book felt strung out, despite its relatively short length. Had it been portrayed as a biography of Doctor Zhivago and the man who wrote it, the pacing would have made more sense.
While I found the book on the whole an interesting look at one writer’s impact on both the literary world and his personal life, the book felt strung out, despite its relatively short length. Had it been portrayed as a biography of Doctor Zhivago and the man who wrote it, the pacing would have made more sense.
Content Warnings
Minor: Antisemitism
fictionfan's review against another edition
5.0
“To drive men mad is a heroic thing.”
When Russian poet Boris Pasternak wrote his only novel, Doctor Zhivago, he knew that its criticism of the Soviet revolution, though mild, would be enough to ensure that the book wouldn’t get past the censors. So he decided to give it to an Italian publisher to be translated and published abroad despite knowing that this would be severely frowned upon by the authorities. However the CIA decided it would be a propaganda coup if they could have the book printed in Russian and smuggled back into the USSR. The Zhivago Affair is billed as the story of that CIA campaign and of the impact it had on the Soviet regime and on Pasternak himself.
Although the CIA campaign is given plenty of space, most of the book really takes the form of a biography of Pasternak. Already a highly regarded poet when he began writing his novel, Pasternak was also already seen as potentially dangerous to the regime and therefore his work was closely monitored, as was the work of most writers. The Soviet regime pampered its authors and intellectuals in comparison to other sectors of society, but punished any disloyalty harshly, with imprisonment in the gulags or even death on occasion. So from the moment it became known that he was writing the novel, Pasternak ran grave risks of bringing retribution down on himself and the people close to him.
I expected to find that I admired Pasternak – that he was a courageous man standing up for his beliefs against a regime that could crush him. Sadly, I came away from the book feeling that in fact he was an arrogant egoist, who cared little for anyone but himself and had no purpose in writing his book other than self-aggrandisement. Well, I can accept that – writers should not have to serve a higher calling any more than the rest of us, but then they shouldn’t ask for special treatment either – and oh, how Pasternak felt that his amazing, unmatched genius (as he judged it) deserved to be recognised, honoured and lauded! He also felt that he was so special that he shouldn’t be expected to live within commonly accepted standards, so kindly moved his mistress and her family in just down the road from his wife and own family and divided his time happily between them. Happily for him, that is – one felt the wife and mistress weren’t quite so thrilled by the arrangement. But I think his level of self-centeredness is best shown by the fact that when he decided the only way out of the pressure over the book was suicide, he expected his mistress to kill herself along with him. To my amusement, the devoted but almost equally self-centred Ivinskaya was having none of it! And, denied his dramatically artistic and romantic exit, Pasternak decided to live on…
The CIA operation was dogged with incompetence from the outset (no big surprise there, I’m guessing) and also paid scant attention to the problems it may cause for Pasternak inside the USSR. However, they did in the end manage to smuggle some copies of the book in and, although the readership in the USSR was limited, the book became a huge bestseller internationally. This may have provided a level of protection for Pasternak since any severe action against him would have provoked international condemnation; and by the late ’50s and early ’60’s, the Soviet regime cared a bit more about their international standing than they perhaps had a decade or two earlier. However, they did subject Pasternak to a number of restrictions and humiliations that made his life increasingly difficulty – they forced his peers to publicly condemn him and suspend him from the writers’ union, which in turn meant that he couldn’t get work. With no income, he was driven to trying to smuggle the royalties from the sale of the book in Europe into the USSR at great risk to himself and those he involved in the plan. And again Pasternak’s selfishness and egoism can be seen at play here – too afraid to collect the money himself, he gave the task to the young daughter of his mistress, a task which later resulted in her spending time in prison – something Pasternak always managed to avoid for himself.
The book is well written and gives the impression of having been thoroughly researched. Despite my lack of sympathy for Pasternak, I enjoyed the biographical strand more than the CIA story and was glad that Pasternak’s story got more space than the spy stuff. In case I’ve made it seem that the book is very critical of him, I must say that the authors’ interpretation of Pasternak was considerably more sympathetic than my own, while not making any attempt to whitewash the less appealing aspects of his personality and behaviour. Overall, the book gave a clear picture of the difficulties faced by writers trying to operate under a regime of censorship backed up by fear, and some of the more moving moments were when the authors recounted the later thoughts of Pasternak’s peers, regretting how they had allowed themselves to be manipulated into turning away from him at the height of the affair. An interesting and thought-provoking read – recommended. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
When Russian poet Boris Pasternak wrote his only novel, Doctor Zhivago, he knew that its criticism of the Soviet revolution, though mild, would be enough to ensure that the book wouldn’t get past the censors. So he decided to give it to an Italian publisher to be translated and published abroad despite knowing that this would be severely frowned upon by the authorities. However the CIA decided it would be a propaganda coup if they could have the book printed in Russian and smuggled back into the USSR. The Zhivago Affair is billed as the story of that CIA campaign and of the impact it had on the Soviet regime and on Pasternak himself.
Although the CIA campaign is given plenty of space, most of the book really takes the form of a biography of Pasternak. Already a highly regarded poet when he began writing his novel, Pasternak was also already seen as potentially dangerous to the regime and therefore his work was closely monitored, as was the work of most writers. The Soviet regime pampered its authors and intellectuals in comparison to other sectors of society, but punished any disloyalty harshly, with imprisonment in the gulags or even death on occasion. So from the moment it became known that he was writing the novel, Pasternak ran grave risks of bringing retribution down on himself and the people close to him.
I expected to find that I admired Pasternak – that he was a courageous man standing up for his beliefs against a regime that could crush him. Sadly, I came away from the book feeling that in fact he was an arrogant egoist, who cared little for anyone but himself and had no purpose in writing his book other than self-aggrandisement. Well, I can accept that – writers should not have to serve a higher calling any more than the rest of us, but then they shouldn’t ask for special treatment either – and oh, how Pasternak felt that his amazing, unmatched genius (as he judged it) deserved to be recognised, honoured and lauded! He also felt that he was so special that he shouldn’t be expected to live within commonly accepted standards, so kindly moved his mistress and her family in just down the road from his wife and own family and divided his time happily between them. Happily for him, that is – one felt the wife and mistress weren’t quite so thrilled by the arrangement. But I think his level of self-centeredness is best shown by the fact that when he decided the only way out of the pressure over the book was suicide, he expected his mistress to kill herself along with him. To my amusement, the devoted but almost equally self-centred Ivinskaya was having none of it! And, denied his dramatically artistic and romantic exit, Pasternak decided to live on…
The CIA operation was dogged with incompetence from the outset (no big surprise there, I’m guessing) and also paid scant attention to the problems it may cause for Pasternak inside the USSR. However, they did in the end manage to smuggle some copies of the book in and, although the readership in the USSR was limited, the book became a huge bestseller internationally. This may have provided a level of protection for Pasternak since any severe action against him would have provoked international condemnation; and by the late ’50s and early ’60’s, the Soviet regime cared a bit more about their international standing than they perhaps had a decade or two earlier. However, they did subject Pasternak to a number of restrictions and humiliations that made his life increasingly difficulty – they forced his peers to publicly condemn him and suspend him from the writers’ union, which in turn meant that he couldn’t get work. With no income, he was driven to trying to smuggle the royalties from the sale of the book in Europe into the USSR at great risk to himself and those he involved in the plan. And again Pasternak’s selfishness and egoism can be seen at play here – too afraid to collect the money himself, he gave the task to the young daughter of his mistress, a task which later resulted in her spending time in prison – something Pasternak always managed to avoid for himself.
The book is well written and gives the impression of having been thoroughly researched. Despite my lack of sympathy for Pasternak, I enjoyed the biographical strand more than the CIA story and was glad that Pasternak’s story got more space than the spy stuff. In case I’ve made it seem that the book is very critical of him, I must say that the authors’ interpretation of Pasternak was considerably more sympathetic than my own, while not making any attempt to whitewash the less appealing aspects of his personality and behaviour. Overall, the book gave a clear picture of the difficulties faced by writers trying to operate under a regime of censorship backed up by fear, and some of the more moving moments were when the authors recounted the later thoughts of Pasternak’s peers, regretting how they had allowed themselves to be manipulated into turning away from him at the height of the affair. An interesting and thought-provoking read – recommended. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
carolynf's review against another edition
4.0
A very interesting, very in-depth look at how and why the USSR collectively freaked out at the publication of Dr Zhivago in 1956, and why the writers community in particular turned on the author. Pasternak is not idealized. He is shown in all his faults and is destroyed by his own hubris. He was one of the few writers willing to address flaws in the Soviet system, but still was horrified by the threat of exile and could not imagine life outside the USSR. Also TIL that Gloria Steinem once worked as a punker of Russians for the CIA.
shawnwhy's review against another edition
5.0
I Never liked Dr. Zhivago, as Mr. Nabokov said, its kindof filled with unbelievable situations and melodramatic situations and interactions. but Mr. Pasternak is freakin cool
margaret_j_c's review against another edition
5.0
This book was gripping. It brought me to tears.
It has been said that when people do not understand something they grow angry at the object of their confusion and do everything in their power to destroy it. No other motive would explain the Kremlin's brutal and relentless bullying of Boris Pasternak for his novel, Doctor Zhivago. He was even forced to turn down a Nobel Prize due to pressure from his government. In the words of the Moroccan newspaper al-Alam, no matter what charges the Soviet Union would ever disseminate, "it would never be able to deny its suppression of Pasternak."
It must be admitted that Pasternak was a bit of a fatalist. He had an unshakable belief in his own gift and refused to waver from the novel's unapologetic message of freedom and his own disillusionment with the Soviet goal. He endured much pain and suffering and allowed it to be inflicted on others, accepting it as necessary to the process of dropping a bombshell of truth on an unenlightened society. He was right. The impact Yuri Zhivago had on the weary lives of citizens behind the Iron Curtain is immeasurable.
The words of an unknown man at the author's funeral still ring true: "Thank you in the name of the working man. We waited for your book."
Pasternak's perspective can be summed up in a few short lines from the end of one of his most famous poems, Hamlet:
Yet the order of the acts is planned
And the end of the way inescapable
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it."
-Boris Pasternak
It has been said that when people do not understand something they grow angry at the object of their confusion and do everything in their power to destroy it. No other motive would explain the Kremlin's brutal and relentless bullying of Boris Pasternak for his novel, Doctor Zhivago. He was even forced to turn down a Nobel Prize due to pressure from his government. In the words of the Moroccan newspaper al-Alam, no matter what charges the Soviet Union would ever disseminate, "it would never be able to deny its suppression of Pasternak."
It must be admitted that Pasternak was a bit of a fatalist. He had an unshakable belief in his own gift and refused to waver from the novel's unapologetic message of freedom and his own disillusionment with the Soviet goal. He endured much pain and suffering and allowed it to be inflicted on others, accepting it as necessary to the process of dropping a bombshell of truth on an unenlightened society. He was right. The impact Yuri Zhivago had on the weary lives of citizens behind the Iron Curtain is immeasurable.
The words of an unknown man at the author's funeral still ring true: "Thank you in the name of the working man. We waited for your book."
Pasternak's perspective can be summed up in a few short lines from the end of one of his most famous poems, Hamlet:
Yet the order of the acts is planned
And the end of the way inescapable
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it."
-Boris Pasternak
qdony's review against another edition
4.0
Es magnífico y muy interesante. Dentro de su grandeza, Pasternak era un egoísta arrogante. Me ha decidido a leer El Doctor Zhivago a la que le encuentre un hueco. No le pongo 5 estrellas porque huele a que idealiza a la CIA y eso me hace dudar, pero en cualquier otro aspecto las merece.
jocelyn_sp's review against another edition
3.0
More a biography of Pasternak, blended with an analysis of how Dr Zhivago was published, including the CIA's role. Interesting, although with more detail than I wanted sometimes.
balzat28's review against another edition
3.0
To be a great writer is to suffer, it seems, under the weight of your own extraordinary talents. Those few whose careers lacked any serious trials or tribulations--Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James--are paled by the hundreds of canonized writers whose biographies read like tragic novels all their own. Emily Dickinson, for instance, spent most of her life as a recluse in her parents' home, where she wrote in her private bedroom and conducted much of her relationships through letters. Herman Melville's failed attempts at writing serious, long-lasting works of fiction brought about the dissolution of his family and the collapse of his already unsteady mental state, and he remained in obscurity for more than three decades after his death, a punchline wrapped up in a footnote.
Others were victimized by the governments under which they wrote, their work breaking through the propaganda and revisionism that justified appalling abuses of power. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, was raised by his widowed mother in the impoverished and totalitarian Soviet Union, served as a battery commander in World War II, and was shuffled between Soviet work- and prison-camps for eight years while also suffering from an undiagnosed cancer that would almost kill him; after he was released, he kept his writing in jars that he buried in his garden so they would not be discovered and taken, won the Nobel Prize, survived an assassination attempt, and was deported. When Solzhenitsyn died in 2008 at age 89, it was almost like a Russian epic was itself ending, daring you to challenge its veracity.
And, of course, there are those whose entire lives were a constant, unending balance between hedonistic adventures and the work that hedonism inspired--a paradox in which the very experiences that served to nurture interesting fiction also shortened the lives of those who wrote about them. The most recognized of all these is Ernest Hemingway, the barrel-chested big-gamesman who survived not only World War I but the Spanish Civil War and World War II--he drove ambulance in the first and covered the latter two as a journalist, all voluntarily--along with two successive plane crashes while on safari in Africa, lived in Paris, married four times, and suffered from physical and psychiatric disorders so varied and severe that it is surprising he survived as long as he did. We see his life reflected in the experiences of his characters, who are wounded in war, struggle with depression and a then-undiagnosed condition called PTSD, fall for and lose beautiful women, and duel with the natural world around them, often fruitlessly.
Last month saw the release of two nonfiction books each concerning an author, their most famous work, and the ways in which their lives fell apart because of it. The first, Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book, concerns Irish writer James Joyce and the controversy surrounding his 1922 novel Ulysses, which became the focus of widespread censorship efforts in much of the English-speaking world and corresponded with Joyce's decline in health. The second, Peter Finn and Petra Couvee's The Zhivago Affair, tells the story of Boris Pasternak's epic novel about Russian life after the October Revolution--an event that transformed Russia into a communist state thereafter called the Soviet Union, which eventually fell under the control of dictator Joseph Stalin. Finn and Couvee's history traces Pasternak's career, the government's reaction to his work, and ways in which the CIA used his book as propaganda in the midst of the Cold War. In both books we see how literature can change the world and convey new ideas to people who suffer under censorship and totalitarianism; how one person can bring those ideas to millions using only ink and paper; and how everyday people will put their own livelihoods--and, often, life itself--at risk to see these ideas distributed worldwide, all to further literature's true role in society.
Still, there are differences between the two men that are worth noting. Joyce wrote as a free man throughout Europe, and the poverty he experienced through much of his life was almost entirely of his own design. He refused to compromise his artistry, and his arrogance towards others was immeasurable. (He once told poet W.B. Yeats, then 37 years old and already considered one of the greatest poets of his generation, that he--Joyce--could have helped make his poetry better if Yeats hadn't been so old and already set in his ways. Joyce was himself 20 years old at the time.) And when Joyce was seeking out a publisher for his most famous and infamous work, an experimental novel based on The Odyssey and running over 700 pages long, he did so before the book was even finished--not an unusual practice at the time, but one that forced his potential publishers into an awkward position of having to approve a book they had not seen in full, and one that would get even more sexually detailed as it progressed towards its final chapter. For years Joyce and his allies labored to see the work realized in print and available to as many people as possible, and for years he was stopped by government censors on both side of the Atlantic. In the case of the United States, Joyce's work was halted by the Post Office, who confiscated every serialized copy of the novel, burned them, and threatened jail-time for their publishers--who, in the case of Ulysses, were almost always women.
The great unspoken irony of Ulysses is that, after every major American publisher rejected the novel outright--and every great American publisher at that time was owned and operated by men--Joyce's work fell into the possession of a half-dozen passionate and determined women, many of whom were also politically active--at least one was a former anarchist--who saw the struggle between free speech and self-preservation and chose the former without hesitation. They knew this small-press crusade for freedom of ideas and expression might lead to their own incarceration--their own loss of freedom--especially under federal law, and they published excerpts of Joyce's novel anyway. In Europe, it fell to an American-born bookshop owner named Sylvia Beach to publish Ulysses in full for the first time. Working with a single French typesetter, she put out a respectable first edition, which sold at the rate of a modern bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and finally introduced readers to the world of Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom, as well as his wife Molly, whose closing monologue not only ended the novel but introduced the world to a female character whose thoughts were complex, detailed, complicated, occasionally obscene, and totally uninterrupted by the hands of men. Not only was this a revolutionary way to end an already revolutionary novel, it was a note on the strength and independence of modern women that also served as an unintended monument to the women who'd brought Joyce's words to the public when no one else would.
Women would serve a primary role in the life of Boris Pasternak, too, but in a much more tragic way. Married for much of his life, Pasternak took mistresses, and the Soviet government used one of these relationships to try and bully Pasternak into renouncing his novel and submitting to the wishes of a government that had little interest in his work, especially after a draft of his novel Doctor Zhivago was spirited out of the country, published by foreign presses, and garnered him international fame, a sizable income, and the Nobel Prize. A poet for most of his life, Pasternak's foray into narrative fiction came from a desire to show how the promises of the October Revolution had been corrupted and suffocated by the Communist government that had sprung from the revolution's bloody soil. Though they had been promised equality of life and peace of mind there was now violence and fear from the all-powerful Joseph Stalin, his strongmen, and his successors. Millions of Pasternak's countrymen were beaten, shipped off to gulags and work-camps, tortured, coerced, and killed, often on little to no evidence other than the spite and paranoia of those in charge. Others were followed by agents of the government, communications both inside and outside of the country were intercepted or forged, and any work that went against the wishes of the government was suppressed and even destroyed. By writing a novel that depicted the Soviet government as undermining the goals of the revolution, Pasternak was putting himself in serious danger, but the government was never violent towards Pasternak himself; instead, they brought immense pain and suffering down on Pasternak's mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to a gulag for five years and, as a result, miscarried her and Pasternak's child. Later, Pasternak would write of Ivinskaya, "She was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a grueling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life, and the fact that they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance."
Like Joyce, Pasternak's novel found publication through a series of covert channels. Where Ulysses was deemed too overtly sexual by potential publishers, who saw his writing as pornographic, Doctor Zhivago was considered too condemnatory towards the Soviet government, and it took the negotiating skills of an Italian publisher (who also happened to be a communist) to convince Pasternak that his novel could be released by a foreign press, which it eventually was. Unfortunately for Pasternak, this was in direct violation of the Soviet government's own laws, which forbade writers to publish their work in other countries without first getting approval to publish in the Soviet Union, which they had not and would not grant to Pasternak. When the CIA caught wind of the controversy over his book, they printed thousands of copies in its original Russian, which they filtered into the Soviet Union as a way to undermine the government's authority. (In one instance, Soviet citizens who were given a copy of the book outside of their home country ripped off the book's cover, divided up its pages, and stuffed the entire novel in their clothes in order to sneak it back with them.) None of this, however, helped Pasternak avoid the propaganda- and fear-fueled backlash he experienced from his fellow writers and countrymen, who denounced him openly and called for his deportation, his novel equivalent to treason, even though almost no one had read anything other than excerpts selected and published by the government itself--a strategy utilized decades earlier by American censors who hoped to undermine any claims of Ulysses' literary merit by isolating portions of the novel in which Joyce uses sexual and anatomical terms with abandon, again to represent a book that almost no one had read.
In the end, both novels came to be the lauded as the best work by their respective authors, with Ulysses being deemed the "finest English-language novel published this century" by the Modern Library in 1998, a decision that surprised many and confounded most. Unfortunately, neither Joyce nor Pasternak would live long enough to see themselves fully vindicated and their work installed as classics among the cannon of world literature, though Joyce's arrogance and Pasternak's Nobel Prize all but guaranteed it. Decades later, their stories offer us insight not only into the pressures both men felt--Joyce's self-imposed because of a debilitating illness, Pasternak's from the country he called his home--but the ways in which those who attempt to suppress important and revolutionary literature, who try to stifle the spread of ideas, will always lose, as human progress invariably moves towards a future that offers us a freer and more open mind, regardless of where we live and what we live for. It is this aspect of literature that makes Joyce and Pasternak worthy of study, their novels worthy of being read, and their stories worth being told, if for no other reason than to let us see just what fear can cost us.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
Others were victimized by the governments under which they wrote, their work breaking through the propaganda and revisionism that justified appalling abuses of power. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, was raised by his widowed mother in the impoverished and totalitarian Soviet Union, served as a battery commander in World War II, and was shuffled between Soviet work- and prison-camps for eight years while also suffering from an undiagnosed cancer that would almost kill him; after he was released, he kept his writing in jars that he buried in his garden so they would not be discovered and taken, won the Nobel Prize, survived an assassination attempt, and was deported. When Solzhenitsyn died in 2008 at age 89, it was almost like a Russian epic was itself ending, daring you to challenge its veracity.
And, of course, there are those whose entire lives were a constant, unending balance between hedonistic adventures and the work that hedonism inspired--a paradox in which the very experiences that served to nurture interesting fiction also shortened the lives of those who wrote about them. The most recognized of all these is Ernest Hemingway, the barrel-chested big-gamesman who survived not only World War I but the Spanish Civil War and World War II--he drove ambulance in the first and covered the latter two as a journalist, all voluntarily--along with two successive plane crashes while on safari in Africa, lived in Paris, married four times, and suffered from physical and psychiatric disorders so varied and severe that it is surprising he survived as long as he did. We see his life reflected in the experiences of his characters, who are wounded in war, struggle with depression and a then-undiagnosed condition called PTSD, fall for and lose beautiful women, and duel with the natural world around them, often fruitlessly.
Last month saw the release of two nonfiction books each concerning an author, their most famous work, and the ways in which their lives fell apart because of it. The first, Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book, concerns Irish writer James Joyce and the controversy surrounding his 1922 novel Ulysses, which became the focus of widespread censorship efforts in much of the English-speaking world and corresponded with Joyce's decline in health. The second, Peter Finn and Petra Couvee's The Zhivago Affair, tells the story of Boris Pasternak's epic novel about Russian life after the October Revolution--an event that transformed Russia into a communist state thereafter called the Soviet Union, which eventually fell under the control of dictator Joseph Stalin. Finn and Couvee's history traces Pasternak's career, the government's reaction to his work, and ways in which the CIA used his book as propaganda in the midst of the Cold War. In both books we see how literature can change the world and convey new ideas to people who suffer under censorship and totalitarianism; how one person can bring those ideas to millions using only ink and paper; and how everyday people will put their own livelihoods--and, often, life itself--at risk to see these ideas distributed worldwide, all to further literature's true role in society.
Still, there are differences between the two men that are worth noting. Joyce wrote as a free man throughout Europe, and the poverty he experienced through much of his life was almost entirely of his own design. He refused to compromise his artistry, and his arrogance towards others was immeasurable. (He once told poet W.B. Yeats, then 37 years old and already considered one of the greatest poets of his generation, that he--Joyce--could have helped make his poetry better if Yeats hadn't been so old and already set in his ways. Joyce was himself 20 years old at the time.) And when Joyce was seeking out a publisher for his most famous and infamous work, an experimental novel based on The Odyssey and running over 700 pages long, he did so before the book was even finished--not an unusual practice at the time, but one that forced his potential publishers into an awkward position of having to approve a book they had not seen in full, and one that would get even more sexually detailed as it progressed towards its final chapter. For years Joyce and his allies labored to see the work realized in print and available to as many people as possible, and for years he was stopped by government censors on both side of the Atlantic. In the case of the United States, Joyce's work was halted by the Post Office, who confiscated every serialized copy of the novel, burned them, and threatened jail-time for their publishers--who, in the case of Ulysses, were almost always women.
The great unspoken irony of Ulysses is that, after every major American publisher rejected the novel outright--and every great American publisher at that time was owned and operated by men--Joyce's work fell into the possession of a half-dozen passionate and determined women, many of whom were also politically active--at least one was a former anarchist--who saw the struggle between free speech and self-preservation and chose the former without hesitation. They knew this small-press crusade for freedom of ideas and expression might lead to their own incarceration--their own loss of freedom--especially under federal law, and they published excerpts of Joyce's novel anyway. In Europe, it fell to an American-born bookshop owner named Sylvia Beach to publish Ulysses in full for the first time. Working with a single French typesetter, she put out a respectable first edition, which sold at the rate of a modern bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and finally introduced readers to the world of Joyce's protagonist Leopold Bloom, as well as his wife Molly, whose closing monologue not only ended the novel but introduced the world to a female character whose thoughts were complex, detailed, complicated, occasionally obscene, and totally uninterrupted by the hands of men. Not only was this a revolutionary way to end an already revolutionary novel, it was a note on the strength and independence of modern women that also served as an unintended monument to the women who'd brought Joyce's words to the public when no one else would.
Women would serve a primary role in the life of Boris Pasternak, too, but in a much more tragic way. Married for much of his life, Pasternak took mistresses, and the Soviet government used one of these relationships to try and bully Pasternak into renouncing his novel and submitting to the wishes of a government that had little interest in his work, especially after a draft of his novel Doctor Zhivago was spirited out of the country, published by foreign presses, and garnered him international fame, a sizable income, and the Nobel Prize. A poet for most of his life, Pasternak's foray into narrative fiction came from a desire to show how the promises of the October Revolution had been corrupted and suffocated by the Communist government that had sprung from the revolution's bloody soil. Though they had been promised equality of life and peace of mind there was now violence and fear from the all-powerful Joseph Stalin, his strongmen, and his successors. Millions of Pasternak's countrymen were beaten, shipped off to gulags and work-camps, tortured, coerced, and killed, often on little to no evidence other than the spite and paranoia of those in charge. Others were followed by agents of the government, communications both inside and outside of the country were intercepted or forged, and any work that went against the wishes of the government was suppressed and even destroyed. By writing a novel that depicted the Soviet government as undermining the goals of the revolution, Pasternak was putting himself in serious danger, but the government was never violent towards Pasternak himself; instead, they brought immense pain and suffering down on Pasternak's mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to a gulag for five years and, as a result, miscarried her and Pasternak's child. Later, Pasternak would write of Ivinskaya, "She was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a grueling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life, and the fact that they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance."
Like Joyce, Pasternak's novel found publication through a series of covert channels. Where Ulysses was deemed too overtly sexual by potential publishers, who saw his writing as pornographic, Doctor Zhivago was considered too condemnatory towards the Soviet government, and it took the negotiating skills of an Italian publisher (who also happened to be a communist) to convince Pasternak that his novel could be released by a foreign press, which it eventually was. Unfortunately for Pasternak, this was in direct violation of the Soviet government's own laws, which forbade writers to publish their work in other countries without first getting approval to publish in the Soviet Union, which they had not and would not grant to Pasternak. When the CIA caught wind of the controversy over his book, they printed thousands of copies in its original Russian, which they filtered into the Soviet Union as a way to undermine the government's authority. (In one instance, Soviet citizens who were given a copy of the book outside of their home country ripped off the book's cover, divided up its pages, and stuffed the entire novel in their clothes in order to sneak it back with them.) None of this, however, helped Pasternak avoid the propaganda- and fear-fueled backlash he experienced from his fellow writers and countrymen, who denounced him openly and called for his deportation, his novel equivalent to treason, even though almost no one had read anything other than excerpts selected and published by the government itself--a strategy utilized decades earlier by American censors who hoped to undermine any claims of Ulysses' literary merit by isolating portions of the novel in which Joyce uses sexual and anatomical terms with abandon, again to represent a book that almost no one had read.
In the end, both novels came to be the lauded as the best work by their respective authors, with Ulysses being deemed the "finest English-language novel published this century" by the Modern Library in 1998, a decision that surprised many and confounded most. Unfortunately, neither Joyce nor Pasternak would live long enough to see themselves fully vindicated and their work installed as classics among the cannon of world literature, though Joyce's arrogance and Pasternak's Nobel Prize all but guaranteed it. Decades later, their stories offer us insight not only into the pressures both men felt--Joyce's self-imposed because of a debilitating illness, Pasternak's from the country he called his home--but the ways in which those who attempt to suppress important and revolutionary literature, who try to stifle the spread of ideas, will always lose, as human progress invariably moves towards a future that offers us a freer and more open mind, regardless of where we live and what we live for. It is this aspect of literature that makes Joyce and Pasternak worthy of study, their novels worthy of being read, and their stories worth being told, if for no other reason than to let us see just what fear can cost us.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
chelsea_not_chels's review against another edition
2.0
More reviews available at my blog, Beauty and the Bookworm.
If this book were a web article, I'd call the title clickbait, because it's pretty misleading. After taking a class about Soviet and CIA operations during the Cold War a few years ago, I've been drawn to true spy stories, and thought this would be another one. It's really not. In fact, The Zhivago Affair isn't really about the Kremlin, the Cia, or the battle over a forbidden book. It's more about the book itself and the reaction to it, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, and the trouble that it caused the author, Pasternak. While there is some involvement of the Kremlin (who banned the book, without having ever read it) and the CIA (who printed copies to give to people traveling to the Soviet Union as part of a campaign to introduce a wider variety of viewpoints behind the Iron Curtain) it's mostly about Pasternak and those directly involved with him, and his struggle to stand by his work while facing derision from many officials in the USSR.
This isn't a very long book--less than 300 pages, which is fairly short for a nonfiction book regarding the Cold War, but it wasn't a particularly riveting read. Maybe I would have been more interested if I'd known what the book was really about going into it; as it was, I found myself putting it down often to read other things that were more interesting. Knowing about how history has treated people it views as dissenters, either rightly or wrongly (when Krushchev, one of the Soviet leaders who was eventually ousted by his compatriots, eventually read the book, he said there was "nothing Soviet" about it) is important, but at the same time I'm not quite sure there was 266 pages of things worth knowing in this. It was interesting reading about how Pasternak reacted to his persecution, and how others both inside and outside of the Soviet Union reacted to Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak's treatment, but it was...pretty much all the same? There wasn't a lot of repetition, but once you realize that Pasternak was being persecuted by the Soviet administration, there's not really that much more to it. It never really stops, right up until Pasternak dies, and if you know anything about the USSR, you wouldn't really expect it to.
The bits about the CIA are very short--maybe a chapter and a half total, focusing on the CIA publishing copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and getting them into the hands of Soviet citizens both at home and abroad, at the World's Fair and at a youth festival. The bits about the Kremlin are very short, too; a few parts about different people being followed or interrogated about the novel, royalties coming in from abroad, stuff like that. There really is no "battle" over the book, at least not between the Kremlin and CIA; if there's any sort of battle, it's in the press and with the Nobel Prize Committee. Overall, the story, while interesting and historically important, wasn't what it was made out to be, and that's worth keeping in mind when going into this book. It was okay, but not particularly riveting, and it's not a nonfiction book I would pick up again.
2 stars out of 5.
If this book were a web article, I'd call the title clickbait, because it's pretty misleading. After taking a class about Soviet and CIA operations during the Cold War a few years ago, I've been drawn to true spy stories, and thought this would be another one. It's really not. In fact, The Zhivago Affair isn't really about the Kremlin, the Cia, or the battle over a forbidden book. It's more about the book itself and the reaction to it, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, and the trouble that it caused the author, Pasternak. While there is some involvement of the Kremlin (who banned the book, without having ever read it) and the CIA (who printed copies to give to people traveling to the Soviet Union as part of a campaign to introduce a wider variety of viewpoints behind the Iron Curtain) it's mostly about Pasternak and those directly involved with him, and his struggle to stand by his work while facing derision from many officials in the USSR.
This isn't a very long book--less than 300 pages, which is fairly short for a nonfiction book regarding the Cold War, but it wasn't a particularly riveting read. Maybe I would have been more interested if I'd known what the book was really about going into it; as it was, I found myself putting it down often to read other things that were more interesting. Knowing about how history has treated people it views as dissenters, either rightly or wrongly (when Krushchev, one of the Soviet leaders who was eventually ousted by his compatriots, eventually read the book, he said there was "nothing Soviet" about it) is important, but at the same time I'm not quite sure there was 266 pages of things worth knowing in this. It was interesting reading about how Pasternak reacted to his persecution, and how others both inside and outside of the Soviet Union reacted to Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak's treatment, but it was...pretty much all the same? There wasn't a lot of repetition, but once you realize that Pasternak was being persecuted by the Soviet administration, there's not really that much more to it. It never really stops, right up until Pasternak dies, and if you know anything about the USSR, you wouldn't really expect it to.
The bits about the CIA are very short--maybe a chapter and a half total, focusing on the CIA publishing copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and getting them into the hands of Soviet citizens both at home and abroad, at the World's Fair and at a youth festival. The bits about the Kremlin are very short, too; a few parts about different people being followed or interrogated about the novel, royalties coming in from abroad, stuff like that. There really is no "battle" over the book, at least not between the Kremlin and CIA; if there's any sort of battle, it's in the press and with the Nobel Prize Committee. Overall, the story, while interesting and historically important, wasn't what it was made out to be, and that's worth keeping in mind when going into this book. It was okay, but not particularly riveting, and it's not a nonfiction book I would pick up again.
2 stars out of 5.