Book review: ‘The Zhivago Affair’ was one of the most fascinating of the Cold War’s cultural skirmishes // Boris Pasternak's refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son's memoirs

The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee
Reviewed by Adam Kirsch|
..More than Christianity, however, life itself is Zhivago’s sacred value—his name is related to the Russian word for life—and he despises every ideology that claims to be superior to life, to be able to shape and control its mysterious forces. His great love affair with the beautiful Lara is cast as an embrace of the wildness and unpredictability of life, which she embodies as the eternal feminine.. 

Cover to the First Edition of Doctor Zhivago, 1957
Pasternak recalled the words of his friend Ekaterina Krashennikova upon reading Doctor Zhivago. She had said, "Don't forget yourself to the point of believing that it was you who wrote this work. It was the Russian people and their sufferings who created it. Thank God for having expressed it through your pen."

What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?

And yet the novel’s ideological heresies were plain to see. Doctor Zhivago is a love story set against the backdrop of the world-shaking events of 20th-century Russian history—the revolution of 1905, the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the devastating civil wars that followed, with an epilogue that carries the action forward to WWII. The Communist Party had long laid down the law about how these events, the crucible of the Soviet state, should be treated in literature. The good guys and bad guys had to be clearly identified; the virtue and necessity of the Revolution had to be taken for granted. There was no room for any kind of idiosyncratic, individual reassessment of the official storyline.

The miraculous thing about Doctor Zhivago is that, as the American critic Edmund Wilson noted at the time, Pasternak wrote as if all this ideological apparatus simply didn’t exist...

The end of the Cold War did not mean that America ceased to have rivals and enemies on the world stage. But if you look at the threats that chiefly concern our foreign policy today—the fight against Islamic terrorism, the commercial rivalry with China, even the war of nerves with Putin’s Russia in Eastern Europe—they all lack the element that made the Soviet-American struggle so consequential. That is the intellectual dimension, the sense that geopolitical rivalries were driven by a profound ideological disagreement about the best form of government.

When Francis Fukuyama invented the phrase “the End of History” to describe what happened after 1989, he did not mean that events would stop taking place, or that no more wars would be fought. He was referring specifically to the fact that, after the Cold War, struggles between rival powers were just that: power struggles, and not philosophical disagreements. No matter what happens in Ukraine or Syria, it will not shake the conviction of Americans, and billions of other people around the world, that liberal democracy is the ideal political system. Other societies may disagree, but in the West, there is no chance that we will suddenly decide that an Islamic caliphate, or a party-state dictatorship, would be preferable to parliamentary democracy. The ideological battle today is completely one-sided: the foes of democracy must justify their opposition, while the supporters of democracy take comfort in feeling that they have history on their side.

One side effect of “the End of History” is that intellectual life is no longer so charged with significance as it was during the Cold War. When a society is debating fundamental philosophical questions, as left and right did during the 20th century, even the most seemingly abstract of cultural products can reflect life-and-death political issues. That is why the CIA, during the 1950s and 1960s, became one of the most important sponsors of American culture—a fact that scandalized many when it was finally revealed but that makes a basic kind of sense. If American culture is the product of the American way of life, then showing off the products of that culture is an indirect advertisement for democracy. That’s why the CIA and the State Department sent Jackson Pollock and Louis Armstrong on world tours and funneled money into magazines like Encounter—just as the USSR promoted the work of Communist writers and sent Shostakovich to conduct his music in America.

The Zhivago Affair, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, is a detailed reconstruction of one of the most fascinating of the Cold War’s cultural skirmishes. Today the novel Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, sits placidly on the shelves of Russian classics, alongside War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. Most people, if they know the story at all, probably know it from David Lean’s widescreen film epic, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and the balalaika-heavy “Lara’s Theme.” But when it was published in 1957, Doctor Zhivago touched off a worldwide controversy, as the Soviet Union tried ineffectually to stop the book from appearing and then reacted with outrage when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize. No book except The Gulag Archipelago, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would publish some 15 years later, caused more anguish to the Soviets during the whole Cold War... read more:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/175661/zhivago-affair?%20%20all=1

Lara's Theme: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXtFRl1nSs4>

OBITUARY: Olga Ivinskaya
Olga Ivinskaya was Pasternak's friend and the lover of his last 13 years, and the original of Lara in his first novel and best-known work Doctor Zhivago, banned in the Soviet Union but published in Italy in 1957.

Boris Pasternak refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son's memoirs

It is one of the most remarkable events of all associated with Boris Pasternak’s 100 years celebration – a decision of Nobel Prize committee to restore the historic truth and call the writer’s refusal to receive the prize compelled and void. The original decision to award the prize to Boris Pasternak in 1958 turned into a scandal. It poisoned all his remaining life, and during 30 years it was prohibited topic in USSR.

Rumors that Pasternak was to receive the Nobel Prize started right after the World War II was over. According to the current Nobel Committee head Lars Gillensten, his nominee was discussed every year from 1946 to 1950, then again in 1957 (it was finally awarded in 1958). Pasternak guessed about such processes by growing waves of criticism in USSR. Sometimes he had to justify himself of European fame: “According to the Union of Soviet Writers, some literature circles of the West see unusual importance of my work, not matching its modesty and low productivity…” To justify this attention he focused passionately on “Doctor Zhivago”, his artistic testament to the Russian spiritual life.

He would have been exiled straight away, but for Jawaharlal Nehru, who phoned Khrushchev and said he would head the Committee for Pasternak’s protection.

http://english.pravda.ru/society/showbiz/18-12-2003/4383-pasternak-0/

see also
Anna Akhmatova: Forty-Five Poems Including ‘Requiem’
Book Review - Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate