The Kremlin the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book 26/12/15
This book was written by Boris Pasternak between 1945 and 1955 in between he made a living by translating Shakespeare and poems into Russian. He was 65 when he finished the book.
He knew not to send work abroad as the famous Russian poet Pilnyak was killed for sending a copy of Mahogany abroad. From 1934 the artists lived at Peredelkino. After the death of Stalin there was the period called the Thaw which was named after the book by Ilya Ehrenberg.
Di Angelo came to Moscow in 1956 to the communist convention and was looking for new Russian literature to publish at Feltrinelli and new Italian publisher in Milan. The book was published in 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958 and David Lean made the movie in 1965.
1958 the Russian edition was given to Soviet visitors in at the Brussels world fair 1958. and given out to Soviet visitors free by the Papal exhibit. People took the cover off and divided the book into sections so that they could smuggle it home. A copy in Moscow was selling for the equivalent of a weeks wages. From 1950 on Pasternak was a candidate for the Nobel prize because of his poetry but others like Hemingway got it
Boris was born in Odessa and his father was a artist and the great musicians came to their house for portraits Rachmaninov, Scriabin and his mother was a pianist. Isaiah Berlin had a good friendship with him and met him a few times.
After Stalin's death friends asked him to write a poem on Stalin his reply was that Stalin had killed many intellectuals.
Pasternak had arranged with Feltrinelli that the book would be published no matter what and if telegrams arrived in any language other than French to know that they were not from him. The book was published in all the main languages and in Russian the CIA were involved as anything that was banned in Russia they promoted. The Hungarian uprising 1956, being suppressed indicated that the thaw had not come.
Pasternak's opinion was that the type of society that Lenin had set up was the natural cause of Stalinism, Stalin was not an aberration of the system as Khrushchev contended.
When Pasternak had a bladder infection he struggled to get into a hospital as he was blacklisted. His colleagues in the writers union criticized his unpatriotic views but this was done out of self preservation. Students told him they had been asked to sign a letter against him what should they do? They were relieved when he said they should sign it.
When Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet writers he talked of suicide and a nurse was sent to keep and eye on him. He turned down the Nobel prize in 1958 hoping for a better reaction from the Soviets. Eventually western complaint became an embarrassment to Khrushchev and he asked for the situation to backtrack. Later when Pasternak was invited to rejoin the writers union he turned them down.
Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic came to Moscow he met Pasternak and the his last concert the audience eyed Pasternak and the concert felt like it was to him.
After his 70 birthday he felt ill and kept secret that he had lung cancer and lasted another 101 day. The funeral was attended by students and old people but not the writers as the KGB kept tabs of who was there. His mistress Izakaya was now arrested for accepting foreign currency which made quite a scandal in the west. Sukov took evidence to London to show the Soviet Government was justified but as none of it had been published in the Soviet press the British press were not interested.
After Khrushchev retired he read the book and decided in was not anti-Soviet and it was a mistake to ban it. He himself was under house arrest and smuggled out tapes of his own autobiography.
Jewish Russian writers discovered that to be real Russians they had to convert to the Russian Orthodox church.
Only in 1967 did the Soviets pay copyright for western books translated into Russian.
In 1989 his son Yevgeny accepted the Nobel prize for his father posthumously.
