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After 50 Years, Passions Persist Over the Publication of 'Doctor Zhivago'
Sergio D'Angelo visited Moscow this month for the Russian release of his "Doctor Zhivago" memoir.
(Courtesy Of Edward Lozansky - Courtesy Of Edward Lozansky)
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In 1956, D'Angelo was a young Italian communist who came to Russia to work for the Italian service of Radio Moscow. Before he left Italy, another communist, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the fabulously wealthy founder of a new publishing house in Milan, asked him to act as a scout for Russian books.
That May, before "Doctor Zhivago" had attracted much attention, D'Angelo edited a short notice on Radio Moscow that said publication of the book was imminent. He asked a Russian friend if he could set up a meeting with Pasternak. It was arranged for a Sunday at the author's country home in the Peredelkino writers colony, just outside Moscow.
"He received us very warmly," D'Angelo recalled. "It was a sunny day, warm, and he proposed to talk in the garden. We sat on two wooden benches at right angles."
D'Angelo suggested that Pasternak give him a copy of "Doctor Zhivago" to pass on to Feltrinelli, who would then start the process of translation. D'Angelo said Feltrinelli would not publish until after the Soviet edition came out.
Pasternak insisted that the novel would never appear in the U.S.S.R. because it didn't "conform to official cultural guidelines."
"Pasternak stands up, excuses himself, and enters the house," D'Angelo wrote. "He returns a short while later with a large package in tow, which he gives directly to me. 'This is 'Doctor Zhivago,' " he says. "May it make its way around the world."
As he and D'Angelo exchanged goodbyes at the garden gate, Pasternak said: "You are now invited to attend my execution."
A week later, D'Angelo flew to East Berlin, where the Berlin Wall had not yet been built, crossed into the Western part of the city and handed the manuscript to Feltrinelli. An honored guest of the Soviet Union, D'Angelo was never searched.
Over the next 18 months, before the novel's publication in Italy on Nov. 23, 1957, the Soviets, including the KGB, put intense pressure on Pasternak to get the manuscript back. Soviet officials deemed it "a perfidious calumny against our revolution, and against our entire way of life," according to a memorandum issued by the Culture Sector of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
When the novel won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Soviets were outraged, viewing it as a calculated Western provocation. Another Russian author, Ivan Tolstoy, claimed this year that the CIA had a covert role in the Nobel award, a yet unproven plot that actually unites D'Angelo and Yevgeny Pasternak in skepticism.
The Soviet Union forced Boris Pasternak to reject the honor and then pilloried and isolated the writer, who died in 1960 at the age of 70.
Much of the debate between D'Angelo and Yevgeny Pasternak this month focused on the kind of detail that would baffle all but serious students of the book's publishing history. The two, for instance, clashed over the role of Boris Pasternak's lover, Olga Ivinskaya, in attempts to pressure Pasternak to make changes in the novel to placate the Soviets and to write to the Italian publisher asking him to return the manuscript.
