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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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"Ivinskaya never tried to influence Boris Pasternak or go against his will in relation to bringing certain changes in his novel," said D'Angelo, sitting on a podium at the front of the room.
"This is not true, not true," shouted Elena Pasternak, who sat with her husband, Yevgeny, near the front of the hall at the Literary Museum. "She was afraid."
"Let him finish," shouted an audience member.
In the 1990s, the publication of a letter Ivinskaya wrote to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev from a Soviet prison camp suggested she had collaborated with the KGB behind Pasternak's back. D'Angelo views her contacts with the authorities as the pleadings of a frightened woman and her later letter as a desperate gambit to get out of prison rather than any revelation of real duplicity. She was imprisoned for illegal currency dealings after receiving royalties smuggled into the country.
"Ivinskaya came to me in despair," D'Angelo continued. "She asked me to handle the situation somehow. Shortly before that I had returned from Italy and knew that publication of the novel was at such a stage that there was no way back."
D'Angelo, who had become disillusioned with communism after seeing the Soviet Union firsthand, left Moscow at the end of 1957. He writes that he last saw Pasternak at Ivinskaya's Moscow apartment on Dec. 25, 1957. Pasternak, he recalled, had with him a book of poems by Osip Mandelstam, "his close friend who died in the camps."
"He makes an inspirational speech about his poetry and asks me to give the book to Feltrinelli," D'Angelo wrote.
Pasternak doubts the exchange ever took place.
"D'Angelo's description of this party arouses perplexity," he wrote. "First of all, Mandelstam's poetry. Could an Italian publisher know anything about the poet Mandelstam? Could he possibly appreciate his poetry? . . . Pasternak could not have been talking about Mandelstam with inspiration. This is not Pasternak! It is all fantasy or memory aberration."
"Yevgeny Borisovich thinks he is the only authority on Pasternak," D'Angelo said the morning after the debate, using Yevgeny Pasternak's patronymic. "He believes he owns his father's legacy."
