drinking Dr. Zhivago

no mid-day racist séances this week

One of the You Tube videos I listened to said part of the reason people wanted to read Dr. Zhivago was because it was frowned on by the Soviets.

     A situation of creating desire by preventing people from having something.

     "You may not read it!"

     "You may not drink it!"

            So in a sense Dr. Zhivago in the 1950s was kind of like Coors beer in the 1970s, right?

_____________________________________


The Zhivago Affair
----------------------------------------- The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book

written by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée
Vintage Books.  Random House.  New York.  2015.

some of the reviews:


"A galloping page-turner and a stark picture of a nation ruled by terror and unreason, which reads like a sinister rewrite of Alice in Wonderland."
          ~ The Sunday Times  (London)

"The authors persuasively argue that the ripples from the publication of this single book...changed the balance of power in the world during a critical period."
          ~ The Columbus Dispatch

(Khrushchev and Nixon, Kitchen Debate, 1959)


"Fascinating. . . . The story of how Doctor Zhivago helped disrupt the Soviet Union holds some intriguing implications for the present and future of cultural conflict."
          ~ The Atlantic

--------------- [excerpt, The Zhivago Affair] -------------

Prologue

On May 20, 1956, two men took the suburban electric train from Moscow's Kiev station to the village of Peredelkino, a thirty-minute ride southwest of the city.  It was a blue-sky Sunday morning.  Spring had pushed the last of the snow away just the previous month, and the air was sweet with the scent of blooming lilac.  


Vladlen Vladimirsky, easily the bigger of the two, had bright blond hair and wore the billowing pants and double-breasted jacket favored by most Soviet officials.  His slender companion was clearly a foreigner -- Russians teased the man that he was a stilyaga, or "style maven," because of his Western clothing.  

Sergio D'Angelo also had the kind of quick smile that was uncommon in a country where circumspection was ingrained.  

The Italian was in Peredelkino to charm a poet.

__________________________________

-30-