------------------- [excerpt] -------------- D'Angelo, who spoke Russian well and only occasionally had to ask Vladimirsky to help him with a word, told Pasternak that he also acted as a part-time agent for the publisher Feltrinelli.
Not only was Feltrinelli a committed party member, D'Angelo said, he was a very rich man, the young multimillionaire scion of an Italian business dynasty, who had been radicalized during the war.
Feltrinelli had recently started a publishing venture, and he especially wanted contemporary literature from the Soviet Union. D'Angelo said he had recently heard about Doctor Zhivago, and it seemed an ideal book for Feltrinelli's new [publishing] house.
Pasternak interrupted the Italian's pitch with a wave of his hand. "In the USSR," he said, "the novel will not come out. It doesn't conform to official cultural guidelines."
D'Angelo protested that the book's publication had already been announced and since the death of Stalin there had been a marked relaxation within Soviet society, a development that got its name -- "the thaw" -- from the title of a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg.
The horizons of literature seemed to broaden as old dogmas were challenged. Fiction that was somewhat critical of the system, reflected on the recent Soviet past, and contained complex, flawed characters had begun to be published. ...
... D'Angelo had no sense of the risk Pasternak would be taking by placing his manuscript in foreign hands. Pasternak was all too aware that the unsanctioned publication in the West of a work that had not first appeared in the Soviet Union could lead to charges of disloyalty and endanger the author and his family.
In a letter to his sisters in England in December 1948, he warned them against any printing of some early chapters he had sent them: "Publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to mention fatal, dangers."
Pilnyak, Pasternak's former next-door neighbor in Peredelkino (the side gate between their gardens was never closed), was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head in April 1938.
Soviet impressionism:
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{excerpt from The Zhivago Affair, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée. Copyright 2015. Vintage Books, Random House, New York.}
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poem by Boris Pasternak
To a Friend
Come, don't I know that, stumbling against shadows,
Darkness could never have arrived at light?
Do I rate happy hundreds over millions
Of happy men? Am I a monster quite?
Isn't the Five-Year-Plan a yardstick for me,
Its rise and fall my own? But I don't quiz
In asking: What shall I do with my thorax
And with what's slower than inertia is?
The great Soviet gives to the highest passions
In these brave days each one its rightful place,
Yet vainly leaves one vacant for the poet.
When that's not empty, look for danger's face.
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