absolute power

-------------------- [excerpt, Doctor Zhivago.  Written by Boris Pasternak.  Published 1957.] ---------------------

4

     One day in the summer of 1903, Yura was driving across fields in a two-horse open carriage with his Uncle Nikolai.  They were on their way to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a teacher and author of popular textbooks, who lived at Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, a silk manufacturer, and a great patron of the arts.

     It was the Feast of the Virgin of Kazan.  The harvest was in full swing but, whether because of the feast or because of the midday break, there was not a soul in sight.  The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts.  

Birds were circling overhead.  

In the hot stillness the heavy-eared wheat stood straight.  Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes. [end, excerpt] ---------------------

___________________________________

     After the author Pilnyak was given a five-minute trial and subsequently murdered by the Soviet government in 1938, ---------------------- [excerpt, The Zhivago Affair] -------------- Pilnyak's wife spent nineteen years in the Gulag, and his child was raised in the Soviet republic of Georgia by a grandmother.  

All of Pilnyak's works were withdrawn from libraries and bookstores, and destroyed.  In 1938-39, according to a report by the state censor, 24,138,799 copies of "politically damaging" works or titles of "absolutely no value to the Soviet reader" were pulped.

     In the wake of the arrest of Pilnyak and others, the Pasternaks, like many in the village, lived with fear.  "It was awful," said Pasternak's wife, Zinaida, pregnant at the time with their first son.  "Every minute we expected that Borya would be arrested."

     Even after the death of Stalin, no Soviet writer could entertain the idea of publication abroad without considering Pilnyak's fate.  And since 1929 no one had broken the unwritten but iron rule that unapproved foreign publication was forbidden.

     As he continued his patter, D'Angelo suddenly realized that Pasternak was lost in thought.

{The Zhivago Affair, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée.  Vintage Books, Random House, New York.  2015.}

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