Through a number of front organizations, including Bedford Publishing Company in New York City, the agency successfully purchased, printed, distributed, and even commissioned a number of books with the goal of promoting a “spiritual understanding of Western values.” This included novels by authors as diverse as George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce and as Couvée and Finn reveal, one book Bedford commissioned was a false memoir of a Soviet-U.S. When the agency was created in 1947, Congress granted it the power to carry out “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” This rather vague mandate allowed the agency to expand into cultural domains.Ĭouvée and Finn paint an intriguing picture of the literary culture at the CIA in the 1950s one staff member, for example, left to become the fiction editor at Playboy only to hear that his former boss at the agency might submit a story under a pseudonym.

Not long after the novel’s initial 1957 publication, the CIA became involved. He wanted the book published, whatever the repercussions. The Soviet authorities forged his signature and sent letters to the Italian publisher demanding the return of the manuscript, but Pasternak whispered his actual intentions to visiting Italians and sent special notes in French, telling his publisher to disregard communication in any other language. An Italian publishing house secured the rights to the novel, and Pasternak also gave copies to friends visiting from France and England. In The Zhivago Affair, Couvée and Finn recount the tangled tale of the book’s journey to publication. This was easily done within the Soviet Union, but Pasternak managed to pass a copy of the manuscript to a visiting Italian with publishing contacts. A failure to praise the regime was as dangerous as a willingness to question it, and the Communist Party officials charged with overseeing cultural affairs were anxious to prevent the publication of Doctor Zhivago.

The finished product was hardly a celebration of capitalism or a “Western way of life,” but some passages openly doubted that the bloodshed of the revolution was justified, and large stretches were fairly indifferent to politics. The poet’s widow sent the paper to Pasternak, and he honored his friend’s literary defiance by writing a novel that ignored the official demands for literature to glorify the “Soviet man” and the revolution. Boris Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago around 1945 on blank paper he inherited from a dead friend, a Georgian poet who had been tortured and executed by the Soviet regime.

Doctor zhivago book