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| ISBN-13: | 9780817919665 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hoover Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Zhivago's Secret Journey
From Typescript to Book
By Paolo Mancosu
Hoover Institution Press
Copyright © 2016 Paolo MancosuAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1966-5
CHAPTER 1
Early Smugglings
Boris Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago in 1945. In 1948 he sent the first four chapters of his novel to his sisters in Oxford. From the letter Pasternak sent to his sisters, it is clear that he was aware of the unacceptability of his work in progress to the Soviet authorities and of the dangers his novel exposed him to. He wrote:
To come back to the novel. Printing it, — I mean, publishing it in print — is absolutely out of the question, whether in the original or in translation — you must make this absolutely clear to the literary people whom I should like to show it to. Firstly, it isn't completed, this is only half of it, needing a continuation. Secondly, publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to say fatal, dangers. Both the spirit of the work itself, and my situation as it has developed here, mean that the novel can't appear in public; and the only Russian works allowed to circulate abroad are translations of those published here. (B. Pasternak to Frederick and Josephine Pasternak and to Lydia Pasternak Slater, December 12, 1948 [Pasternak 2010b, 376.])
The novel was completed in 1955 and Pasternak, emboldened by the more relaxed atmosphere of the "thaw," started contemplating sending the full typescript abroad for translation and publication. On April 12, 1956, Martin Malia informed Isaiah Berlin that Pasternak was considering sending out a copy of Doctor Zhivago with some unnamed French students:
In recent years, as you know, Pasternak has published little but translations. However, he has written a long and as I gather somewhat symbolic novel, containing a number of poetic passages, called Dr. Zhivago. It is apparently unprintable in the Soviet Union. He told me that last year he had sent out a copy of the first of five parts of this novel via a friend at the New Zealand Embassy and that this copy, he thinks, is now in the hands of Bowra. The other four parts are now in the process of revision and typing. When they are completed sometime this spring he intends to give them to some French students now at the University of Moscow for shipment out through the pouch. Once this is done he would like to have all five parts translated and published in either English or French in order that the book may see the light of day somewhere and perhaps by this means to bring pressure on the Soviets to publish the book in Russia for fear of looking tyrannous if they don't. As he said "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" [I am ready for any scandal in order to bring the book out. — author's translation.] He feels that the situation is now such that the authorities will do nothing more to him than scold him for such a scandal. Therefore, could you please inform Bowra of this and suggest that it might be appropriate to look for some means for having the volume published in translation. However, nothing should be done publicly until all five parts are in the West and, further, until we have some confirmation from the French students that Pasternak still feels the way he did last winter about this matter. Since I am in touch with the French students I will let you know as soon as I hear anything. (BL, MS. Berlin 149, fols. 155–156; see documentary appendix 1 for the full letter.)
This letter by Malia is of great interest for the early history of Zhivago in England and in France. It gives us a glimpse of Pasternak's state of mind at the time as he entertained the thought that sending the novel abroad might force publication at home. He judged the situation in 1955–56 to be propitious for such a move. He deemed the possible political consequences of publication abroad to have been less dire than those he had mentioned to his sisters in 1948.
The passage quoted above raises at least two problems. The first concerns the identity of the friend at the New Zealand Embassy; the second the identity of the French students.
From the secondary literature, it would seem that there is only one plausible candidate for the identity of the New Zealander mentioned in Malia's letter, namely Desmond Patrick "Paddy" Costello, who worked as "second secretary" in the New Zealand Legation in Moscow between 1945 and 1950. During that period Costello met with Pasternak several times (Berlin 1998, 225; Berlin 2004, 64–65). Indeed, the connection between Costello and Pasternak has been discussed in McNeish (2007) and Leniham (2012). However, neither one of those two sources indicate that Costello travelled to the USSR in 1955. Since the New Zealand Legation was shut down in 1950, it remains a bit of a mystery under which circumstances Pasternak could have given Costello the first of five books that made up Doctor Zhivago (incidentally, the Feltrinelli typescript is also divided into five parts). Given the lack of evidence concerning Costello's presence in the Soviet Union in 1955, it is more plausible that Malia misheard Pasternak and that the latter referred not to an event which took place in 1955 but rather a previous episode — the sending of a part of the novel in 1948. A further problem is to find out whether this first part (out of five) of Doctor Zhivago was delivered to Bowra or to someone else. The Bowra papers at Wadham College contain no trace of a typescript of Doctor Zhivago. We do know that Costello acted as a courier for Pasternak on some occasions between 1945 and 1950 (McNeish 2007, 174, 283; Leniham 2012). But the information we have does not point specifically to a smuggling of the first part of Doctor Zhivago nor that he was in England at the right moment (that is, immediately after December 12, 1948, the date of Pasternak's letter to his sisters).
Costello was a very close friend of Dan Davin, also a New Zealander, whose biographer, Keith Ovenden, states that "on one occasion Paddy and Dan acted as go-between in smuggling Pasternak manuscript notes to Oxford" (Ovenden 1996, 263). Davidson (2009b, 83) has Costello acting as courier in bringing a booklet of Pasternak's poems to Bowra in April 1948 and then again in December 1948 for a letter to his sisters. Unfortunately, no specific source for the attribution is given.
I can add the following decisive elements to the clarification of the situation. First of all, there is a typescript dated 1948 containing the first part of Doctor Zhivago(chapters 1 to 4) in the Pasternak Family Papers (see note 2). Second, in Lydia's diary for October 25, 1948, the connection to Costello is recorded as follows: "Costello called to say that he saw Borusha." This confirms the connection between Lydia Pasternak and Costello but does not help with the issue of the delivery of the typescript. Third, and most importantly, a diary entry for January 13, 1949, reads: "To Davin — Lake, letters and photos and book from Moscow." Finally, two days later, on January 15, Lydia remarks: "Read Borya's novel." Douglas W. Lake and his wife, Ruth (née Macky), worked at the New Zealand Legation in Moscow. Davin, Lake, and Costello were all New Zealanders and Davin's connection to Lake has nothing surprising (Templeton 1988; Ovenden 1996). It thus appears that the letter from Pasternak dated December 12, 1948, and the novel were brought to England by Doug and/or Ruth Lake. It is of course quite possible that the middleman in Moscow was Costello.
We can now go back to Malia's letter and determine the identity of the students who met Pasternak in 1956 using Tolstoy (2009) and Malia and Engerman (2005). They were Louis Martinez, Michel Aucouturier, and Louis Allain.Tolstoy (2009) contains interviews with Martinez and Aucouturier, who had spent the academic year 1955–1956 in Moscow. They would become part of the team that translated Doctor Zhivago into French. Malia and Engerman (2005) and the interview with Aucouturier (Tolstoy 2009) single out the poet Lev Khalif as the one who led the French students to Pasternak. The meeting took place on July 15, 1956, just before their return to France. Martinez recalled Pasternak discussing Doctor Zhivago whereas Aucouturier did not. Here is an excerpt from Aucouturier's interview:
I was very interested in him [Pasternak]. There were two more students at the University [Moscow State University], Louis Martinez — who will later be one of the translators of Zhivago — and Louis Allain, who will later become professor in Lille. One day we began talking at the University with the young poet Lev Khalif who asked us: "Would you like to go to visit Pasternak?" and we replied "Of course!" He made a phone call and so we went, Martinez, Allain, and myself. (Tolstoy 2009, 89)
And Louis Martinez told Ivan Tolstoy:
Pasternak welcomed us and began speaking at length about different topics. Almost from the beginning he spoke to us about his novel and explained to us, in somewhat vague terms, not so much its structure and development but rather the background that had given rise to it. He told us in which way this novel reflected the development of Soviet life during an enormous interval of time. We sat there in silence. The monologue lasted eight hours, yes, eight hours. (Tolstoy 2009, 86)
Soon after that meeting Aucouturier, Martinez, and Allain left the Soviet Union. Their departure led Malia to write to Berlin on November 26, 1956:
Also my way of making contact with students would not have been of any help to you since it was largely through several normaliens at the University of Moscow, who had left by the time you wrote. The other contacts were all chance contacts for which there is no formula. (BL, MS. Berlin 149, fols. 166–7)
Back in France, Louis Martinez encouraged Hélène Peltier to get in touch with Pasternak during her forthcoming visit to Moscow. We will return to Peltier in chapter 8.
Pasternak's early plans to smuggle the typescript out of the USSR with the French students were not implemented. But between May 1956 and March 1957, Pasternak sent at least six typescripts outside the USSR. This book is the story of those typescripts.
CHAPTER 2D'Angelo and Feltrinelli
The story of how the first typescript of Doctor Zhivago left the Soviet Union has been fully clarified in, among others, d'Angelo (2006) and Mancosu (2013).
D'Angelo, a young Italian Communist, had begun working in the Italian section of Radio Moscow in March 1956, only one month after Khrushchev's "secret speech." In addition to his official job, he was doubling as a literary scout for a young Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli was one of the richest men in Italy and a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He had founded his publishing house in 1954. Upon d'Angelo's departure for the USSR, Feltrinelli charged him with the task of reporting on works from the Soviet Union that could be of interest. In late April 1956, d'Angelo read a bulletin at Radio Moscow announcing the imminent publication of a novel by Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago. He jotted down the following note in his notebook:
"Boris Pasternak (translator of Shakespeare). Very debated poet (impressionist). He has just finished writing "Doct. Zhivago," a novel in diary form which encompasses 3/4 of the century and ends with the second world war." (Sergio d'Angelo, notebook, Sergio d'Angelo Papers, HILA, Stanford)
D'Angelo immediately informed the publisher in Milan and was told to get in touch with Pasternak in order to obtain a typescript or the proofs of the book. On May 20, 1956, d'Angelo visited Pasternak and brought up the possibility of publication by Feltrinelli. Among his arguments was the consideration that Feltrinelli was a communist and thus there should be no ideological objections on the part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Pasternak gave d'Angelo a typescript of the novel and also requested that Feltrinelli, after publishing the Italian translation, should arrange for the translations into English and French. After one week, d'Angelo brought the typescript to West Berlin where he handed it to Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli spoke no Russian and back in Milan he had the future translator of the novel into Italian, Pietro Zveteremich, read the typescript in a seven-hour, non-stop session. Zveteremich expressed his enthusiastic opinion about the high literary value of the novel and, on June 13, 1956, Feltrinelli wrote to Pasternak offering a contract for the novel. Pasternak signed the contract on June 30 and sent it back to Feltrinelli. The contract gave Feltrinelli rights to publish the book in Italian and rights for translations into foreign languages.
The fascinating story of how the KGB came to know that Pasternak's novel had been smuggled abroad and the various attempts that followed to recover the typescript and to stop Feltrinelli from publishing are the subject of the first one hundred pages (chapter 1) of Mancosu (2013). Pasternak completed the novel toward the end of 1955 and immediately submitted it for publication in early 1956 to several Soviet publishers, including the journal Novy mir. He heard nothing for several months and on May 20, 1956, as already mentioned, he sent the typescript abroad through d'Angelo. On August 24, 1956, the KGB sent a three-page memo to the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) informing the CC that the typescript of Doctor Zhivago had been smuggled out of the country. On August 31, a memo by Dmitrii Shepilov, minister of foreign affairs, condemned Pasternak's novel as "a spiteful lampoon against the USSR." Shepilov's memo was accompanied by a long analysis of Doctor Zhivago by Dmitrii Polikarpov, director of the Department of Culture of the CC of the CPSU, who wrote: "Pasternak's novel is a malicious libel against our revolution and our entire life. It is not only an ideologically faulty work, but also an anti-Soviet book, which undoubtedly cannot be permitted to be printed." A few days after that, in early September, the editorial board members of Novy mir sent Pasternak a thirty-page analysis of Doctor Zhivago which unequivocally spelled out that in their opinion the novel could not be accepted and could not be salvaged even with modifications. The reader will have to keep in mind these facts, for later we will see that Pasternak was offered a contract for the publication of the novel by the State Publishing House (Goslitizdat).
Feltrinelli gave the typescript to Zveteremich, who began translating. As a consequence of the pressures exercised on him by the Italian Communist Party (who, in turn, had been pressured by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Soviet Writers' Union), Feltrinelli put a halt to the translation after a few months. In October he was planning to visit the Soviet Union hoping to get approval to publish the typescript in Italy, and had informed Collins Publishers of his plan. Then, after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in early November 1956, Feltrinelli wrote a confidential letter to Mark Bonham Carter of Collins Publishers saying that, contrary to what he had planned in mid-October, he was not going to Moscow anymore and that at the moment everything had to be put on hold so that he was still not in a position to transfer the rights for the English translation of Doctor Zhivago. A mention of this lost letter is found in a letter written by Marjorie Villiers of Collins-Harvill to Helen Wolff of Pantheon Press. The letter (published in its entirety in the appendix, document 10) is dated January 2, 1957, and has a handwritten postscript by Manya Harari, one of the future translators of the novel into English. Harari said:
P.S. The latest development is that we wrote again to Feltrinelli and he answered that in view of the general situation he was not going to Russia, and that, for the moment, he was doing nothing whatsoever about the book for fear of endangering the author. ( — This suggests of course that he is one of the dissident Italian communists.) But he asked that we should not mention his reply to anyone — so please don't know about it if you write to him.
Yours Manya Harari (Kurt and Helen Wolff Papers at Yale, YCGL MSS 16, box 14, folder 467, "Harvill Press Ltd/1957–1961," folder 1)
In his reply to Feltrinelli's letter, Mark Bonham Carter, on December 2, 1956, wrote:
Dear Feltrinelli,
Many thanks for your letter which allows me to understand the position [sic]. There is only one further question to which I would like an answer: Is there any other way the translation rights in this book might be sold in this country by someone other than yourself, or direct by the Soviet authorities?
Naturally I will regard your letter as confidential.
Yours sincerely,
Mark Bonham Carter (AGFE, busta 2, fascicolo 3)
Feltrinelli replied on January 14 but his letter is not found in the archives. Bonham Carter wrote back on January 16, 1957:
Dear Mr. Feltrinelli,
Many thanks for your letter of the 14th of January. I am glad for your assurance that you think there is no possibility of the Pasternak book being sold through other channels, and I look forward to hearing from you directly [when] you have any news about it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zhivago's Secret Journey by Paolo Mancosu. Copyright © 2016 Paolo Mancosu. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
preface,acknowledgments,
abbreviations and archives,
01 Early Smugglings,
02 D'Angelo and Feltrinelli,
03 The Polish Harbinger,
04 Berlin, Katkov, and Collins Publishers,
05 Doctor Zhivago Arrives in Oxford,
06 The Novel Makes the Rounds,
07 November 1956: The Hungarian Watershed,
08 Hélène Peltier,
09 Pasternak's Ruse,
10 Pasternak, Soca, and Peltier,
11 Katkov and Peltier,
12 Gallimard and de Proyart,
13 Publication in Poland, Italy, France, England, and the United States,
14 The Mouton Edition of the Russian Text,
15 The CIA, MI6, and the Origin of the Microfilm Received by the CIA,
16 A Comparative Analysis of the Typescripts with the Mouton Edition,
17 The Russian Text and the BBC Broadcasting,
18 Whodunnit?,
bibliography,
about the author,
index,
Illustration Gallery,