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Also by Peter Finn:

The Zhivago Affair, June 2014
Hardcover / e-Book

Also by Petra Couvée:

The Zhivago Affair, June 2014
Hardcover / e-Book

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR
By: Peter Finn, Petra Couvée

The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book

Pantheon
June 2014
On Sale: June 17, 2014
368 pages
ISBN: 0307908003
EAN: 9780307908001
Kindle: B00HKVE1K2
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Thriller Political

Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.

In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world.

From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union.

In The Zhivago Affair, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring us intimately close to this charming, passionate, and complex artist. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world.

(With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Media Buzz

Diane Rehm Show - NPR - June 17, 2014
CBS This Morning - April 7, 2014