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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
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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.)
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