IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON OF May 13, 1956, Alexander Fadeyev, agitated and drunk at his dacha, stripped naked and, with a Nagant revolver, shot himself through the heart. His body was found by his eleven-year-old son, Mischa. On the nightstand was a suicide note, in which Fadeyev raged about the treatment of literature by “the self-confident, ignorant leadership of the Party.” The best writers, he wrote, had been “physically exterminated” and literature had been “debased, persecuted and destroyed.” He lashed out at the “ignoramuses” in the Khrushchev regime, from whom he expected “worse than from the satrap Stalin.” “My life as a writer loses all meaning, and I leave this life with great joy, seeing it as a deliverance from this foul existence where meanness, lies and slander rain down on you,” he wrote.1 The KGB were soon on the scene and sealed off the office. The suicide note was filed away, its contents kept secret, and the official reasons given for his death was the combination of a nervous disorder and alcohol.
The KGB had good reason for suppressing Fadeyev’s jeremiad. Of all the Soviet Union’s writers, he was the most fervent Party loyalist. For the previous two decades he had been the figurehead of Soviet literature, the general secretary of the Writers’ Union, who had headed the delegations at the conference at the Waldorf in New York in 1949 and the Paris Peace Congress the following year. He never wavered from the Party line. When Dwight Macdonald asked him about the disappearance of writers at the Waldorf, he claimed they were alive and well, when he knew they were not. When Howard Fast asked him about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, he claimed there was no such thing, despite having personally provided lists of Jewish writers to the authorities. Domestically, while he did try to protect some writers he was more than happy to crack the ideological whip, often with devastating consequences for those receiving the lash.2 During the purges he signed letters that led to the arrest of his fellow writers, knowing they would be sent to the gulag or worse.3 He sold his soul to Stalin—and it came at a price.
The preceding February, Fadeyev had been shaken to the core by Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. For Fadeyev, the condemnation of Stalinism was a disaster. He had been faithful, but he had not been blind. He knew what had happened under Stalin. He had blood on his hands. He soon found himself being pushed to the margins under the new regime and began to drink heavily and behave erratically. It is not clear whether it was guilt or fear that prompted him to pull the trigger.
Fadeyev’s body was laid out in the Hall of Columns, just as Stalin’s had been. Among the guard of honor was Boris Pasternak, a poet who had steadfastly refused to make the same bargain as Fadeyev. Even at the height of the purges, Pasternak had refused to inform on friends and did what he could to protect his fellow writers. It was perhaps only his international reputation that spared him from being sent to the camps or executed. On many occasions Fadeyev had publicly upbraided and bullied Pasternak, deriding his “political neutrality,” his “individualism,” and his “formalist tricks.”4 But in private Fadeyev revered Pasternak’s poetry and he even made efforts to try to protect him. They had neighboring dachas at the writers’ community at Peredelkino and had retained a strange kind of friendship. Looking at Fadeyev’s corpse, Pasternak said that, in taking his own life, “Alexander Alexandrovich had rehabilitated himself.”5
It was a time for rehabilitation in Russia. The postwar purges—led by Second Secretary Andrei Zhdanov—had swiftly crushed any expectation that the end of the war would bring a new era of cultural liberalization. That had to wait until the old man was dead. Pasternak had not been denounced by Zhdanov but being well-known and admired in the West, and having spent much of the war translating Shakespeare, he knew he would be a target, too. Despite his secret passion for Pasternak’s work, Fadeyev subjected him to public harangues, and a new edition of his poetry was banned in 1947. The publisher eventually had to destroy the entire run.6 In the autumn of 1949 the secret police did to Pasternak what they had done to Akhmatova: they took a hostage. Pasternak’s lover, Olga Ivinskaya, was arrested and interrogated. She was told that Pasternak, whose parents had moved to Oxford at the end of their lives, was an English spy. Less fantastically, they asked questions about Pasternak’s new literary project, a novel he was working on.7 The MGB, as the security services were known between 1946 and 1953, were interested in Doctor Zhivago from its earliest drafts. Ivinskaya was then sent to a camp and not released until Stalin’s death in 1953.
UNDER KHRUSHCHEV, Soviet culture underwent the period of reform and cultural liberalization known as the Thaw, but Pasternak was skeptical about how much had substantively changed. He believed Khrushchev looked like a pig and behaved like one, too. In the summer of 1956 he wrote a poem—which he recited only among trusted friends—in which he claimed Stalin’s cult of personality had been replaced by “nothing but porcine snouts” and that people were driven to “shoot themselves from drunkenness because they cannot stand it anymore.”8 Khrushchev was, to the poet’s mind, a vulgarian who cared for culture only when it could be politically exploited. Pasternak’s judgment was borne out years later when, sensing that the ideological tide was turning, Khrushchev derided modern art displayed at the Manege Gallery in Moscow. He asked one artist if he was “a pederast or a normal person” and told another that he deserved to have his trousers taken down and be dumped in a pile of nettles. The art itself he pronounced to be “dog shit.”
Art and literature that attacked Stalin was seen as politically expedient by Khrushchev and his allies and, as a result, they permitted the circulation of work that would have been unthinkable in previous decades. But there remained limits on work that criticized the current regime, or Communism more generally. There was a new line drawn, and Doctor Zhivago was on the wrong side of it.
By the time of Khrushchev’s speech, Pasternak had privately circulated excerpts of the manuscript of his novel and conducted readings for his friends at his dacha. In April 1954, the journal Znama had published some poems that were to be part of the last section of Doctor Zhivago, and these were accompanied by a note about the plot of the forthcoming novel. Still, Pasternak did not believe the government would allow him to publish it when it was done. “You mark my words,” he told Ivinskaya, “they will not publish this novel for anything in the world. I don’t believe they will ever publish it. I have come to the conclusion that I should pass it around to be read by all and sundry.”9
Pasternak was right. Novy Mir, the most liberal of the literary journals in Moscow, repeatedly rejected his efforts to publish parts of the novel. After all, Doctor Zhivago did not just criticize Stalinism, it appeared to undermine the whole revolutionary project. It was a grand, sweeping novel, redolent of the great works of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The hero, Yuri Zhivago, is a doctor and poet who is torn between his love for two women and between his duty to society and his duty to his art. While Zhivago is initially enthused by the possibilities of the revolution, he becomes disenchanted with the way Communism strips out the spiritual and the poetical from life. He seeks a retreat from society that will allow him the privacy to write what he wants. What made this premise even more intolerable for the authorities was that the novel ends before the Stalinist purges begin—that is, before the period when criticism of official policy was accepted. Doctor Zhivago was a work of heresy and Pasternak knew it.
In May 1956, Pasternak gave the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to Sergio D’Angelo, a young Italian, who had taken the train out to Peredelkino hoping to bump into the poet. D’Angelo’s primary job was in the Italian section of Radio Moscow, the Soviet Union’s official international broadcaster, but he had a sideline as a literary scout for the Italian Communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. It had taken little more than a few hours of conversation with D’Angelo for Pasternak to hand over a book he knew might land him in jail or worse. “You are now invited to attend my execution,” he told the Italian as he left.10 He had made his decision on what seemed like the spur of the moment, but he knew it was a choice that would carry serious consequences. He could not have anticipated how seismic those consequences would be.
THE KGB KNEW that Doctor Zhivago was a problem. They had informers who had attended some of Pasternak’s private readings and it was clear this novel was not going to follow the Party line. The bad news for the secret police was that D’Angelo had made it out of the Soviet Union without being searched and had passed the manuscript to Feltrinelli in Berlin. Feltrinelli had then used a trusted courier to get a contract directly into the hands of Pasternak. The good news, though, was that Feltrinelli was a Communist and so in theory could be leaned upon by the Soviet authorities.
In August, KGB chairman Ivan Serov delivered a report to the Politburo in which he revealed that Pasternak had given permission for Feltrinelli to make publishing deals with firms in Britain and France. Serov also quoted from letters that the KGB had intercepted, in which Pasternak said he would be torn “limb from limb” for sending his book into the West. It was clear that he was not as naive as some of his defenders claimed. He knew he was in trouble and was determined to face it down.11
One option for the Soviet authorities was to publish the book in the Soviet Union before it was published in the West, but a report by the Central Committee’s cultural department effectively killed off that idea. The book, the report claimed, was impossible to publish because of the way it undermined the revolution. Instead, the Committee determined that Feltrinelli should be squeezed and that they should try to persuade Pasternak to change course. The head of the culture department, Dmitri Polikarpov, told Ivinskaya that the novel could be published in the Soviet Union but only once it had been thoroughly edited. Pasternak was unimpressed by this proposition. Anticipating what was coming, he asked a French friend, Hélène Peltier, to smuggle out a note for Feltrinelli, which read: “If ever you receive a letter other than in French, you must absolutely not do what is requested of you—the only valid letters shall be those written in French.”12
The Kremlin ordered the Italian Communist Party to get the manuscript back, and Feltrinelli agreed to put his publication plans on hold.13 Yet just as they appeared to have contained the problem, new complications arose. In October, students marched on the parliament in Budapest, protesting the political repression of the Soviet-backed Communist government. Demonstrators pulled down a statue of Stalin and tried to gain access to the Radio Budapest building to broadcast their demands to the nation. Agents of the Hungarian secret police opened fire on the crowd. The situation swiftly escalated, and soon the whole country was gripped by revolt. The Hungarian rebels hoped for protection from the Western powers, but when the Russian tanks rolled in at the beginning of November, nobody came to their aid. Tens of thousands of Hungarians were thrown in jail and hundreds were executed. Feltrinelli, like many European Communists, was horrified at the brutality with which the Soviet Union cracked down on the revolution, and as a result was determined not to be pushed around and to publish Doctor Zhivago.
On the other end, Pasternak was pressured into writing telegrams to Feltrinelli asking that he return the manuscript but as they were in Italian and Russian, the publisher knew they did not reflect the author’s true intentions. (Pasternak, meanwhile, used trusted intermediaries to transmit his true wishes.) Alexei Surkov, a poet and Party loyalist, traveled to Milan to confront Feltrinelli, brandishing one of these telegrams. When that got him nowhere, he gave a press conference in which he lamented that Doctor Zhivago would become the first work of Russian literature to be initially published abroad since Boris Pilnyak’s Mahogany in Germany in 1929. The analogy masked a threat: Pilnyak had been a neighbor of Pasternak’s at Peredelkino in the 1930s, when the fallout from the foreign publication of Mahogany had made him a target for the regime. Pasternak had been visiting with Pilnyak when he was arrested in 1937. Found guilty of being a Japanese spy and of plotting to assassinate Stalin, he was executed with a bullet to the back of the neck.14
But the KGB’s efforts were in vain. The book was launched at the Hotel Continental in Milan on November 22, 1957. The first edition of six thousand copies sold out on the first day, and there were multiple reprints. In June it was published in France, in September in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in October in Germany. In the United States it topped the best seller list from November 1958 to May 1959. It seemed like the only country in which this Russian masterpiece was not being read was Russia. The CIA decided to do something about that.
A SOVIET TOURIST visiting the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels might have decided that The Thinker, Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, was enough of a temptation to lure them into the Vatican pavilion, that opium den for the spiritually needy masses. While taking in Rodin’s masterpiece, which was on loan from the Louvre, the Soviet visitor might have heard an unexpected Russian voice. This was Irina Posnova, a Ukrainian exile and the daughter of an Orthodox theologian, who invited visitors behind a curtain into a concealed library. There Posnova, possibly accompanied by a Russian priest going by the name of Father Pierre, revealed her illegal stash: Russian editions of religious texts either banned or difficult to get hold of in the Soviet Union. The hope was that the recipient of this gift might take the word of God back into the atheist darkness of the Soviet Union.
Such was the case for the first eight months of the fair’s run. For those who arrived in September, though, there was something more tantalizing on offer in the Vatican’s secret library: a Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago. Of those visitors who accepted the gift, some tore off the blue covers and dumped them in the trash to better secrete the pages in their luggage for their return home. Thanks to a combination of the CIA, the Dutch intelligence services, and the hospitality of the pope, Pasternak’s novel was returning to Russia.
The distribution of Doctor Zhivago was a propaganda coup for the United States. Expo 58 was the first World’s Fair hosted in the Cold War era and therefore an opportunity to make a powerful ideological statement. The Soviet Union had seized the opportunity by spending more than $50 million to construct a vast pavilion to exhibit their technological prowess. Displayed before the imposing gaze of a giant statue of Lenin was a replica of Sputnik-1, which the previous year had become the first satellite to be launched into Earth’s orbit. This unexpected success had precipitated a crisis in the United States, with fears that beyond the launching pad the Soviet Union was leaving the West behind. A year before the launch of Sputnik-1, Khrushchev had declared, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” With Sputnik, that prediction had suddenly seemed much less far-fetched. And if the Soviet Union could develop the technology to get into space quicker than the United States, did that mean they were also making military advances? Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic majority leader, declared it a worse defeat than Pearl Harbor. This was not just political point scoring; the rocket that delivered Sputnik was an ICBM and the implication was that if the Soviets could launch a rocket into space, they would have little trouble launching one at the United States.15 Anxieties about a “missile gap” prompted renewed investment in education, research, and the military even if President Eisenhower knew that Soviet missile capacity was not what official Soviet sources claimed. Secret overflights of high-altitude U-2 aircraft, equipped with powerful cameras, showed that when it came to missile numbers, Khrushchev was bluffing. Nevertheless, in launching Sputnik, the Soviet Union had secured an important Cold War victory. To rub it in, at the fair the Soviets also displayed a replica of Sputnik-2, the second satellite to make it into orbit and the first to carry a living creature (Laika the dog).
Anything that could be done to undermine Soviet triumphalism in Brussels was seized upon by the CIA. They had long been using books as weapons in a variety of countries, but the Zhivago operation, code-named AEDINOSAUR, was their most ambitious yet. Over the previous decade the CIA had funded a number of different schemes for getting printed matter beyond the Iron Curtain. From 1952 to 1957, millions of balloons were launched from three sites in West Germany, carrying propaganda leaflets into Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland (the Czechoslovak air force was ordered to shoot these balloons down). By 1956 the strategy shifted to direct mailing of pamphlets and books to strategically selected addresses in Warsaw Pact countries. This assumption that books had the capacity to change people in ways that other methods could not was unsurprising in this generation of college-educated Americans: it underpinned the liberal arts ethos that was fundamental to the way they had been educated. Books were inspirational, revelatory, and as such, the CIA found them “the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.”16 As a result, the CIA also secretly subsidized publishers who brought out banned books in their original languages, presuming some of these would find their way into the Eastern bloc. One such publisher, Bedford Publishing Company, had a budget that grew from an initial $10,000 in 1956 to more than $1 million by the late sixties.17 The goal of the program was to institute Western values through “psychology, literature, the theater and the visual arts” rather than “directly antagonizing materials.”18 As such, the type of books sent across the Iron Curtain were not just politically charged, like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, but also seemingly apolitical works, like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory.
It is not clear where and when it happened, but at some point, a British spy managed to laboriously photograph, page by page, the Russian manuscript of Doctor Zhivago and send it to CIA headquarters at Langley in January 1958. The agency realized it had something special. John Maury, the head of the Soviet Russia division, wrote to Frank Wisner, describing the novel as “the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death.”19 Maury was an astute reader; the novel did not call for an uprising against the Kremlin, or enumerate the historical crimes of the Soviet Union, but it did ignore pretty much every single edict issued by the Communist Party as to the purpose of literature and how it should be made.
Wisner and the CIA were invested in the idea that literature that did not look like propaganda was much more effective at winning hearts and minds than polemical material—this had been their whole rationale for backing the non-Communist left and magazines like Encounter. It was easy for the Soviet authorities to dismiss a novel by someone like Koestler as propaganda. But Pasternak was different. He was prepared to criticize the regime, but his criticism was difficult to dismiss because it grew out of a self-evident love for both Russia and literature. Doctor Zhivago was not written as propaganda or out of ideological fervor, but nevertheless it was banned by Moscow, and this suited the CIA’s needs perfectly. The lead character, Zhivago, a doctor and a poet, refuses to engage with politics and it was this, Maury argued, that was “fundamental.” “This book has great propaganda value,” read a CIA memo, “not only for its thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication: we have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”20
The CIA developed a two-pronged plan of attack. First, they would do everything they could to promote Doctor Zhivago in the West and, from the beginning, this involved a plan to get the attention of the Nobel Prize committee in Sweden.21 The second prong was getting Russian-language copies of the novel into the Soviet Union. The CIA explored different ways of getting the book published in the States but changed plan when they heard that an anti-Communist Dutch publisher, Mouton, was in negotiations with Feltrinelli over a Russian-language edition. The CIA asked for Dutch intelligence to figure out if Mouton might be able to produce an early run for their exclusive use, but on the condition that their role in it remain secret. Dutch agents used an intermediary, a retired army officer, to approach Mouton with a deal: he needed one thousand copies by early September, he could provide page proofs, and the whole process had to be handled with the utmost discretion. In return they would be paid handsomely and in cash. (One of the Mouton editors later claimed the army officer told them that if they did not do the deal, he would offer the proofs to a rival publisher).22 Mouton agreed and, once this advance run was complete, the one thousand copies were distributed to CIA stations around Europe, with the largest package being sent to Brussels for the Expo.23 From there, copies of the novel found their way back into the Soviet Union. One even made it into the hands of Pasternak himself, who was disappointed to find it full of errors, based as it was on an earlier typescript. However, he soon had more pressing problems to worry about.
IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1958 rumors began to circulate that Pasternak was the favorite to win the Nobel Prize. The Soviet Union had long pressed the case of Mikhail Sholokhov, whose And Quiet Flows the Don was considered the greatest Russian novel since the revolution, but, to their dismay, he did not even make the shortlist. Pasternak’s inclusion on that list (along with Karen Blixen and Alberto Moravia) caused the Kremlin to consider its response should he win. Once again, the suggestion that an adapted version of the novel should be published was rejected. The Soviet Embassy in Stockholm was ordered to communicate to the Swedish intellectual community that selecting Pasternak would constitute “an unfriendly act.”24
On the afternoon of October 23, Pasternak took his usual walk in the surrounding countryside, only to be confronted by foreign journalists seeking his reaction to winning the Nobel Prize (the Moscow correspondents of the major American and European outlets had rushed off to Peredelkino as soon as they heard the news of his win). He had little to say but was obviously delighted and returned to his dacha to celebrate. The following day, the novelist Konstantin Fedin was instructed to visit Pasternak and urge him to reject the prize. Pasternak refused. There were two days of official silence on the matter before the backlash began.25
Pasternak was vilified in the press for his “shameful, unpatriotic attitude.”26 The rejection letter he had received from Novy Mir after seeking to publish an excerpt of Doctor Zhivago with them was published in a prominent literary journal. He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, which meant the denial of various benefits, including a pension. The KGB placed him under ostentatious surveillance.
Reeling, Pasternak contemplated suicide and suggested that Ivinskaya join him in taking an overdose of Nembutal.27 She managed to talk him out of it. With the ferocity of the attacks on him intensifying, Pasternak drove into Moscow and sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy renouncing the prize. If he hoped this would defuse the crisis, he could not have been more wrong, as his change of mind was transparently due to the pressure to which he had been subjected by the Kremlin. Not only had the Soviet Union refused to publish Doctor Zhivago; now it was forcing its author to reject the highest literary honor. Newspapers around the world carried protests by writers and intellectuals at Pasternak’s treatment. Ernest Hemingway offered him a place to stay. Nehru interceded directly with Khrushchev. Pasternak’s rejection of the prize did nothing to abate the campaign against him—if anything, it intensified it. One polemic insisted Pasternak should be kicked out of the country. Fearing exile, he agreed to write a letter appealing directly to Khrushchev. He also put his name to an open letter, published in Pravda, in which he claimed he had rejected the Nobel Prize because of the way it was being politically exploited in the West.
The Zhivago affair had, of course, been exploited in the West, but the heavy-handed approach of the Soviet authorities had made such exploitation easier. Khrushchev had sought to convince the world that he was more politically and culturally liberal, that the age of Stalinist repression was an aberration. The treatment of Pasternak, though, coming hard on the heels of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, was a scandal that carried ugly echoes of the 1930s and the suppression of many of the best writers of Pasternak’s generation. The toll it took on Pasternak was considerable, and while the international scandal offered him protection from imprisonment, he was effectively placed in internal exile. He continued to write and receive visitors in his dacha but, suffering from lung cancer, he became weaker by the day. One of his correspondents at this time was Stephen Spender, the two poets exchanging letters about the poetry they admired.28 Pasternak died on the evening of May 30, 1960, surrounded by his family.
IT BEGAN WITH A SMALL HANDWRITTEN NOTE stuck up by the ticket counter at Moscow’s Kiev station. “At four o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, June 2,” it read, “the last leave-taking of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the greatest poet of present day Russia, will be held.”29 The location was carefully chosen: trains for Peredelkino departed from Kiev station. Pasternak’s death on May 30, 1960, had been met with calculated silence by the official organs of the government and the Communist Party. Only Literatura i Zhizn (Literature and Life) carried a perfunctory announcement from the board of the Literary Fund on June 1, which was reprinted by the more prestigious Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) the following day—that of the funeral—and only then at the very bottom of the back page.
Earlier in May, Khrushchev had succeeded in publicly embarrassing Eisenhower, signaling the end of a period of détente between the two superpowers. On May 1, an American U-2 spy plane, photographing Russian missile launch sites from high altitude, had been shot down over the Soviet Union. The CIA had assured Eisenhower that a self-destruct device would have obliterated any evidence of spy-camera equipment and that the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had no chance of surviving a crash from such high altitude. As a consequence, Eisenhower agreed to the use of a CIA-concocted cover story: NASA released a statement saying one of their weather research planes had gone missing over northern Turkey. Khrushchev set his trap, claiming that this was no weather research plane but actually one used for spying. He withheld one crucial bit of information: Powers was alive. When the Americans stuck to their story, assuming the Russians had no proof, Khrushchev played his hand, disclosing that not only had Powers survived but that he had confessed to the true purpose of his mission. Incriminating photographic equipment had also survived the crash. Outmaneuvered, Eisenhower privately considered resigning. The Americans were due to meet with the Russians, British, and French at the Four Powers Summit on May 15, a meeting planned as a stepping-stone toward ending the Cold War. Now it promised to be stage for Soviet crowing. Khrushchev did not disappoint: he demanded an apology from Eisenhower and when it did not come, the meeting collapsed and with it hopes of a truce in the Cold War.
The U-2 incident had been a victory for the hard-liners in the Kremlin. They had exposed the American president lying about an illegal spying program not only to his own people but to the rest of the world, too. Such was the geopolitical climate when Pasternak died. The last thing the Kremlin needed was an event like Pasternak’s funeral turning into a rallying point for internal dissent and a new round of international condemnation. For that reason, the news of Pasternak’s death was deliberately suppressed, with all the major newspapers ignoring it. The strategy might have worked, too, had Pasternak not meant so much to so many.
Moscow’s network of writers, intellectuals, and students sprang into action, and more notices like the one posted at Kiev station began to appear around the city, replaced as soon as the police tore them down. Taking another approach, the Kremlin used their informants in Moscow cultural circles to put it about that the secret police would be present at the funeral and that they would photograph all mourners. Members of the Union of Soviet Writers were given unofficial warnings that the funeral should be avoided. As a result, Konstantin Fedin, the newly appointed chairman of the union, who had been a good friend and neighbor to Pasternak, claimed to be ill and did not attend. But still, the mourners came, and by the hundreds.
Among them was Priscilla Johnson, a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a large newspaper syndicate.30 “From the moment I set foot on the suburban platform of Moscow’s Kiev Station just after one o’clock on the afternoon of June 2, I sensed that there were people around me who were determined to be present at his funeral,” she wrote. “The first mourners I saw were an elderly man and two elderly women who huddled together and stared up at a blackboard where arrivals and departures of the suburban trains were scrawled in chalk. I knew them by their black clothes and by the sprigs of lilac and tulip they held in their hands.” Aboard the train Johnson spotted familiar venerable faces from Moscow’s cultural scene as well as students and young poets coming to pay their respects to the master.
On arrival, the crowd made their way through the countryside to Pasternak’s dacha. Branches of pine trees had been cut and arranged on the lawn to protect the grass from the crowd. Waiting patiently under the blooming lilac trees, the mourners took their turn to enter the house and pay their respects. According to Alexander Gladkov, who wrote a memoir about his friendship with Pasternak, it was not hard to spot “the alien element” in the midst of this group: the secret policemen went about their work, logging names, taking pictures, listening in on conversations.31 Inside the dacha, the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter played on Pasternak’s old upright, signaling the beginning of the funeral procession with Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” The officials present wanted Pasternak’s body placed in a blue van parked out front so they could drive it up the hill to the burial plot. But while their instructions were to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible, the pallbearers, and the crowd around them, had other ideas. “As the pallbearers set a fast pace down the roadway and the crowd of about a thousand struggled to keep up, a cloud of dust swirled over the open coffin and a broiling, late afternoon sun beat down,” Johnson wrote. “At moments, in the crowd, I glimpsed Pasternak’s body in profile; the rest of the time, only a lock of white hair was visible.”32
Graveside, Pasternak’s old friend Valentin Asmus, a short, white-haired philosophy professor, gave a speech. Then, despite the best efforts of the literary fund officials to wrap things up, a young actor from the Moscow Art Theater started to recite Pasternak’s “Hamlet.” This was a banned poem, appearing as it did among the collection of poems gathered at the end of Doctor Zhivago, yet, according to Johnson “a thousand pairs of lips moved in silent unison.”33 The lid was placed on the coffin and it was lowered into the grave. The crowd was encouraged to disperse, but around fifty mourners remained graveside, taking turns to recite poems. The secret policemen took notes but did not break up the group.
PASTERNAK’S FUNERAL HAD BECOME THE FOCUS of a modest kind of defiance, a civilized but determined protest. Even attending the funeral had demanded courage, but there was clearly resolution to honor Pasternak, even if it meant personal risk. “Anxious to have a complete story of Pasternak’s burial reach the outside world, yet not daring to speak more than a few words to a Western journalist,” Johnson wrote, “Russians of all ages appeared again and again at my side to whisper the name of a speaker, the title of a poem being recited, or a bit of information about the man who was being buried.”34
Among this crowd of mourners was one devotee who had a more ambitious plan of defiance. He had already taken the first steps in following Pasternak’s example, by having his work smuggled out to be published abroad, disguising his identity by using the pseudonym Abram Tertz. The KGB were already on the case and their agents, mingled with the crowd, were on the alert for any rumors about the identity of this mysterious new writer. Yet Tertz was hiding in plain sight: he was the bearded man solemnly carrying Pasternak’s coffin lid. It was a symbolic gesture that almost everyone there that day could only appreciate in retrospect. Andrei Sinyavsky, for that was his name, was ready to take up Pasternak’s mantle.