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    The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
    The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
    The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

    Written by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country#8217;s most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak#8217;s much anticipated first novel, entrusted to him with these words from the author: #8220;This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.#8221;Pasternak knew his novel would never be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an assault on the 1917 Revolution, so he allowed it to be published in translation all over the world. But in 1958, the CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published Doctor Zhivago in Russian and smuggled it into the Soviet Union where it was snapped up on the black market and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak, whose funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of readers who stayed for hours in defiance of the watching KGB, launched the great Soviet tradition of the writer-dissident. With sole access to otherwise classified CIA files, the authors give us an irresistible portrait of the charming and passionate Pasternak and a twisting Cold War thriller that takes us back to a time when literature had power to shape the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 17, 2014
    ISBN9781622314379
    The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

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    Reviews for The Zhivago Affair

    4.5/5

    6 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Best book I have read this year. An amazing story of how Pasternak's masterpiece was smuggled out of the Soviet Union by an Italian communist to be published in Italy. Adding to the layers of intrigue is how the CIA sponsored editions to be smuggled back into the Soviet Union where Dr. Zhivago was a source of controversy from its publication in 1958 into the post-Cold War era. Once highly regarded as a poet, Pasternak was harassed and persecuted by the Soviet government following the publication of this - his only novel. Like a novel itself, Finn delivers a quality work that captures the drama of Cold War era tensions against the backdrop of the literary landscape . If you have any interest at all in Russian history and literature, move this to the top of your reading list.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An excellent non-fiction book describing the struggles to smuggle Pasternak's masterpiece out of the Soviet Union and the problems the author faced as a consequence.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating and sometimes gripping read, but it was also oddly structured and not particularly well-written. Worth your time if you have an interest in Doctor Zhivago in particular or the Cold War in general, but not a must-read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book to learn about the explicit/implicit means of censorship on both sides of the iron curtain. Also a very humorous book at times, which I really appreciated. VERY well written. Never a boring part, even when it got dry and technical in its recount of history. I found myself enjoying the most dense passages in a way I haven't in any book I've read all year. Very highly recommend.
    • 4/5
      Dr. Zhivago is one of my husbands favorite movies, a very unusual pick for him because he usually likes ironic comedies. I remember reading this in school but had no idea of the history behind the novel nor of the man who wrote it.This is a non fiction book that reads in may ways as a thriller. The fate of many of the writers under Stalin was very oppressive, although Russians had a great love of poetry, if that which was written was thought not to be in the service of Soviet politics their fates were set. The author writes, "After 1917, nearly 1500 writers in the Soviet Union were executed or died in labor camps for various alleged infractions." Pasternak himself, somehow escaped this fate. In wanting to leave a legacy, he began writing Zhivago, a semi autobiographical novel, that would take him over ten years. In the end it was deemed by the Soviet Union, unpublishable so it was given to an Italian publisher to publish and translate and circulate throughout foreign coup tries. It would become a weapon used by the CIA, propaganda for a warning about the Cold War. There are many parts to this story and I felt that the authors did an outstanding job, following them all and keeping the book moving fluidly throughout. His messy home life is examined as is his writing career. One item I marked as amusing was how he and Nabokov felt about each other, they w3re less than impressed by the writing of the other.A book well worth reading and one I will now pass on to my husband.ARC from publisher.
    • 3/5
      "Books are different from all other propaganda media," wrote the CIA chief of covert action, "primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium...that is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers -- but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda."This is the true story of how the CIA used the novel Dr. Zhivago as a weapon in the cold-war fight for the hearts and minds of Russian citizens. In fact, the CIA had a "book program" which smuggled hundreds of titles into eastern bloc countries. So, beyond all the politics, beyond the biography of Boris Pasternak, this book is also a testament to the power of literature.The book is well written, almost reading like a spy novel at times. We see what life was like in Stalinist Russia and how important the Cold War was to the U.S. We see the life of Boris Pasternak, including the open affair he carried on and the pressure placed on him to renounce the Nobel Prize for Literature.