The Zhivago affair : the Kremlin, the CIA, and the battle over a forbidden book
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- ISBN: 9781467683722
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Physical Description
electronic
1 audio media player (9 3/4 min.) : digital ; 3 3/8 x 21/8 in.
Content descriptions
General Note: | Requires AAA battery and headphones for playback. GMD: playaway. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Prologue: This is Doctor Zhivago : may it make its way around the world -- The roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off -- Pasternak, without realizing it, entered the personal life of Stalin -- I have arranged to meet you in a novel -- You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel? -- Until it is finished, I am a fantastically, manically unfree man -- Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture -- If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well I must say we have a different view of it -- We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain -- We'll do it black -- He also looks the genius : raw nerves, misfortune, fatality -- There would be no mercy, that was clear -- Pasternak's name spells war -- I am caught like a beast at bay -- A college weekend with Russians -- An unbearably blue sky -- It's too late for me to express regret that the book wasn't published -- Afterword. |
Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Simon Vance. |
Additional Information
Zhivago Affair : The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
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Summary
Zhivago Affair : The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country's most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak's much anticipated first novel, entrusted to him with these words from the author: "This is "Doctor Zhivago." May it make its way around the world."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.