Peter CostelloIn 1956 Boris Pasternak, who had a recognised place in modern Russian literature as a poet, but was not otherwise widely known, passed to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Marxist publisher in Milan, the manuscript of a novel on which he had been working for many years, and which it had proved impossible to publish within the Soviet Union.
The Soviet government tried to put pressure on the publisher and failed and the novel was published to universal acclaim in 1958. Then the CIA printed a clandestine Russian language version which was published illegally with the Soviet Union. The poet became the victim of the power struggle between the two empires.
Drawing on formerly secret files, this is a fascinating account of how artists and writers are endlessly manipulated for political gain.
The CIA, as we now know, had its hand in many cultural pies.
The novelist Peter Matthiessen who died recently revealed that when he founded The Paris Review he was a CIA agent. Encounter, also a much admired magazine of culture, was also sustained by CIA money. Even poetry it seems cannot escape the baleful taint of power politics.
I suspect that many people know the novel only through its film version – fair enough, but the book itself remains an ambiguous masterpiece, very much a poet’s vision, the turmoil of war shot through with elements of the eternal Russian sensibility to beauty and religion.