Soviet spite for Dr Zhivago repeated by today’s tyrants

It's just over 60 years since Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago, and got it smuggled to the West. My mother — Pasternak’s sister — received a faint carbon copy typed out by a devoted friend. That was my first encounter with Yuri Zhivago. I was deeply excited and moved by his story then, and now I have achieved my ambition to translate it.

It’s lyrical, musical, evocative — truly a novel written by a poet. But it doesn’t shrink from describing harsh and ugly events. Pasternak realised that he would be pilloried if it was ever printed, and when the book was half-complete he wrote to my mother, “Publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to say fatal, dangers.”

Why? Because he put his own individual slant on historical events: the Great War, the two revolutions of 1917, the civil war that followed them, the social breakdown of the early years of Communism. He interpreted everything in the light of his own wonder at the human spirit, at nature and life, without a whisper of official orthodoxy anywhere in the book.

Pasternak knew what the consequences would be when he arranged to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of Russia. But things turned out worse than he expected. When in 1958 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, it triggered a tornado of official hatred and vilification. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev described Pasternak as “worse than a pig”. Mass protests were organised, at which ordinary citizens denounced him as a fascist traitor, demanding his arrest, exile or worse. No one there had ever seen the novel.

After being dragged through this political mincing machine, my uncle was crushed and broken, and died soon afterwards. The autopsy showed deposits of secondary cancer in his heart — a very rare condition. He had died of a broken heart.

But the result of the Soviet authorities’ persecution was to turn the book into an instant sensation. Its publication worldwide, its critical success, the Nobel Prize, all became a slap in the face for the Soviet regime. What an irony! If the government had ignored the novel — if instead of proscribing it, it had allowed it to appear in Russia, in a modest way, perhaps with some cosmetic changes, in a small print run — it could never have made such a stir. Pasternak might not have got the Nobel prize. The Soviet onslaught on the novel and its author must have influenced the prize committee in Pasternak’s favour.

What they had forgotten is that persecution creates martyrs, and martyrs are news — bad news for governments that care about their international standing. Yet the same mistakes go on being repeated — in our day, the attempted silencing of Sergei Skripal, the all too effective silencing of Jamal Khashoggi, have cost their governments dear. It seems a difficult lesson to learn.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s translation of Doctor Zhivago is published by The Folio Society