Open Password – Friday April 1, 2022
#1049
Erdmute Lapp – Doctor Zivago – Boris Pasternak – Film adaptation – Government of the Soviet Union – October Revolution – Civil War years – Lev Tolstoy – Fyodor Dostoevsky – University of Hamburg – Indiana University – DAAD – Feltrinelli Editore – University of Michigan Press – Nokolai Gorbacev – Perestroika – Verlag Eksmo – Sven Richard Berg – Exeter University Library – University of the South Urals – Gasan Gusejnov – Moscow School of Economics – Embedded Librarian – Peredelkino – Peter Finn – Petra Couvée – The Zivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book – Pantheon Book – Sergio D’Angelo – Radio Moscow – KPI – Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – Accusation of Treason – Boris Pilnjak – Mahogany – Gulag Archipelago – Bavarian Academy of Art – University of Moscow – University of Marburg – Great Terror
Homage to the Book (IX)
An initiative by Open Password
and the Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen
Written with heart, passion and deep knowledge about books “that moved us”
Now that the book is threatened by short attention spans, lack of reading pleasure and electronic formats, it is time for a tribute to the book. Open Password and the Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen have teamed up on the project “Books that moved us” and have recruited 41 authors who report with passion, passion and deep knowledge how they were influenced by a particular book.
In our ninth homage to the book, Erdmute Lapp examines the life and main work of Boris Pasternak and describes how a piece of enduring world literature gained world publicity against all the efforts of the KGB and the Soviet government.
Erdmute Lapp reads the book of her life:
“Doctor Zivago” by Boris Pasternak
In the footsteps of a Russian poet
The Zivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA
and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
Erda Lapp at Cafe Cereteli
When I was twelve years old, the film Doctor Zivago was being shown in the small German town where my family and I lived at the time, and my father only took me to the cinema. “The little one can’t come, she’s definitely not 16 yet,” said the cashier when my father asked for two cinema tickets. “She’s with me,” my father replied, pulling me into the cinema.
What I saw there left a lasting impression on me, although of course I hardly understood anything. I didn’t understand that first there was a world war and then a civil war; I didn’t understand why Yuri Zivago lived with Lara even though he was married to Tonja; why, together with the partisans, he first shoots the young people with the sympathetic faces and then bandages the wounded man; why Yuri Zivago, after escaping from partisan captivity, returned to Yuryatin to Lara and not to Varykino to Tonja, with whom he had two children. And why did Yuri Zivago have to die so early? I found the landscape, which was almost always winter, fascinating. (The film was shot in Finland and Canada.) I can still see the daffodil field in Varykino in my mind’s eye. But the Zivago family fled hunger in Moscow, so why do they grow daffodils? They’re beautiful, but vegetables would be edible.
My father explained to me that the novel Doctor Zivago was only published in the West; the Soviet government did not like the depiction of the revolution and the civil war years; The author Boris Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for this book and for his poems (which unfortunately we can only read in translation, which we do not know how well it reproduces the original), but was not allowed to accept it. He died in 1960 and is one of the great Russian writers of the 20th century.
On the parents’ bookshelf and also in the city library there were a number of works by Russian writers in German translation, but Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zivago was not there. So I first read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
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In the footsteps of a Russian poet.
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It took me several years to read Doctor Zivago in German translation, and I was fascinated by the complexity of the novel. (I had started learning Russian at school by then, but you have to be advanced to read Doctor Zivago.) Of course I admired Yuri Zivago, but I distinctly remember thinking: My father would have been like Tonjas My father made sure that I and my children would emigrate to Paris if I were married to a man as unreliable as Yuri Zivago.
After studying Slavic, English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg and at Indiana University, Bloomington, I worked on my dissertation in Moscow in my first year as a DAAD scholarship holder. My Russian friend and I took the Elektricka to Peredelkino and I saw Pasternak’s dacha where Doctor Zivago was created. At that time, the dacha was not yet a literary museum and you could only look at the house from the outside. After we returned to Moscow from the trip, my friend bought me a large bouquet of daffodils from a street vendor at Kievskij vokzal.
A copy of Doctor Zivago was circulating among the students I was with during my time in Moscow, and everyone devoured it at night. When I was back in Germany, I found out that the Italian publisher Feltrinelli Editore and the University of Michigan Press had published Russian-language editions. I read the novel in Russian and now everything made sense. I had gotten to know Soviet culture well enough to understand that, according to Soviet opinion, Yuri Zivago had the wrong view of the revolution and the events of the civil war, that he was beyond all ideology and that art was more important to him than the revolution. I understood the carefreeness and freedom that characterize him and that Lara probably understood and accepted it too. We don’t know about Tonja. She feels like she loves him and he doesn’t love her. But he loved her, just differently than she loved him. I now understood the balalajka at the beginning of the film as a symbol of art and the daffodils as a symbol of beauty in the midst of the chaos of the civil war.
In 1987, after the beginning of Gorbacev’s Perestroika, the novel was first published in Russian in the Soviet Union, and has been published in Russia ever since. Mikhail Gorbacev also studied in Moscow and knew that many intellectuals could be won over if they could read what they wanted to read. In addition to the Feltrinelli edition, I bought a Russian-language edition from Eksmo from 2013 for the Bochum University Library. The cover image shows a painting by the Swedish artist Sven Richard Berg, created in 1899-1900 and entitled Nordic Summer Evening. A man and a young woman in white dresses stand at the window of a manor house and look at the garden. The impression is that Doctor Zivago is a romantic story from the turn of the century. Nothing could be further from reality.
In 2002-2004, the Bochum University Library and the Exeter University Library, as Western European partners, carried out an EU project (Tempus JEP) with the library of the University of South Urals in Celjabinsk. I told my colleagues from Celyabinsk about Doctor Zivago and asked them which city was Yuryatin’s role model. Later I learned that it is Perm in the Ural foothills and that a rural estate near the city, as a model for Varykino, attracts many tourists. During their visit to Bochum, the Russian colleagues borrowed the Feltrinelli edition from the Bochum University Library and read it at night.
In June 2019 I had the opportunity to take part in a summer school in Peredelkino and Moscow that Bochum Slavists and students organized with Gasan Gusejnov from the Moscow School of Economics and his students. Professor Gusejnov taught in Bochum in the summer of 2017 and 2018 and suggested that I take part in the 2019 summer school as a librarian. Until then, I had always envied my American colleagues because they were able to accompany professors and students from their university on trips as embedded librarians, and now it has happened to me too. We stayed at the Dom tvorcestva pisatelej in Peredelkino, the classes also took place there. Of course we visited Boris Pasternak’s dacha. I had prepared the lecture on Boris Pasternak and the 1958 Nobel Prize.
Dr. Zivago, Russian edition
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The Zivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book.
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My text is based on the detailed research of Peter Finn and Petra Couvée (Peter Finn is an American journalist for the Washington Post and Petra Couvée a Dutch journalist and university lecturer), which was published in 2014 under the title “The Zivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book” was published in New York by Pantheon Book.
Like the two journalists, I start on May 20, 1956. On that day, the Italian Sergio D’Angelo took the Elektricka from the Kievskij vokzal to Peredelkino to visit Pasternak. D’Angelo was working as an intern for Radio Moscow at the time. Before his stay in Moscow he had managed the bookstore of the Italian Communist Party in Rome, and his stay in Moscow was financed by the Italian Communist Party.
The Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli of Milan had asked D’Angelo to look for interesting Soviet literature that Feltrinelli wanted to have translated and published. In April 1956, D’Angelo had read a short cultural note that mentioned the impending publication of Russian poet Boris Pasternak’s first novel. The novel was called “Doctor Zivago”. D’Angelo was sure he had found what Feltrinelli was looking for. D’Angelo suggested that Pasternak give him the manuscript, the text would be translated in Italy, and Feltrinelli Editore would wait to publish it until the novel had appeared in the Soviet Union. He added that Pasternak could trust Feltrinelli, who was also a communist.
D’Angelo had no idea of the risk Pasternak would take by giving his manuscript to a foreigner. But Pasternak knew all too well that the unsanctioned publication in the West of a work that had not been published in the Soviet Union could bring charges of treason and put the author and his family in danger. Boris Pilnjak, Pasternak’s former neighbor in Peredelkino (the side gate between the gardens of the two dachas was always open) was shot in 1938 after his short novel Mahogany was published in Berlin; Pilnjak’s wife spent 19 years in the Gulag. Even after Stalin’s death, no author could consider publication in the West without thinking of Pilnyak’s fate.
But Pasternak’s answer was: I will give you the manuscript on the condition that Fetrinelli also sends copies of the text to publishers in France and England. Then he brought a package wrapped in newspaper, it contained 433 closely typewritten sheets, the text was divided into 5 parts. Each piece was bound in cardboard and held together with a string threaded through holes in the paper and then tied. The first section was dated 1948 and the text was full of handwritten corrections. (The authors mention that Feltrinelli’s son let them look at the original manuscript, an exciting moment for the journalists.) Pasternak gave the manuscript to D’Angelo and said, “This is Doctor Zivago, may he begin his journey around the world.” And in farewell he said D’Angelo: “You are hereby invited to my execution.”
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Surviving the Great Terror
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Below I would like to explain why Pasternak took this risk and what the future fate of the manuscript was.
Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 into a Jewish artistic family. His father was a well-known impressionist painter and professor at the Moscow Academy of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture. (I was lucky enough to be able to see two paintings by Leonid Pasternak in the Tel Aviv Art Museum right before the summer school.) Leonid Pasternak came to Moscow from Odessa in 1881 to study medicine, and in the fall of 1882 he entered the Bavarian Art Academy Registered in Munich. Boris Pasternak’s mother, née Rosalia Kaufman, was a musical prodigy, she studied in Vienna and was appointed professor of music at the Odessa Conservatory when she was not yet twenty years old.
Boris Pasternak studied law and philosophy at Moscow University and philosophy in Marburg. In 1922 he married his first wife Evgenija Lourié. In the summer of 1939 he became more and more attracted to Zinaida Neijgaus / Neuhaus, the wife of his best friend Genrich Nejgaus, and he lived with her. In 1920, Pasternak’s parents and sisters moved to Berlin and settled in England before the outbreak of World War II. Pasternak decided that he had to stay in Russia.
Sestra moja – zizn’ / My sister – life was his first volume of poetry with an excellent response. Boris Pasternak also distinguished himself as a translator; his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe’s Faust achieved great importance.
Miraculously, he survived the great terror. He said: During those terrible years, anyone could be arrested. We were shuffled around like a pack of cards. There was no obvious logic to the killing.
Read the final episode: A book prevails worldwide against the KGB and the government of the Soviet Union.
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