Browse content similar to The Real Doctor Zhivago. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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It's one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:07 | |
A tale of passion and fear, | 0:00:07 | 0:00:09 | |
set against a backdrop of revolution and violence. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:13 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
Julie Christie as Lara. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:16 | |
The violent, sensual, sensitive girl. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:21 | |
Zhivago's great love and mistress. | 0:00:21 | 0:00:23 | |
But our story isn't about Yuri Zhivago and Lara, | 0:00:24 | 0:00:28 | |
it's about their creator, | 0:00:28 | 0:00:30 | |
Boris Pasternak, a man who became a prisoner in his own country. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:34 | |
He willingly committed acts of literary suicide | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
practically every day. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:41 | |
It may have been the bravest book ever written. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
Pasternak faced penury, public denunciation and even death. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:49 | |
IN RUSSIAN: | 0:00:49 | 0:00:51 | |
He wanted to have his say and he knew that it was dangerous. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:03 | |
-ARCHIVE: -On Stalin's orders, | 0:01:03 | 0:01:04 | |
75% of the supreme War Council are murdered. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:06 | |
Pasternak's love of Russia was always at odds with his | 0:01:06 | 0:01:10 | |
disenchantment with the brutal Soviet regime. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
Writing the book under Stalin was dangerous, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:18 | |
attempting to to get it published at the height of the Cold War, | 0:01:18 | 0:01:21 | |
even more so. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:22 | |
I would love to know who the original source was that British intelligence | 0:01:34 | 0:01:38 | |
got the manuscript from before they gave it to the CIA. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:43 | |
The CIA used every opportunity they could to catch on to something | 0:01:43 | 0:01:48 | |
cultural to injure the Russians. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:50 | |
Our story begins before the film won five Oscars | 0:01:57 | 0:02:01 | |
and its author the Nobel Prize. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:03 | |
It's the untold story of the real Doctor Zhivago, | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
Boris Pasternak. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
Pasternak's only novel, Doctor Zhivago, | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
bears witness to one of the greatest moments of the 20th century - | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
the Russian Revolution - | 0:02:21 | 0:02:23 | |
and was immortalised in David Lean's epic film. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:27 | |
From the most widely acclaimed novel of our generation, | 0:02:27 | 0:02:30 | |
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents David Lean's film, | 0:02:30 | 0:02:34 | |
of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
It was on the streets of Moscow | 0:02:45 | 0:02:47 | |
that Boris Pasternak grew up and he witnessed | 0:02:47 | 0:02:50 | |
the birth throes of the Russian Revolution 100 years ago. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:54 | |
The book was Pasternak's attempt to personalise what he experienced and | 0:02:56 | 0:03:00 | |
witnessed through this momentous time. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:03 | |
An early scene in the film echoes Pasternak's own feelings towards | 0:03:07 | 0:03:12 | |
the beginnings of the Revolution, | 0:03:12 | 0:03:14 | |
as Imperial cavalry charge a peaceful protest march, | 0:03:14 | 0:03:18 | |
all seen through the eyes of Yuri Zhivago. | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
When I read Doctor Zhivago, | 0:03:30 | 0:03:32 | |
I couldn't help but feel that Yuri is Pasternak's alter ego. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:36 | |
Yuri, too, is a poet, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:38 | |
tormented by his great loves for the women in his life and for | 0:03:38 | 0:03:43 | |
mother Russia, where to this day, | 0:03:43 | 0:03:45 | |
Pasternak is still held in high regard as a writer. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
I welcome you on a tour devoted to Boris Pasternak, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
it is the place where he lived for many, many years. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
This area of Moscow connected with his life very tightly and connected | 0:03:56 | 0:04:01 | |
with Doctor Zhivago and with many of his poems. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:04 | |
I joined a tour tracing Pasternak's early footsteps | 0:04:04 | 0:04:08 | |
in Moscow run by Anna Sergeeva-Klatis, | 0:04:08 | 0:04:11 | |
a Russian Pasternak scholar and lecturer at Moscow State University. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:17 | |
Anna, sorry to interrupt, sorry, everybody. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:21 | |
This is a great turnout, this evening. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:25 | |
What does that say about the popularity and in the interest | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
-in Pasternak in Russia now? -Because he's a great writer. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
Is that true? Do we all agree? | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
SHE TRANSLATES TO RUSSIAN | 0:04:36 | 0:04:38 | |
Boris was a Muscovite from his head to his... | 0:04:41 | 0:04:45 | |
-Toes. -..toes. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:47 | |
He spoke like a Muscovite and he moved like a Muscovite, | 0:04:47 | 0:04:52 | |
he loved Moscow and Moscow reflected in many of his poems. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:57 | |
He left Moscow for very short periods. | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
He spent all his life in Moscow. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:03 | |
What would you say is interesting about Boris's upbringing? | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
It was quite bourgeois, middle-class, wasn't it? | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
His family was an artistic family. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:12 | |
His father was a famous painter | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
and he was already famous when Boris was born. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
And his mother was a very gifted pianist. | 0:05:20 | 0:05:25 | |
They both were very successful, | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
the atmosphere in the family was really artistic. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:32 | |
He was very gifted person from his childhood. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
And he began to draw when he was about 12 years of age. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:41 | |
His father was very satisfied. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:43 | |
He said that he can be a very talented painter. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
But he stopped. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
He changed his mind. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:51 | |
And he began to play piano and he had very good achievements in that, | 0:05:51 | 0:05:56 | |
but he also stopped that. | 0:05:56 | 0:05:59 | |
And then he went into philosophy | 0:05:59 | 0:06:02 | |
and he went to Germany and he was offered | 0:06:02 | 0:06:06 | |
to continue his education in Germany because, as a Jew, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:10 | |
he had no way to continue his career in Russia. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:14 | |
And he refused because he began to write poetry. He was 22. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:19 | |
That was the beginning. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:20 | |
Having found his true calling, | 0:06:22 | 0:06:24 | |
it was only five years later he saw the start of the Revolution, | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
an event that changed his life and changed Russia forever. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
Excited by the Revolution, Boris never left Russia. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:36 | |
His family were different. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:38 | |
Despite their liberal leanings, | 0:06:39 | 0:06:41 | |
the Pasternak family as a whole took a wary view of the Revolution. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
And when they happened to make a journey to Germany in 1923, | 0:06:45 | 0:06:50 | |
they took the opportunity to make the visit permanent | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
and went into exile. First there, and later in Oxford. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:58 | |
The family home here is full of images of Boris's Russian childhood | 0:07:00 | 0:07:04 | |
and the cultural greats who visited when they lived in Moscow. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:08 | |
This is the garden room. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:10 | |
Being part of the intelligentsia and cultural aristocracy, | 0:07:10 | 0:07:13 | |
the family had many stellar visitors, | 0:07:13 | 0:07:16 | |
painted and drawn by Boris's father. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:19 | |
This one you might recognise, this is Rachmaninov at the piano. | 0:07:19 | 0:07:23 | |
But for Boris, one visitor to their Moscow home | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
stood out more than any of the others. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
Boris remembers as a child being woken by the sound of a piano | 0:07:29 | 0:07:34 | |
being played solo by his mother and | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
stumbling out into a room that was full of people, including Tolstoy, | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
who was listening to the concert that she was giving in their house. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:45 | |
This is Tolstoy in his family estate, | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
reading one of his manuscripts. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:51 | |
For Boris, Tolstoy was a moral example and an artistic example. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:58 | |
Tolstoy was interested in the peasantry, | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
the common life. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:03 | |
And you can see this in Zhivago, | 0:08:03 | 0:08:07 | |
where Boris is also interested in a language of peasant culture | 0:08:07 | 0:08:13 | |
which he uses. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
So there was a strong feeling of compassion for the underclass, | 0:08:15 | 0:08:20 | |
which Boris inherited. | 0:08:20 | 0:08:22 | |
Before the Revolution, | 0:08:22 | 0:08:23 | |
Tolstoy chose to stay in Russia and was a thorn in the side of | 0:08:23 | 0:08:27 | |
the Romanovs. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:28 | |
Now, for Pasternak, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
also feeling compelled to remain in his motherland, | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
meant that he would be expected to be loyal to the new Soviet regime. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:38 | |
If you want to see the how USSR glorified the Revolution, | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
you need look no further than here in Moscow's Revolution Square | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
underground station, where it's only depicted as magnificent and epic. | 0:08:55 | 0:09:00 | |
Despite his privileged upbringing, | 0:09:00 | 0:09:03 | |
Pasternak greeted the Revolution with gusto, | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
hoping for a fairer society and a better system of government. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:11 | |
And you can see his initial revolutionary fervour | 0:09:11 | 0:09:14 | |
in the pages of his novel. | 0:09:14 | 0:09:15 | |
"The Revolution broke out willy-nilly, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:25 | |
"like a breath that's been held too long. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:28 | |
"Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:32 | |
"You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
"his own personal revolution as well as the general one." | 0:09:35 | 0:09:40 | |
The artists who were galvanised by the Revolution soon divided into | 0:09:47 | 0:09:52 | |
two camps. There were those who supported the state | 0:09:52 | 0:09:56 | |
and produced wholesome propaganda like this. | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
Others, like Pasternak, remained neutral, but in doing so, | 0:10:00 | 0:10:04 | |
he made himself a target. | 0:10:04 | 0:10:06 | |
In 1922, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:09 | |
Trotsky summoned Pasternak to his office and demanded to know what | 0:10:09 | 0:10:13 | |
his poetry meant and why he didn't write about social themes. | 0:10:13 | 0:10:18 | |
And when Yuri's captured in Doctor Zhivago, by the Red Army, | 0:10:18 | 0:10:22 | |
it's clear the scene depicts Pasternak's | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
and other writer's fears. | 0:10:25 | 0:10:27 | |
-Yes. -I used to admire your poetry. | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
-Thank you. -I shouldn't admire it now. | 0:10:30 | 0:10:33 | |
I should find it absurdly personal, don't you agree? | 0:10:33 | 0:10:37 | |
Feelings, insights, affections, it's suddenly trivial now. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
You don't agree? You're wrong. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:44 | |
The personal life is dead in Russia. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:48 | |
History has killed it. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:49 | |
If the Russian people were fearful under Lenin in the years after his death, | 0:10:51 | 0:10:55 | |
they were soon subjected to a new set of terrors | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
when Stalin took control. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:01 | |
-ARCHIVE: -On Stalin's orders, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:04 | |
75% of the Supreme War Council are murdered. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
In their places, Stalin installed political commissars who ensured his control. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:11 | |
Writers who were seen as a danger to the state, no matter who they were, | 0:11:41 | 0:11:46 | |
put themselves at risk. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:49 | |
And, like all Russians, | 0:11:49 | 0:11:50 | |
Boris saw Vladimir Mayakovsky as the greatest living writer. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:55 | |
A close friend and associate of Boris Pasternak's, | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
he was dubbed the poet of the Revolution | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
and he advocated socialist thought through his verse. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
But when Mayakovsky's writing became critical of the regime, | 0:12:07 | 0:12:11 | |
his fate soon changed. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:13 | |
In 1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide | 0:12:14 | 0:12:17 | |
by shooting himself in the heart. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:20 | |
Controversy rages as to why he did it - lost love, | 0:12:20 | 0:12:24 | |
lost faith in the regime, or even that he was murdered. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:28 | |
His funeral was the third biggest in the history of the Soviet Union. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:34 | |
Pasternak was greatly disturbed by this turn of events, | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
so much so that 25 years later, | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
he reflected on Mayakovsky's work in Zhivago. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:44 | |
"I've always liked Mayakovsky. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:47 | |
"What an all-devouring poetic energy. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:50 | |
"And his way of saying a thing once and for all, implacably, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
"straight from the shoulder. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:56 | |
"And above all, the way he takes a good, bold swing, | 0:12:56 | 0:12:59 | |
"and chucks it all at the face of society. | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
"And a bit further, somewhere, into outer space." | 0:13:02 | 0:13:06 | |
Mayakovsky's death was only the first of many. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:10 | |
As Stalin's terror convulsed Russia, | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
many of Pasternak's closest friends would be exiled, | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
imprisoned or executed. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:18 | |
Like all writers of the time, | 0:13:28 | 0:13:30 | |
Pasternak had to think of his own fate in the face of what was going | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
on all around him. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:36 | |
The years of Stalin's terror were among the most tortuous | 0:13:36 | 0:13:39 | |
for Pasternak and his countrymen. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:41 | |
In 1932, Stalin's wife killed herself over his infidelity, | 0:13:41 | 0:13:46 | |
shooting herself through the heart. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:48 | |
That struck a profound chord with Pasternak, | 0:13:48 | 0:13:51 | |
who was himself tormented over his own infidelity | 0:13:51 | 0:13:55 | |
in his first marriage. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:56 | |
He wrote a personal letter to Stalin, full of deep condolence, | 0:13:56 | 0:14:01 | |
which is said to have bound the leader to the poet for life | 0:14:01 | 0:14:04 | |
and given the latter a unique protection. | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
Another incident that challenged Pasternak's loyalty came on a Moscow | 0:14:07 | 0:14:11 | |
street corner when he met one of the most popular and highly regarded | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
poets of the time. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
Osip Mandelstam recited his new verse, Stalin Epigram. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:22 | |
"But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen | 0:14:24 | 0:14:28 | |
"And he plays with the services of these half-men, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:32 | |
"Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
"He's alone booming, poking, and whiffing." | 0:14:36 | 0:14:40 | |
Pasternak knew those lines could be fatal to the pair of them. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:48 | |
So he told Mandelstam, "This never happened, | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
"you didn't read that to me, I never heard it." | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
Mandelstam was arrested. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:57 | |
Stalin phoned Pasternak personally, | 0:14:57 | 0:15:00 | |
wanting to know if the prisoner was a good writer or not. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
Pasternak avoided the question, whereupon Stalin taunted him, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:08 | |
"Why aren't you standing up for your friend?" | 0:15:08 | 0:15:11 | |
The call only lasted a few minutes, | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
but it almost certainly sealed Mandelstam's fate. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
Stalin was clearly testing Pasternak's loyalty to the regime. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:22 | |
And while he was protected, Mandelstam was not. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:25 | |
So, when arrested again and charged with counterrevolutionary activities, | 0:15:25 | 0:15:30 | |
Mandelstam died in transit to a labour camp. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:34 | |
The official cause of death was "unspecified illness". | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
Pasternak would never forget what happened to Mandelstam | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
and his feelings of guilt and complicity | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
would haunt him for the rest of his life. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:48 | |
I'm leaving Moscow by train to take a trip to the country | 0:15:56 | 0:16:01 | |
to see the next trick Stalin had up his sleeve. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:04 | |
He created a community for writers at Peredelkino, | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
just 15 miles south-west of Moscow. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
Well, we're only a few minutes by train outside Moscow, | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
but the difference is palpable. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
Away from all that smog and stress and pollution, | 0:16:27 | 0:16:31 | |
you were serenaded by birdsong in this sun-dappled wood. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:34 | |
And you have a sense of what this might have meant for Pasternak, | 0:16:34 | 0:16:38 | |
to connect to the Russian countryside, | 0:16:38 | 0:16:40 | |
so important in the literary canon and to the Russian soul. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:44 | |
But the reality of living and writing in Peredelkino, | 0:16:49 | 0:16:53 | |
was described by one of Pasternak's neighbours, Dukovsky, | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
as "entrapping writers in a cocoon of comforts, | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
"surrounding them with a network of spies." | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
Within a year of being here, | 0:17:06 | 0:17:08 | |
Pasternak felt impassioned and strong enough to start writing | 0:17:08 | 0:17:13 | |
Doctor Zhivago, a novel that speaks of his love of Russia | 0:17:13 | 0:17:16 | |
and his hatred of the brutal regime that now ran it. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:20 | |
It's very plain and austere, isn't it? | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
It's a sort of writer's desk out of a woodcut or a fairy tale. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:29 | |
I mean, partly, that's to ensure no distractions, | 0:17:29 | 0:17:33 | |
but also what it connects with, I think, is a reference | 0:17:33 | 0:17:36 | |
I'm sure I came across in the book, either by Pasternak, | 0:17:36 | 0:17:39 | |
or his alter ego, Zhivago, | 0:17:39 | 0:17:42 | |
saying that what he wants is to connect with the ordinary man and woman. | 0:17:42 | 0:17:46 | |
His book, his great classic, isn't some highfalutin literary puzzle, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:52 | |
but it's the story of Russia for everybody to understand. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
Plain speaking from a plain desk. | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
It wasn't just Doctor Zhivago that Pasternak poured his writing into | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
from this desk. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
He risked keeping in regular correspondence with his exiled | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
family in Oxford, telling them of the pressures he was under, | 0:18:10 | 0:18:14 | |
being part of the writer's colony in Peredelkino. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:17 | |
These are extracts of letters that Boris wrote to his sisters. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
"The absurdities of life here, | 0:18:22 | 0:18:24 | |
"the obstacles they create for writers and artists | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
"are beyond belief, | 0:18:27 | 0:18:29 | |
"but that's how a revolution has to be." | 0:18:29 | 0:18:32 | |
In his letters to his sisters, as far as he's able, | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
knowing of course that all his letters were probably | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
being intercepted and read by the Soviets at that time, | 0:18:38 | 0:18:42 | |
he talks about the incredible struggle to write his truth | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
about a regime when | 0:18:46 | 0:18:48 | |
of course that was absolutely not the thing to be doing. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
I genuinely believe that he, willingly almost, | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
committed acts of literary suicide, practically every day. | 0:18:55 | 0:18:58 | |
Pasternak carried on writing Doctor Zhivago | 0:18:59 | 0:19:03 | |
in the idyll of Peredelkino, | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
when suddenly his and Russia's worlds were turned upside down. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
The domestic terrors of Stalin's regime abated when history took | 0:19:11 | 0:19:15 | |
an unexpected turn. | 0:19:15 | 0:19:17 | |
Russia entered the Second World War, | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
joining the fight against Nazi Germany. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:23 | |
Stalin called it the great patriotic war. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
Pasternak saw it as a real chance for a new dawn for Russia, | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
and became a fire warden, defusing the bombs that fell on Moscow. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:38 | |
He even visited the front line to read his poetry to the troops. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:43 | |
But his hopes for a new Russia were short-lived. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
The repressions and ethnic cleansing that followed victory meant that | 0:19:46 | 0:19:50 | |
the terrors got even worse. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:53 | |
As Stalin's iron grip tightened, | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
Pasternak returned to writing Doctor Zhivago in Peredelkino. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
He lived there with his second wife, Zinaida, | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
having divorced his first, Evgeniya. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
But a trip to Moscow in search of a publisher lead to a chance encounter | 0:20:08 | 0:20:12 | |
that changed his life forever | 0:20:12 | 0:20:14 | |
and gave his novel and David Lean's film | 0:20:14 | 0:20:17 | |
a memorable love affair at its centre. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:20 | |
It made Yuri Zhivago a romantic hero. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:22 | |
This scene is a direct reference to Pasternak's visit to the offices of | 0:20:29 | 0:20:33 | |
the state literary magazine, Novy Mir. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
It was there he met Olga Ivinskaya, who was working for the magazine. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:44 | |
Her boss introduced him to her as "your biggest fan". | 0:20:44 | 0:20:48 | |
Returning home that evening, | 0:20:48 | 0:20:49 | |
Olga told her mother that she'd been "speaking with God". | 0:20:49 | 0:20:54 | |
The next day, Pasternak sent her his full set of works and | 0:20:54 | 0:20:58 | |
their relationship began. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:00 | |
Boris was the most impassioned of men. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:04 | |
What I most love about him is that you feel his extreme strain of | 0:21:04 | 0:21:10 | |
emotionalism, through everything that he did, | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
and he did not take anything lightly. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
I feel that he did have a certain moral weakness and that played | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
out in his relationships. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
Olga had a daughter from a previous relationship | 0:21:22 | 0:21:24 | |
and she remembered those early days of Boris and her mother | 0:21:24 | 0:21:28 | |
very well. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:30 | |
-My mother. -Right. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:31 | |
Pasternak. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:33 | |
What sort of man do you think Boris Pasternak was? | 0:22:05 | 0:22:08 | |
Irena's mother, Olga, | 0:22:28 | 0:22:29 | |
soon became Pasternak's mistress and his muse for Doctor Zhivago. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:34 | |
Their relationship would open him to further pressure and danger as he | 0:22:34 | 0:22:38 | |
continued writing the book with Olga in his life. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
There is absolutely no doubt that Olga became the prototype for Lara | 0:22:42 | 0:22:47 | |
in Doctor Zhivago. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:48 | |
Lara originally was based on his second wife, Zinaida Neigauz, | 0:22:48 | 0:22:53 | |
but the minute that he meant Olga, | 0:22:53 | 0:22:55 | |
his Lara softened and flowered to embody Olga Ivinskaya. | 0:22:55 | 0:23:00 | |
David Lean's interpretation of this love affair was a big selling point | 0:23:00 | 0:23:04 | |
for the film. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:05 | |
Wouldn't it have been lovely if we'd met before? | 0:23:05 | 0:23:08 | |
Before we did? | 0:23:08 | 0:23:09 | |
Yes. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:11 | |
We'd have got married, had a house and children. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
If we'd had children, Yuri, | 0:23:19 | 0:23:22 | |
would you have liked a boy or a girl? | 0:23:22 | 0:23:24 | |
I think we may go mad if we think about all that. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:30 | |
I shall always think about it. | 0:23:30 | 0:23:32 | |
Inspired by his new love, | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
Pasternak threw himself into what would be | 0:23:37 | 0:23:39 | |
his great epic of the Russian Revolution and civil war. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:43 | |
He poured all his anguish and his deepest reflections into its pages. | 0:23:43 | 0:23:49 | |
When his character Yuri talks about writing, | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
well, it could almost be the voice of Pasternak himself. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:57 | |
"Ever since his school days, he dreamed of writing a book in prose. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:03 | |
"A book of impressions of life, in which he would conceal, | 0:24:03 | 0:24:07 | |
"like buried sticks of dynamite, | 0:24:07 | 0:24:11 | |
"the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about." | 0:24:11 | 0:24:16 | |
There have been writers who have said that Zhivago is less a novel | 0:24:24 | 0:24:28 | |
than an autobiography of a poet. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:30 | |
It was his political beliefs that he channelled through the character of | 0:24:30 | 0:24:34 | |
Yuri Zhivago. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
In David Lean's film adaptation, | 0:24:38 | 0:24:40 | |
the scene between Yuri and his half-brother, | 0:24:40 | 0:24:43 | |
played by Alec Guinness, shows Pasternak's political intentions. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:47 | |
You lay life on a table and you cut out all the tumours of injustice. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:51 | |
Marvellous. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:53 | |
'I told him, if he felt like that, he should join the party.' | 0:24:53 | 0:24:55 | |
Ah, cutting out the tumours of injustice, that's a deep operation. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:59 | |
Someone must keep life alive while you do it. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:01 | |
By living. Isn't that right? | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
'I thought then it was wrong. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:07 | |
'He told me what he thought about the party and I trembled for him. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:11 | |
'He approved of us, but for reasons which were subtle, like his verse.' | 0:25:11 | 0:25:15 | |
As he carried on writing Zhivago, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
the threats towards Pasternak soon became more direct and personal. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:27 | |
Pasternak's fear and sense of isolation grew deeper. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:32 | |
In 1948, | 0:25:32 | 0:25:33 | |
25,000 copies of his poems were pulped by the state publisher | 0:25:33 | 0:25:38 | |
and the leading literary magazine, Novy Mir, rejected his verse. | 0:25:38 | 0:25:43 | |
As Pasternak noted drily, | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
"public appearances by me are considered undesirable." | 0:25:46 | 0:25:49 | |
In 1949, | 0:25:51 | 0:25:53 | |
the secret police went to see Stalin to say they were going to arrest | 0:25:53 | 0:25:57 | |
Pasternak. Imagine their surprise when the Great Leader began | 0:25:57 | 0:26:02 | |
reciting Pasternak's verse. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:04 | |
"Heavenly colour, colour blue," he said. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
And Stalin told his goons, "Leave him, he's a cloud dweller." | 0:26:07 | 0:26:12 | |
He didn't know that he had this kind of golden protection on high from | 0:26:15 | 0:26:18 | |
Stalin, and yet he risked his literary life daily | 0:26:18 | 0:26:22 | |
writing his truth about a regime which appalled him. | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
Pasternak's faith in his work was unshakeable. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
He began having readings of it at his dacha and here in Moscow. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
This was an extraordinary act of bravery, or perhaps recklessness, | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
on his part. After all, at the time, | 0:26:42 | 0:26:44 | |
copies of his poems were being pulped, | 0:26:44 | 0:26:47 | |
orders for his arrest were circulating, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:49 | |
and yet here he was risking the very act of defiance | 0:26:49 | 0:26:53 | |
which had cost his friend Mandelstam his life. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:56 | |
Pasternak must have known that informers would be eavesdropping on | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
these readings. Retribution, when it came, was excruciating. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:06 | |
The authorities left Pasternak himself alone. | 0:27:06 | 0:27:09 | |
Instead, they arrested his new love, Olga Ivinskaya. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:14 | |
In 1949, Olga was incarcerated in the notorious Lubyanka prison | 0:27:14 | 0:27:20 | |
in central Moscow. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:22 | |
She was put in solitary confinement | 0:27:59 | 0:28:01 | |
and she was interrogated nightly over the book | 0:28:01 | 0:28:04 | |
that her lover was writing. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
She was subjected to appalling sleep deprivation with blinding lights in | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
her face, and I think that the authorities thought that, probably, | 0:28:10 | 0:28:14 | |
she would crack very quickly and reveal all. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
Not once does she ever betray the man she loved. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
She did discover that she was pregnant | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
while she was in the Lubyanka. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:25 | |
And one day she was told she was going to be allowed a meeting with Boris, | 0:28:25 | 0:28:29 | |
so she was absolutely thrilled and put on her favourite crepe de chine | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
polka-dot dress, which, bizarrely, her mother had managed to smuggle | 0:28:32 | 0:28:36 | |
into the Lubyanka for her. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:38 | |
And in fact she was driven in a blacked-out car across Moscow | 0:28:38 | 0:28:42 | |
and taken to another government building where, six months pregnant, she was marched | 0:28:42 | 0:28:46 | |
up and down flights of stairs and, eventually, | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
taken down to the basement where she smelt this very strange smell | 0:28:48 | 0:28:53 | |
and these doors open, and she was pushed into the Moscow morgue, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
where there were the bodies on zinc top tables, under tarpaulin. | 0:28:56 | 0:29:00 | |
And, of course, because she'd had no contact with Boris, | 0:29:00 | 0:29:03 | |
she assumed that he was dead and that those were one of those bodies | 0:29:03 | 0:29:07 | |
and she was left for many hours in the morgue in her silk dress and, | 0:29:07 | 0:29:10 | |
of course, the next day she miscarried. | 0:29:10 | 0:29:14 | |
Unaware of any of this, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:16 | |
Pasternak himself was summoned to the Lubyanka, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:19 | |
expecting to collect his newborn child. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:23 | |
Instead, he was palmed off with some old letters and gifts | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
that he'd given to Olga. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:27 | |
It would be months before he learned the grisly truth. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:32 | |
Pasternak was distraught. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:36 | |
He told a friend, "Everything is finished now. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
"They've taken her away from me and I'll never see her again. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
"It's like death. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
"Even worse." | 0:29:45 | 0:29:46 | |
She was sentenced to four years hard labour. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
Pasternak evoked his sense of desolation in Doctor Zhivago | 0:29:52 | 0:29:56 | |
when Lara disappears, which David Lean used | 0:29:56 | 0:29:59 | |
as one of the closing scenes to his epic | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
interpretation of the novel. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
One day, she went away and didn't come back. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:08 | |
She died, or vanished somewhere. | 0:30:08 | 0:30:09 | |
In one of the labour camps. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:12 | |
A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:17 | |
That was quite common in those days. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:21 | |
Despite these traumas, Pasternak kept writing. | 0:30:21 | 0:30:24 | |
If the Soviet tactic was to pressure him to stop, it wasn't working. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:29 | |
And then, in 1953, | 0:30:30 | 0:30:32 | |
Stalin's death heralded a new era of hope and redemption for Pasternak. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:38 | |
Olga was released after four years | 0:30:38 | 0:30:41 | |
and they rekindled their love affair. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:43 | |
Towards the end of the writing of the novel, | 0:30:45 | 0:30:47 | |
Olga was typing up the manuscript every afternoon | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
and it was she who was literally taking bound copies | 0:30:50 | 0:30:53 | |
of the manuscript around to publishers. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:56 | |
She acted like an editor, a literary agent, she was his stalwart, | 0:30:56 | 0:31:01 | |
she watched his back. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:03 | |
She absolutely held this man energetically with this love and belief and support. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:08 | |
And I think we owe her everything. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:10 | |
In 1954, after 20 years work, | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
Pasternak finished writing Doctor Zhivago in Peredelkino. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:19 | |
He was ecstatic. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:22 | |
He wrote, "You cannot imagine what I have achieved. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:26 | |
"I have found and given names to the sorcery that has been the cause of | 0:31:26 | 0:31:30 | |
"suffering, bafflement, amazement and dispute for several decades. | 0:31:30 | 0:31:36 | |
"Everything is named, in simple, transparent and sad words. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:42 | |
"I also renewed and redefined the dearest and most important things. | 0:31:42 | 0:31:47 | |
"Land and sky, great passion, creative spirit, life and death." | 0:31:47 | 0:31:54 | |
If Boris's feelings about mother Russia were clear, | 0:31:56 | 0:31:59 | |
so to were his enduring feelings towards the Soviet regime | 0:31:59 | 0:32:04 | |
in the pages of Doctor Zhivago. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:06 | |
"I don't know of any teaching more self-centred and further from the | 0:32:07 | 0:32:11 | |
"facts than Marxism. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
"Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, | 0:32:13 | 0:32:16 | |
"to learn from experience. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:19 | |
"But those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of | 0:32:19 | 0:32:23 | |
"their own infallibility that they turned their backs | 0:32:23 | 0:32:26 | |
"on truth as squarely as they can. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
"Politics mean nothing to me. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
"I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth." | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
Despite such bold passages, | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
Pasternak was still confident his book would be published | 0:32:39 | 0:32:42 | |
and he submitted it to the state publisher, Novy Mir. | 0:32:42 | 0:32:47 | |
Advertisements even appeared | 0:32:47 | 0:32:48 | |
forecasting the imminent arrival of the book. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:52 | |
But then the Soviets moved the goalposts. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
In September 1956, Novy Mir turned the book down | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
on ideological grounds. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:01 | |
Pasternak was torn between his desire to see his book published | 0:33:01 | 0:33:05 | |
and his fear over the possible repercussions. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:08 | |
He now realised that if Doctor Zhivago | 0:33:08 | 0:33:10 | |
was ever to see the light of day, | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
he would have to look beyond Russia for a publisher. | 0:33:12 | 0:33:15 | |
The Soviet loss of the book was about to become a wonderful | 0:33:17 | 0:33:22 | |
opportunity for the West. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:24 | |
As luck would have it, | 0:33:24 | 0:33:25 | |
an Italian publishing house with links to the Communist Party | 0:33:25 | 0:33:29 | |
had a man in Moscow at the time | 0:33:29 | 0:33:31 | |
and he got wind of Doctor Zhivago and liked the sound of it. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
That man would go on to be one of the most important go-betweens in | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
literary history. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:40 | |
He's still alive, 95 now, | 0:33:40 | 0:33:42 | |
and lives in a village north of Rome. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:44 | |
SPOKEN IN ENGLISH: | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
What happened next? | 0:34:13 | 0:34:15 | |
In 1957, Sergio D'Angelo smuggled the Zhivago manuscript | 0:34:50 | 0:34:55 | |
out of Russia through Berlin, | 0:34:55 | 0:34:57 | |
where he passed it to his employer, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. | 0:34:57 | 0:35:01 | |
The Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan is now run by his son, Carlo. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:14 | |
Why was your father so committed to Zhivago and to Pasternak himself? | 0:35:16 | 0:35:21 | |
How did your father communicate with Pasternak | 0:35:43 | 0:35:47 | |
during this whole process? | 0:35:47 | 0:35:48 | |
And this code paid off. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:18 | |
When the Russians forced Pasternak to send a telegram to Feltrinelli, | 0:36:18 | 0:36:22 | |
asking for the manuscript to be returned for corrections to be made, | 0:36:22 | 0:36:26 | |
it was in Russian. | 0:36:26 | 0:36:27 | |
So Feltrinelli knew it had been sent under duress. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
The Soviet regime then blocked the publication of Doctor Zhivago | 0:36:33 | 0:36:38 | |
in Russia, putting more pressure on Pasternak. | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
Even with his arrangement with Feltrinelli in place, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:44 | |
he didn't stop there. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:46 | |
Either through determination or desperation, | 0:36:46 | 0:36:49 | |
Pasternak gave out four other copies to contacts he trusted to take to | 0:36:49 | 0:36:54 | |
countries with a strong literary tradition. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:57 | |
I'm here in Paris to discover how one of those typescripts | 0:36:57 | 0:37:00 | |
was smuggled into France. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
Jacqueline de Proyart was studying Russian at Moscow State University | 0:37:03 | 0:37:08 | |
in 1956, and her fellow students said there was | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
someone she had to meet. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:13 | |
And they said, you know, if you are in Russia here | 0:37:13 | 0:37:17 | |
and you don't go and see Pasternak, | 0:37:17 | 0:37:19 | |
you will have been here for nothing. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:22 | |
I was amazed because I knew Pasternak, | 0:37:22 | 0:37:24 | |
but like a name across a blackboard. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:26 | |
You saw the book before you met Pasternak. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:30 | |
I opened it, I read it, the language is wonderful, | 0:37:30 | 0:37:33 | |
because it's a poetic one. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:36 | |
Very well-balanced. Pleasant to hear. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
I mean, it's very musical. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:41 | |
So the literary value of this novel was... | 0:37:41 | 0:37:47 | |
Amazed me. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
Pasternak trusted her and gave her a set of typescripts to smuggle back to France. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:55 | |
These typescripts didn't carry Pasternak's name, for fear of them | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
being found in transit out of Russia. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
The only name printed in the front matter was Doctor Zhivago. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
Is this the one you took to the French embassy? | 0:38:06 | 0:38:09 | |
-Yes, yes, of course... -It is. | 0:38:09 | 0:38:11 | |
I had it in my suitcase. | 0:38:11 | 0:38:13 | |
And I put it in a certain way in my suitcase. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
When I came back, | 0:38:17 | 0:38:18 | |
I opened my suitcase and the book was not at all in the same place. | 0:38:18 | 0:38:21 | |
No, so somebody had opened your suitcase. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
Yes. Of course. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:25 | |
But they didn't remove it. They saw it... | 0:38:25 | 0:38:28 | |
They saw it, maybe they opened it, they saw no name | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
and nobody knew Doctor Zhivago at that time. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:35 | |
It was quite a scary proposition, | 0:38:35 | 0:38:38 | |
it was a big responsibility, to do that. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
SHE CHUCKLES | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
Well, I think when we are 29, you have still punch. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:49 | |
It's not like putting a microchip in a handkerchief, is it? | 0:38:49 | 0:38:53 | |
You've really got to... | 0:38:53 | 0:38:54 | |
You've really got to hide that. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
-No... -And I love the fact that these are sort of careless tea stains | 0:38:56 | 0:39:00 | |
on the cover of this great historical document. | 0:39:00 | 0:39:03 | |
It's life. | 0:39:03 | 0:39:04 | |
Meanwhile, in Oxford, | 0:39:06 | 0:39:07 | |
the exiled Pasternak family was also involved in the intrigue of bringing | 0:39:07 | 0:39:12 | |
Boris's masterpiece to print. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
When I was about 13, my mother | 0:39:15 | 0:39:17 | |
asked me to go with her on a little bus journey | 0:39:17 | 0:39:21 | |
up to the northern part of Oxford | 0:39:21 | 0:39:24 | |
to the household of a Russian academic, because she had to pick up a parcel. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:28 | |
I had the feeling this is an important occasion. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:31 | |
There's something going on. | 0:39:31 | 0:39:32 | |
Why did she need me with her? | 0:39:32 | 0:39:34 | |
We came to this small academic's house | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
and I was left in a room and my mother went into another room | 0:39:40 | 0:39:44 | |
and came back with a brown paper parcel. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
And the brown paper parcel | 0:39:47 | 0:39:49 | |
was the second volume of the two-volume typescript | 0:39:49 | 0:39:53 | |
of Doctor Zhivago. | 0:39:53 | 0:39:55 | |
And what was the plan? | 0:39:55 | 0:39:56 | |
What was your mother meant to do? | 0:39:56 | 0:39:58 | |
Boris wanted her and his sister to read it | 0:39:58 | 0:40:01 | |
and it was guarded ferociously by them. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
There was a controversy on whether it would be dangerous | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
for Boris to have it published or not. | 0:40:08 | 0:40:11 | |
And it clearly was dangerous for Boris, | 0:40:11 | 0:40:13 | |
but on the other hand, Boris had | 0:40:13 | 0:40:17 | |
put the last 20 years of his life working on it, | 0:40:17 | 0:40:21 | |
and he wanted to have his say, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
and he knew that it was dangerous. | 0:40:24 | 0:40:28 | |
Despite the best efforts of the Kremlin and | 0:40:30 | 0:40:33 | |
the Italian Communist party to get the typescript back | 0:40:33 | 0:40:37 | |
from Feltrinelli in Milan to censor, | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
Feltrinelli got the book published first, in November 1957, | 0:40:39 | 0:40:43 | |
giving him the global copyright. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:46 | |
So great was the demand for Doctor Zhivago | 0:40:46 | 0:40:49 | |
that he licensed rights in 18 different languages | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
in advance of the novel's publication. | 0:40:52 | 0:40:55 | |
No Russian writer had gone round the state control of | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
published works before, and this especially infuriated the new | 0:41:14 | 0:41:18 | |
Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
As if Pasternak's life was not complicated and perilous | 0:41:47 | 0:41:51 | |
enough, he was about to become a pawn in a much bigger | 0:41:51 | 0:41:54 | |
and more dangerous political game, | 0:41:54 | 0:41:56 | |
as anything that annoyed the Soviet Union was a godsend | 0:41:56 | 0:42:00 | |
for their biggest Cold War enemy. | 0:42:00 | 0:42:03 | |
The book came to the attention of the CIA, | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
who wanted to make sure copies got into the hands of ordinary Russians. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:19 | |
I'm here to meet Peter Finn, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:25 | |
who is now the national security editor for the Washington Post. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
In 2014, he co-wrote a book documenting the CIA's involvement | 0:42:30 | 0:42:35 | |
in turning Pasternak's novel against the Soviet state. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
How did you get involved in the story of Pasternak | 0:42:40 | 0:42:43 | |
and the writing of this great book? | 0:42:43 | 0:42:45 | |
I was a correspondent in Moscow for the paper between 2004 and 2008. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:51 | |
And at that time I started to read about Pasternak | 0:42:51 | 0:42:55 | |
in various biographies | 0:42:55 | 0:42:56 | |
and I saw that the evidence on the CIA and its role | 0:42:56 | 0:43:00 | |
was elusive but persistent. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
I also realised that if I'm going to bring anything to this story | 0:43:03 | 0:43:08 | |
that's fresh or original, I would have to do get the CIA documents. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:13 | |
So, that was a long process, that took probably three years | 0:43:13 | 0:43:18 | |
from when I first approached the agency to when I got them. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:23 | |
What are the documents or paragraphs that particularly catch your eye | 0:43:23 | 0:43:28 | |
from your tranche here? | 0:43:28 | 0:43:30 | |
This one I like because this is the beginning of it all. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:32 | |
So, this is a document dated January 2nd, 1958, | 0:43:32 | 0:43:38 | |
and you can see the outline of the whole operation here. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:41 | |
They talk in the second paragraph, and it's redacted, but essentially | 0:43:41 | 0:43:46 | |
"British intelligence are in favour of exploiting Pasternak's book. | 0:43:46 | 0:43:50 | |
"and have offered to provide whatever assistance they can. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
"They have suggested the possibility of getting copies into the hands of | 0:43:54 | 0:43:58 | |
"travellers going to the Iron Curtain area." | 0:43:58 | 0:44:01 | |
So, it's essentially telling headquarters, | 0:44:01 | 0:44:04 | |
"we are including two rolls of film, this is the book, Doctor Zhivago." | 0:44:04 | 0:44:10 | |
This is very spy craft, isn't it? | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
Somebody has stood over the book and taken pictures of every page presumably. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:17 | |
Yes, correct. And then used to typeset their own edition. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:20 | |
So, for them, this was a propaganda operation. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:23 | |
They viewed culture as a form of propaganda | 0:44:23 | 0:44:27 | |
that they could use against the Soviet state. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:31 | |
These were not... | 0:44:31 | 0:44:32 | |
They may have had very fine literary tastes, | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
but they weren't doing this for literary or philanthropic reasons. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:40 | |
They were doing this for political reasons. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
Now that the CIA had a manuscript of the novel, | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
the race was on to weaponise it, | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
to turn it into a kind of cosh to beat the Soviets with. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:56 | |
But they needed to conceal their part in the subterfuge and find | 0:44:56 | 0:45:00 | |
a European publisher to print copies in Russian. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:03 | |
And as for what happened next in the story, well, | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
that brings me as far as you can imagine from the steppes of Russia | 0:45:06 | 0:45:11 | |
to the bosky countryside of Hampshire | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
and somebody who was there at the time. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
My husband worked for the Dutch security service, the DBB. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:24 | |
And they set up an operation, | 0:45:24 | 0:45:26 | |
although it was initiated by the CIA. | 0:45:26 | 0:45:30 | |
They found this printer in the Hague and my husband, | 0:45:30 | 0:45:35 | |
he said to them, "I've got to go and collect some books." | 0:45:35 | 0:45:39 | |
And he collected these books from the publisher | 0:45:39 | 0:45:44 | |
and took them out to the CIA officer's house in Wassenaar. | 0:45:44 | 0:45:50 | |
Are we talking about dozens or hundreds? | 0:45:50 | 0:45:52 | |
Well, they printed 1,000 altogether. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:54 | |
And they took something like 395 to the World Exhibition | 0:45:54 | 0:45:59 | |
that was being held that year in Brussels. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:03 | |
And they took them to the Vatican pavilion | 0:46:03 | 0:46:07 | |
and the Vatican, when Soviet visitors came, | 0:46:07 | 0:46:09 | |
had a rather cunning arrangement | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
because they had a little sort of chapel at the back of the pavilion, | 0:46:12 | 0:46:16 | |
so they would take their Soviet visitors there | 0:46:16 | 0:46:20 | |
and hand out a book. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:23 | |
It had a hardback cover in blue | 0:46:23 | 0:46:26 | |
and it was wrapped in plain brown paper. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:30 | |
Of course, these people who were going back to the Soviet Union, | 0:46:30 | 0:46:34 | |
you couldn't just take a hardback book, so they removed the cover, | 0:46:34 | 0:46:41 | |
divided the book into sections, | 0:46:41 | 0:46:43 | |
and stuffed them in pockets or their trousers or whatever. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
This is the original copy that my husband brought back, | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
and he wrote on it, "Saturday 6th of September, 1958." | 0:46:52 | 0:46:56 | |
I'm sure you read fluent Russian. | 0:46:56 | 0:46:58 | |
Sometimes. | 0:46:58 | 0:47:00 | |
Do you think, when we look back at the Cold War and how it all ended, | 0:47:00 | 0:47:05 | |
how significant was this episode? | 0:47:05 | 0:47:08 | |
I think it did actually help sway opinion. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:12 | |
It was very different to military operations | 0:47:12 | 0:47:16 | |
because if you can sway people's way of thinking, | 0:47:16 | 0:47:20 | |
in the long run that can be very effective. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:23 | |
Was there much discussion, | 0:47:23 | 0:47:24 | |
much thought about where this would leave Pasternak | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
when his novel started turning up in Russia in a Russian edition? | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
I don't think that they had worried too much about that. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:37 | |
They were too keen on embarrassing the Russians. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
Boris, marooned in Peredelkino, | 0:47:43 | 0:47:45 | |
was oblivious to the way his book was being used as a cultural | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
weapon against the Soviet Union, but on the 23rd of October 1958, | 0:47:49 | 0:47:55 | |
a very important announcement was made, | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
shattering the relative calm in the household. | 0:47:58 | 0:48:00 | |
It proved to be yet another major embarrassment for the Russian state. | 0:48:00 | 0:48:04 | |
Imagine the elation bursting into this quiet rural retreat | 0:48:06 | 0:48:10 | |
the day the telegram arrived in 1958 | 0:48:10 | 0:48:14 | |
telling the isolated, frustrated author | 0:48:14 | 0:48:17 | |
that he had won the Nobel Prize. | 0:48:17 | 0:48:19 | |
And here he is sharing that moment of triumph. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
But that sense of triumph was short-lived when Pasternak found | 0:48:23 | 0:48:27 | |
himself confronting an exquisite and somehow rather Russian dilemma. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:32 | |
Of course, he was free to go and collect the Nobel Prize if he wished, | 0:48:32 | 0:48:36 | |
but if he did so, the authorities left him under no doubt | 0:48:36 | 0:48:40 | |
that he would not be welcome again in his mother country. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:43 | |
Word of Pasternak's award soon got around and he came out onto | 0:49:29 | 0:49:33 | |
his steps to meet a horde of journalists. | 0:49:33 | 0:49:36 | |
He told them, "to receive this prize fills me with great joy and also | 0:49:36 | 0:49:41 | |
"gives me moral support, but my joy is a lonely joy." | 0:49:41 | 0:49:45 | |
Perhaps he was referring to the many people in his own country who | 0:49:45 | 0:49:50 | |
couldn't share in such happiness. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:52 | |
Closer to home, | 0:49:52 | 0:49:53 | |
Pasternak's nearest and dearest also had grave misgivings and | 0:49:53 | 0:49:58 | |
his neighbour Fedin, another writer, called on Pasternak, | 0:49:58 | 0:50:01 | |
not to offer his congratulations, | 0:50:01 | 0:50:03 | |
but to tell him on no account should he accept the award. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:07 | |
But as the West was giving Pasternak praises and prizes, | 0:50:08 | 0:50:13 | |
Russia reacted in a very different way. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:17 | |
That same year, he was expelled from the powerful Union of Writers, | 0:50:17 | 0:50:21 | |
then publicly denounced and instructed to leave the Soviet Union | 0:50:21 | 0:50:25 | |
in front of Khrushchev. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:27 | |
This added to the pressures on Pasternak, and again | 0:50:33 | 0:50:37 | |
the regime turned to his lover Olga to reinforce that. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:41 | |
Olga was summoned to a meeting in Moscow and left it fearful that | 0:50:45 | 0:50:50 | |
she and Boris were about to be expelled. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
On the street she bumped into a plausible seeming fellow, | 0:50:53 | 0:50:57 | |
probably KGB, who gave her a cock-and-bull story | 0:50:57 | 0:51:00 | |
about loving the poet's work. | 0:51:00 | 0:51:01 | |
All Pasternak had to do to be safe, he said, | 0:51:01 | 0:51:04 | |
was to write to Khrushchev assuring him of his allegiance to the USSR. | 0:51:04 | 0:51:08 | |
A letter was sent, but its wording went on to become | 0:51:11 | 0:51:14 | |
a contentious issue in the Pasternak family. | 0:51:14 | 0:51:17 | |
I've come back to Moscow to meet Boris's daughter-in-law, Yelena, | 0:51:17 | 0:51:21 | |
who is very clear about the particular point | 0:51:21 | 0:51:23 | |
Pasternak wanted to make. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
Even given his perilous situation, | 0:52:06 | 0:52:08 | |
Pasternak was still willing to risk riling the Soviet regime, | 0:52:08 | 0:52:13 | |
by making a clear and personal distinction | 0:52:13 | 0:52:16 | |
between the Soviet Union he despised, and the Russia he loved. | 0:52:16 | 0:52:20 | |
Isolated in Peredelkino, Pasternak was reduced to poverty, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:27 | |
not being allowed to accept the Nobel Prize money, | 0:52:27 | 0:52:30 | |
or the considerable royalties from the novel's international sales. | 0:52:30 | 0:52:34 | |
But soon money worries became overshadowed | 0:52:36 | 0:52:39 | |
when Boris was diagnosed with lung cancer. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:43 | |
And just three years after the global success of his novel, | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
he died here in Peredelkino on the 30th of May, 1960. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:52 | |
The Russian Literary Gazette carried only the smallest of notices of his death. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:59 | |
If the Russian authorities wanted Pasternak's death to pass unnoticed, | 0:53:03 | 0:53:08 | |
the Russian people had very different ideas. | 0:53:08 | 0:53:12 | |
Unnoticed by the security guards, | 0:53:12 | 0:53:14 | |
handwritten messages for travellers appeared at the ticket desk here | 0:53:14 | 0:53:18 | |
at Kiyevskaya station. | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
They said, "At three o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday 2nd of June, | 0:53:20 | 0:53:24 | |
"the last leave-taking of Boris Pasternak, | 0:53:24 | 0:53:28 | |
"the greatest poet of modern Russia, will take place." | 0:53:28 | 0:53:31 | |
These little samizdat, or underground funeral announcements, | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
led to thousands of mourners travelling out from Moscow to Peredelkino, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:42 | |
to attend Pasternak's last rites, | 0:53:42 | 0:53:45 | |
in defiance of strict Soviet laws on mass gatherings. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:49 | |
The similarities between Pasternak's own funeral and Yuri's in | 0:54:45 | 0:54:49 | |
David Lean's epic are striking and poignant. | 0:54:49 | 0:54:53 | |
I was astonished at the extent of his reputation. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:57 | |
His work was unattainable at the time, | 0:54:57 | 0:55:00 | |
and was disapproved of by the party. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:02 | |
But if people loved poetry, they loved poets, | 0:55:02 | 0:55:05 | |
and nobody loves poetry like a Russian. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:08 | |
The enmity of the Russian state towards Pasternak continued, | 0:55:08 | 0:55:13 | |
and shortly after the funeral, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:15 | |
Olga and Irina were sent to a labour camp for allegedly receiving | 0:55:15 | 0:55:19 | |
royalties from the West. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:21 | |
It was not until 1988, 30 years after he finished the book, | 0:55:21 | 0:55:26 | |
that it was finally published in Russia in its original form, | 0:55:26 | 0:55:30 | |
and caused an instant sensation. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:32 | |
I love the image of the Moscow Metro in 1988, | 0:55:33 | 0:55:36 | |
and absolutely everybody sitting with their copies of Doctor Zhivago. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:40 | |
You know, a bit like when Harry Potter comes out, and everybody... | 0:55:40 | 0:55:44 | |
-Or Lady Chatterley. -Yes, or Lady Chatterley. | 0:55:44 | 0:55:46 | |
And there were queues snaking round the streets | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
from book shops of people waiting, | 0:55:48 | 0:55:51 | |
spending their hard-earned roubles to get a copy. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:54 | |
So, I think it was definitely worth the wait. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
Judging by the response I have to meeting Russians around the world, | 0:55:57 | 0:56:01 | |
and in Russia, when they discover I am a Pasternak, | 0:56:01 | 0:56:03 | |
it was definitely worth the wait. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:05 | |
The following year, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:07 | |
Pasternak's eldest son, Yevgeni, was allowed to travel to Stockholm | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
and collect the Nobel Prize on behalf of his father. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:16 | |
I feel this is an historic moment. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
When you look at it now, | 0:56:48 | 0:56:49 | |
do you think it was worth all the pain and suffering that he and other | 0:56:49 | 0:56:52 | |
people around him went through? | 0:56:52 | 0:56:55 | |
What struck me throughout has been the extraordinary determination of | 0:57:26 | 0:57:30 | |
Boris Pasternak to abide in Russia, his homeland, | 0:57:30 | 0:57:34 | |
and to live life on his own terms. | 0:57:34 | 0:57:37 | |
He somehow contrived to find hope and promise | 0:57:37 | 0:57:40 | |
amidst incredible setbacks and intolerable pressure. | 0:57:40 | 0:57:45 | |
And that is what makes the epilogue of his book so compelling, | 0:57:45 | 0:57:48 | |
when the friends of Yuri Zhivago are gathered together, | 0:57:48 | 0:57:52 | |
watching the sunset, with a copy of his book in their hands. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:57 | |
"They felt a peaceful joy for this holy city, and for the whole land, | 0:58:00 | 0:58:04 | |
"and for the survivors among those who played a part in this story and | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
"for their children. And the silent music of happiness filled them | 0:58:08 | 0:58:13 | |
"and enveloped them and spread far and wide. | 0:58:13 | 0:58:17 | |
"And it seemed that the book in their hands knew what they were | 0:58:17 | 0:58:21 | |
"feeling, and gave them its support and confirmation." | 0:58:21 | 0:58:24 |