The Cloak & Dagger Novel

The publication of the most famous novel of Stalinist Russia owed something to Kiwi diplomatic finesse and can-do.

- Robin Munro

New Zealand diplomats were involved in smuggling an early draft of Doctor Zhivago from under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s nose to the West in the late 1940s, new research indicates. The transfer took place a decade before publication of the novel sparked an international furore.

Its author, Boris Pasternak, was recognised as a great poet in the Soviet Union and beyond; he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1946 to 1950. However, his refusal to follow Communist Party precepts on art had angered the cultural authorities. The poet had friends and family abroad and corresponded with them, despite the danger that the Stalinist police state would brand him as a foreign spy. Making matters worse, Pasternak was of Jewish heritage: both he and his work were condemned in various Kremlin campaigns that were effectively anti-Semitic.

Although Doctor Zhivago paints a negative portrait of Stalinism, agricultural collectivisation, prison camps and the 1930s purges of the Communist Party, the Soviets were mostly concerned about its rejection of the state ideology on literature: it did not deal with the working class or the poor or with the social structures that oppressed them, as officials had prescribed.

The intricately plotted novel tells the story of a physician and poet caught up in the tumult of 20th-century Russian history and torn between his love for two women. Published in the US in 1958, it topped Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list that year. Translated into dozens of languages, it was popular throughout the world. In 1965, David Lean’s movie of the same name, filmed in Spain and starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, was released. It won five Oscars and is in eighth place on the inflation-adjusted list of highest-grossing films.