Dr. Zhivago, Cold Warrior

[PosterChild]

...few readers know the trials of its birth and how the novel galvanized a world largely divided between the competing ideologies of two superpowers. The CIA’s role — with its publication of a hardcover Russian-language edition printed in the Netherlands and a miniature, paperback edition printed at CIA headquarters — has long been hidden.

Dr. Zhivago, Cold Warrior (Washington Post)

(Long hidden, but suspected none the less.)

[snappyturtle]

1. What a fascinating read! It scares me a bit to be happy about anything the

CIA has done but, in this case, I'm glad. Thanks PosterChild....and Welcome to DU!

[dipsydoodle]

2. Good find.

[Igel]

3. It's a footnote.

The Russian edition would have come out anyway, and a Russian samizdat edition would have quickly started to circulate (if it hadn't already by 1958).

The CIA action sped things up. Yet somehow the general impression you get from the article--because of the focus, the foregrounding of part of the story and backgrounding of most of it--is that the CIA is somehow implicated in the novel's prominence. The only prominence the CIA triggered was making it part of a struggle. It would have gotten there anyway.

A few years later there were commercially available copies of Zhivago in Russian. My first copy had a pale yellow cover, paperback; on very thin yellowish paper with absurdly small print. Perhaps 3.5" x 2.75" and a bit more than 1/2" thick. And still it was in two volumes. One of those editions intended specifically for carrying and use in the USSR.