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Lead book review

Doctor Zhivago's long, dark shadow

A review of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée. Boris Pasternak really did defeat the Soviet censors (and not just because he was Stalin's pen-pal). But no one was allowed to do the same again

5 July 2014

9:00 AM

5 July 2014

9:00 AM

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

Harvill Secker, pp.352, £20, ISBN: 9781846557125

For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago.

The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the early 1950s, when Zhivago was nearing completion.

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