Dr. Zhivago, Cold Warrior
Dr. Zhivago, Cold Warrior (Washington Post)
(Long hidden, but suspected none the less.)
snappyturtle
(14,656 posts)CIA has done but, in this case, I'm glad. Thanks PosterChild....and Welcome to DU!
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)Igel
(35,337 posts)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.