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Working and typesetting manuscript trees and the first and
early editions of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The publication history of the most important Russian novel of the Twentieth Century is alarmingly complicated. Dealer descriptions, especially on the internet, no matter how well-intended, are often filled with errors and incorrect assumptions.

To the best of my knowledge there is no published descriptive bibliography of this work's first and early editions in Russian, Italian, French and English. The chronology appended below should, therefore, be helpful to dealers and collectors, though it must be considered provisional until further research is published.

The holograph manuscript tree and the Cyrillic typescript tree of Doctor Zhivago are so complicated that they may never be sorted out, but in this article we will try to arrange a chronology of the writing of the novel and the first and early editions in Italian (the true first edition), French, Russian and English. I will be as brief as possible, and as accurate as current published information and my experience with the book will allow.

In the winter of 1945/6 Boris Pasternak, long acknowledged and loved as one of Russia's greatest poets, had resumed writing actively on a major prose work that had been chronically delayed by the war and by translation assignments he had taken on in order to make a living. But, in a very real sense, Boris Pasternak had been working on this masterpiece all his life.

Boris Pasternak was born in 1890 into a cultured and artistic urban Jewish family. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a well-known Moscow artist and professor of art, and had been the portraitist of such cultural and literary lions as Rilke, Rachmaninoff, and even Tolstoy. Boris's mother, Rosa Kaufman Pasternak, was an accomplished pianist. In this encouraging environment, the young Pasternak was exposed to, and absorbed, an immersion course in music, literature, philosophy and art. His early fluency in English and German provided a source of income whenever needed and Pasternak particularly excelled in rendering Goethe, Rilke, and Shakespeare into superb Russian versions (although in one of his letters he states it is now time for him to "spoil" Faust). By 1917 he had published his first collection of original poems, and from that point forward -- though suffering periods of financial strain -- was never out of the literary and cultural limelight of Soviet Russia. Like all of his generation, much of his existence and worldview was defined through, or against, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath of Stalinism. The Revolution, and its subsequent growing suppression of artistic and social freedoms would dominate his literary exisitence, especially as he moved from poetry to more controversial prose with work on his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago.

As early as February 1946, Pasternak optimistically told a friend that the novel would be ready by that summer, but some translating and critical notes on Shakespeare intervened. Meanwhile, a brief fifteen-month post-war period of relative liberalism came to an abrupt end during August 1946 when the Party Central Committee passed the resolution "On the Magazines Zvezda and Leningrad" which denounced the publication of material "hostile or alien to the interests of Soviet literature."

Despite his high expectations, by the end of 1946 Pasternak had only a draft of the first two chapters, introducing the key characters of Zhivago and Lara. Even with only this portion in hand, Pasternak had already begun private readings among friends. Pieces of the working drafts of Zhivago began being circulated in the Russian underground literary community, and being smuggled to the West through Oxford, as early as 1948. Books covering the subject seem to refer to both typescripts and holograph manuscripts as "manuscripts" so it is not always clear as to whether a document under discussion in any particular instance is handwritten or typed. Pasternak's copyist and typist during the writing of Zhivago was Marina Baranovich. Chapter 3 was debuted in a reading of April 1947. During the late 'forties, some of the "Zhivago poems" were integral to the text rather than appended, as in the final form of the book. It is clear from remarks and correspondence that Pasternak was attempting a grand novel in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (he even mentions Dickens); he considered the work important. By mid-1948 Pasternak had a full plot and story arc worked out. Several of the poems and portions of prose drafts were in circulation among friends in pencil holograph and typed versions. By then end of the summer 1948 Marina Baranovich had produced a dozen or so typescripts and carbons from Pasternak's continuing revisions. Four complete chapters were smuggled out to friends at Oxford in December 1948. Pasternak encouraged his friends to make and circulate fair copies but warned against any attempts to print the material, either in Russian or in translation, because such publication "would threaten me with disastrous, not to say fatal, consequences, since the spirit in which it is written and my situation here make its appearance impossible." (letter of 12 December 1948 to F.K. Pasternak and family).

In 1950 and 1951 readings continued among friends and family as subsequent chapters of the novel reached completion. By August 1952 Marina Baranovich had typed a version through Chapter 7, and by October, Chapter 8. Zinaida Pasternak, Boris's second wife, was making fair copies for distribution, some of which Boris used for rewrites. By autumn of 1953 the poetic cycle of Chapter 17 was finished in holograph and in December Marina Baranovich typed the last of the poems. The final order was established in the notebooks of 1955. The full text was rewritten extensively through 1954 and 1955. At his residence in the Soviet Writers' Village of Peredelkino, Pasternak continued to revise and polish the novel until telling Baranovich on 5 August 1955 that the Zhivago manuscript in its "second redaction" was ready for her to type it again -- from about 600 holograph notebook pages. She had this ready by September and Pasternak did his final holograph revisions on this typescript, from which Baranovich prepared the "final" typescript. Pasternak informed several friends on 10 December 1955 that the novel was finally finished to his satisfaction, though in one letter he confided that he knew that, given the current political climate, the novel was "completely unfit for publishing."

Going into the New Year (1956) Pasternak hired another typist to produce a fresh typescript with multiple carbons. Some of these went to the journals Znamya and Novy mir and various friends and acquaintances. Pasternak made some changes to some of these in holograph. This profusion of typescripts by two typists -- some with different authorial revisions -- plus many partial fair copies -- led to the future confusion of editors of Russian language editions for decades.

Typescripts in Cyrillic and some holograph notes escaped through various routes to other Iron Curtain nations and to the West. The unpublished, and perhaps unpublishable novel, was becoming a cause celebre in literary circles of the West. This stir did not escape the attention of the controversial Italian Communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli of Milan, who dispatched a young correspondent named Sergio D'Angelo to visit Pasternak in the Soviet Union and try to obtain a typescript. Much to everyone's surprise, Pasternak did give young D'Angelo a typescript, but one that had not been proofed by him. He never expected it to be any more than a sample; certainly he did not expect it to become the translating master for the first edition in Italian. Once Feltrinelli had the typescript in hand he began to try to obtain the rights to publish in Italy in Italian. Pasternak agreed to such an arrangement. Feltrinelli set the accomplished translator Pietro Zveteremich to work on the novel in Rome. Meanwhile other typescripts had gone to Czechoslovakia and Poland.

By this time the KGB had issued a communiqué describing Zhivago as " a heinous calumny" thus making its potential publication an affair of the state. At this point the Soviet journal Novy mir officially turned down the novel. The Novy mir rejection, backed up by a Central Committee decision was certainly very bad news, but Goslitizdat (the official State literary publisher) had not yet decided what course it would take, and that decision would be the determining factor within th e Soviet Union. Many of Pasternak's friends and family in Russia and England (notably Isaiah Berlin, who also had a typescript of the work) tried to persuade Pasternak to postpone or cancel the pending Italian edition. The Oxford circle of friends and family already had set Manya Harari and Max Hayward to work translating the couple of typed versions they had there into English. Pasternak had given one of the "best" typescripts to Jacqueline de Proyart, a Radcliffe-Harvard PhD graduate who was attending courses at Moscow University, and with it his authority for her to prepare a French translation for the publishing house Gallimard upon her return to Paris, and, most significantly, for her to use to prepare the first foreign publication of the novel in Russian. She suggested the publishing firm of Mouton in The Hague. Jacqueline de Proyart's involvement, and the lack of clear definition of her involvement, led to a great deal of confusion and conflict between her and Feltrinelli -- putting Pasternak awkwardly and uncomfortably in between the two.

Poltical pressure within the Soviet Union led to Goslitizdat's cancellation of their publication plans for Zhivago, and, further, the State was attempting to recover the escaped typescript in Italy through pro-Soviet channels there, and thus prevent the Feltrinelli edition. Feltrinelli, though an avowed Communist, declared he would sooner leave the Party than break his commitment to Pasternak and this great novel. In February of 1957 Goslitizdat sent a letter to Feltrinelli asking for him to delay his publication, under the falsehood of their still trying to prepare a Russian edition. Feltrinelli agreed to delay publication until September. But he didn't want to wait any longer than that. He wanted to publish the first edition so as to have international copyright control and he knew that translations were already in the works in English, French, German, Czech and Polish -- any of which would jeopardize his controlling position.

It is difficult to re-create, or even fathom, the intricate high-level machinations by the Soviets to suppress the publication of this novel. But the novel was too powerful to be stopped. In the late summer of 1957, much to the consternation of the Soviet powers-that-were, some of the religious poems of Zhivago were printed in Grani (a Russian-émigré journal based in Germany) and some excerpts from the text of the novel were printed in the Polish journal Opinie. Pasternak came under official investigation as to how these journals received the texts. Soviet officials, and their not-so-official agents, were doing all they could to squash the pending editions in Italian, French and English, but their efforts along those lines were doomed to failure.

On 22 November 1957 the Italian translation of Doctor Zhivago was published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore of Milan, amidst a huge amount of publicity and controversy. The highly anticipated first printing of 6,000 or 6,300 copies (depending on source; Feltrinelli reported 12,000 units but that number is not supported) sold out the first day; many reprints followed immediately. The novel was greeted as a major artistic triumph (almost unanimously, though Nabokov was a voice of strong dissent) Other translations were now being rushed into readiness.

Once Feltrinelli had opposed the Soviets and gone forward, the floodgates were open. The work was too strong to be stopped. Soviet pressure on Gallimard was ineffective and their pressure on Pasternak to stop Gallimard was also ineffective because Gallimard was legally contracted with Feltrinelli, not Pasternak. The Gallimard edition, in French, with unnamed translators was released on 23 June 1958. At this point Feltrinelli was the controlling publisher of the novel and he consolidated and maximized his influence, even writing to Jacqueline de Proyart, Mouton, and the University of Michigan Press to forbid their publishing any Russian-language editions they had in the works. The University of Michigan was planning to publish their edition of Doctor Zhivago as part of their projected multi-volume critical edition of the collected works of Pasternak. Other publication schemes were in the works because of the above-mentioned proliferation of manuscripts and typescripts throughout Europe and Russian. But Feltrinelli was quite effective, at least in the beginning, in asserting and maintaining his control.

Through a court order in The Hague, Feltrinelli stopped the Mouton publication in Russian. It was well known that Pasternak was under serious consideration for a Nobel Prize in Literature and because of complications involving whether or not the novel itself would be considered part of his Nobel acheivement and candidature, publication in the Russian language had to be no later than August 1958. Since Mouton was ahead of him in preparedness for the press, Feltrinelli allowed Mouton to go to press, but over his imprint. This edition of a few hundred copies was published on 24 August. Some copies of this printing were pirated without the Feltrinelli imprint title-page and were available at the Vatican Pavilion of the Brussels World Fair until October, some say with the connivance of the CIA and perhaps the British Secret Service, MI6. Within a few months of the Mouton edition over the Feltrinelli imprint, Feltrinelli issued his "real" edition in Milan, but with a 1957 date and a slug line securing his copyright through the precedence of his Italian version. Thus, Feltrinelli secured his position as publisher of the Nobel candidate. What was not yet clear to Mouton and Feltrinelli was that they were not working from the best available Cyrillic typescript: supposedly that in the possession of Jacqueline de Proyart in Paris being used for the French translation. It would be years before a reasonable accurate critical edition in Russian would appear.

In late August, with official publication dates of September 1958, the acclaimed English-language translation by Manya Harari and Max Hayward appeared in New York via Pantheon and in London via Collins and Harvill.

In December of 1958, with a title-page reading 1959, the University of Michigan Press at Ann Arbor published their first edition in Russian: they had a revised second edition out by February 1959. Some argue that the Michigan editions as the first "authorized" editions in Russian, but the case is not crystal clear: there is a decent argument that the Dutch and Italian printings in Russian had at one time or another been, or at least seemed to have been, authorized) or at least condoned) by Pasternak -- or Feltrinelli, believing himself to be Pasternak's authorized representative on the matter.

Numerous translations into many languages around the world followed.

Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Under intense pressure from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak was forced to decline the award. In a published letter from Pasternak to Khrushchev (Pravda, 1 November 1958, purporting to by Pasternak but actually composed by Olga Ivinskaya) Pasternak publicly rejects the Nobel Prize, but refuses to apologize, closing with the phrase: "With my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature and I can still be useful to it."

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the towering icon of Russian poetry and prose of the Twentieth Century, died in May 1960 at his residence in the Soviet writers' community of Peredelkino.

Chronological Bibliography of the First Editions of Doctor Zhivago.

True First Edition, in Italian.

Feltrinelli's edition, the true first. Translated by Pietro Zveteremich in Rome. Translation completed 18 June 1957. Published November 1957 over the imprint Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore.

First Edition in French.

The Gallimard edition seen through the press by Jacqueline de Proyart. Anonymous translation.

First Edition in Russian

[title page in Cyrillic:] Boris Leonidovich Pasternak/Doctor/Zhivago/A Novel/G Feltrinelli - Milan/1958. [actually:] [The Hague: Mouton, 1958]

This very limited Dutch pirate (or semi-authorized) edition in Russian precedes the genuine Milan Feltrinelli edition in Russian of later 1958 and the University of Michigan edition in Russian dated 1959, but actually December 1958. The Milan printing and the Ann Arbor printing are often mis-identified as first printings in Russian, but they are both preceded by this Dutch printing which is identifiable by its inclusion of the word "novel" on the title-page, a two-page Introduction (dated 1 August 1958), and a text page count of 634 pages. The first printing by Feltrinelli drops "novel" from the title-page, lacks the two-page Introduction, and runs to only 567 pages.

Original publisher's blue glazed buckram, spine lettered in gilt in Cyrillic, issued without a dustjacket.

This was the principal edition available at the Brussels World's Fair, but another edition, possibly under the aegis of the CIA, was available with no publisher statement on the title-page and no printing on the spine; this may have been orchestrated by the CIA with the cooperation of the University of Michigan as is it reported to be of the same typesetting as their edition, which was about to be published (vide infra). Rumors have circulated of a further CIA piracy in two small volumes; I have no details.

First editions in English

September 1958 in New York by Pantheon and, simultaneous or just thereafter, in London by Collins & Harvill, both using the well-respected translation of Max Hayward and Manya Harari. Very quickly on the heels of their first edition, Pantheon issued an illustrated edition.

Second (or Third) Edition in Russian

This is the "official" Feltrinelli imprint actually printed in Milan, not The Hague, issued in late 1958 or early 1959. The title-page is in Cyrillic but "Feltrinelli" and "Milan" are printed in Latin type (Feltrinelli Editore Milano); no date on title-page. With a copyright-page slug reading: "Prima Edizione Mondiale in Lingua Italiana; Novembre 1957." Issued in dustjacket, except for a limitation of 300 within the first edition that were issued in leatherette. The general trade edition was bound in pale green paper with black lettering; white dustjacket with pictorial design on front cover and black and white photograph of Pasternak on the back. 567 pages.

Third (or Second) Edition in Russian

This is the University of Michigan Press edition, printed in Ann Arbor in December 1958 with a publication date and title-page date of 1959. 566 pages. Orange cloth, issued without a dustjacket. Sometimes catalogued as the first "authorized" edition. This is probably correct, but such a claim may not be able to be substantiated in the general confusion of rights if, in fact, Pasternak had ever "authorized" Feltrinelli to publish in Russian, as Feltrinelli claims. The second printing by Michigan in February 1959 already incorporated textual changes. (Feltrinelli's 1961 edition (his Third Edition) in Russian was "authorized" and incorporated revisions using the manuscript that had been in the hands of Jacqueline de Proyart.

Sources:

Barnes, Christopher. Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Volume 2, 1928-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. I assume this to be the best available source, though I wish it had a better foot-noting and sourcing apparatus, especially, of course, in the matters of manuscripts, typescripts, and printings.

Borisov, Vadim and Evgeni Pasternak. "The History of Boris Pasternak's Novel 'Doctor Zhivago'" in Soviet Literature, 2 (1989), pp. 137-50. They report, sadly, that Pasternak used preparatory notebooks and holograph draft sketches as fuel for his stove.

Feltrinelli, Carlo. Senior Service. London: Granta Books, 2001. Well-intentioned but not 100% reliable. Carlo Felrinelli's memoirs of his father, Giangiacomo.

Fleishman, Lazar. Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1990.

Ivinskaya, Olga. A Captive of Time. NY: Doubleday, 1978. Unreliable, self-serving.

Proffer, Carl R. Widows of Russia and Other Writings. Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ardis, 1987.

Special Thanks to John Wronoski, Lame Duck Books.

lee@biondirarebooks.com