First published in Italy in 1958, Doctor Zhivago was not released in the Soviet Union until 1989. The story of Yuri Zhivago, it outlined the history of the Russian Revolution and aftermath not as an epochal event for humanity but as a complicated event registered in the soul of a man who was very much an individual. Soviet logic demanded that it be banned. American cold war logic demanded that the book be embraced, though to celebrate it merely as propaganda was to do Pasternak the writer a terrible disservice. Pasternak’s real achievement, in Zhivago, had been to liberate himself from politics. Yet such liberation was inevitably a political act in the Soviet Union, and it was a political act outside the Soviet Union as well. “One of the great events in man’s literary and moral history,” according to Edmund Wilson, Doctor Zhivago was also the blunt object of cold war struggle, regarded with sustained attention by heads of state, by heads of the secret police and by the heads of intelligence services.

Peter Finn, a journalist at The Washington Post, and Petra Couvee, a Russian academic, trace the history of this singular novel in The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle of a Forbidden Book. Their riveting, well-researched book reads like a literary thriller: the cloak (espionage), the dagger (persecution), and the pen (literature) combined in ways that only the cold war could have made possible.

Born in 1890, Pasternak was a child of the Moscow intelligentsia. Before World War I, he traveled and studied in Western Europe. Though his parents and sisters would eventually settle in the West, Pasternak stayed at home. Though “never openly hostile to Soviet power,” as Finn and Couvee put it, his poetic gifts made Soviet power interested in him. In 1922, he was summoned to meet Trotsky. Hung over, Pasternak defended literary individualism when Trotsky pressed him to write about social themes; Trotsky was charmed nevertheless. Later on, Pasternak had an avid reader in Joseph Stalin who famously telephoned Pasternak: “‘I have long wanted to meet you for a serious discussion,’ Pasternak said. ‘What about?’ Stalin asked. ‘About life and death.’ Stalin hung up.” In 1936, Pasternak wrote several poems in praise of Stalin, but when asked to endorse the execution of some persona non grata he refused. Pasternak was never an outright dissident, but neither was he a conformist. The poet Mandelstam paid for his poetry with his life, the poet Anna Akhmatova was maneuvered into silence or into a kind of private poetry. At a time of immense ideological pressure, Pasternak maintained his autonomy.

Joseph Stalin famously telephoned Pasternak: “I have long wanted to meet you for a serious discussion," Pasternak said.

Pasternak the nonconformist was lucky to survive the 1930s. “Leave him. He’s a cloud dweller,” Stalin declared when Pasternak’s arrest was contemplated. Pasternak spent the war years translating Shakespeare, and in 1945, he began work on what would become Doctor Zhivago, a star-crossed venture from the start. “I don’t believe they will ever publish it,” he prophesied. Pasternak could not desist, however, from completing a novel in which “everything is named in simple, transparent and sad words.” The transparency—the inversion of socialist realism, which required a language in harmony with Soviet officialdom and its version of reality—was his revolutionary gesture. But the “cloud-dweller” still had to live on earth; Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, was interrogated and imprisoned because of her connection to him. If he could not be brought into line directly, if he could not be forced into socialist realism, he could still be threatened and prevented being in public the writer he was in private. He was a Soviet artist living in a prison without bars...

In 1956, a chance meeting with an Italian visitor resulted in the manuscript’s secret transmission to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian communist and a publisher who quickly grasped the novel’s significance. Feltrinelli did not consider the book anti-Soviet. He simply thought it was great literature. Defying Soviet pressure, Feltrinelli ushered the book into print in 1957. The Nobel Prize was offered a year later; a Hollywood film followed in 1965; and the novel’s fame spread across the globe. In strictly literary terms, Zhivago’s success had its limits: The New York Times labeled it “a respectable achievement,” while Vladimir Nabokov dismissed it as a “sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic.” (Zhivago overtook Lolita on The New York Times bestsellers list.) But the author’s courage lent the novel a meaning apart from literature.