Zhivago's Secret Journey ─ From Typescript to Book

Paolo Mancosu continues an investigation he began in his 2013 book Inside the Zhivago Storm, which the New York Book Review of Books described as "a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes". In this book Mancosu extends his detective work by reconstructing the network of contacts that helped Pasternak smuggle the typescripts of Doctor Zhivago outside the Soviet Union and following the vicissitudes of the typescripts when they arrived in the West. Mancosu draws on a wealth of firsthand sources to piece together the long-standing mysteries surrounding the many different typescripts that played a role in the publication of Doctor Zhivago, thereby solving the problem of which typescript served as the basis of the first Russian edition: a pirate publication covertly orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also offers a new perspective, aided by the recently declassified CIA documents, by narrowing the focus as to who might have passed the typescript to the CIA. In the process, Mancosu reveals details of events that were treated as top secret by all those involved, vividly recounting the history of the publication of Pasternak’s epic work with all its human and political ramifications.

Paolo Mancosu is Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak's Masterpiece (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013) and Smugglers, Rebels, Pirates: Itineraries in the Publishing History of Doctor Zhivago (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2015). He has been a fellow of the Humboldt Stiftung, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Institut d'Etudes Avancees in Paris.