"How a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia's greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak's first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: 'This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.' Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak's funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union. A literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War -- to a time when literature had the power to stir the world"--Provided by publisher.

Prologue: This is Doctor Zhivago : may it make its way around the world -- The roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off -- Pasternak, without realizing it, entered the personal life of Stalin -- I have arranged to meet you in a novel -- You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel? -- Until it is finished, I am a fantastically, manically unfree man -- Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture -- If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well I must say we have a different view of it -- We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain -- We'll do it black -- He also looks the genius : raw nerves, misfortune, fatality -- There would be no mercy, that was clear -- Pasternak's name spells war -- I am caught like a beast at bay -- A college weekend with Russians -- An unbearably blue sky -- It's too late for me to express regret that the book wasn't published -- Afterword.