In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village outside Moscow to visit Russia's greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the manuscript of Pasternak's only novel, which Soviet authorities viewed as an unacceptable attack on the 1917 Revolution. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel.
The CIA 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 from friend to friend. Pasternak's funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands who defied their government to bid him farewell.
The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union. First to obtain CIA files providing proof of the agency's involvement, Peter Finn and Petra Couvee give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating Cold War era when literature had the power to stir the world.