Doctor Zhivago was published for the first time thanks to the efforts of the Italian, communist and potent editor Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, nicknamed the Jaguar , on November 23, 1957. The manuscript by which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year to the poet and translator Borís Pasternak was taken out of the USSR incognito thanks to the tricks of the journalist Sergio d'Angelo, a collaborator at the time of Radio Moscow. The Feltrinelli publishing press did not stop until 150,000 copies were printed. In 1958, the vicissitudes of Dr. Yuri Zhivago were in the bookstores of the Midwest, including Spain. But the United States, entangled in its particular crusade against the USSR in the middle of the Cold War, wanted to return the blow that had knocked it out after being overcome by its intimate enemy in the space race: Moscow had launched the first satellite that went around the Tierra, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. The CIA believed that if he translated the book written by the most popular poet of the Soviets and filtered it into his territory, the opposition to the regime of disseminating it and causing it to implode among the subjects of Stalin. This is the historical and novel environment of The Secrets We Keep (edited by Seix Barral and translated by Aurora Echevarría), the American novel Lara Prescott now edited.

Can a book change the world? "Yes. Books reach people's hearts and their way of looking at that world . It happened to me with Toni Morrison or Patricia Highsmith. Reading, you look at life with the perspective of other people, ”the novelist Lara Prescott and former collaborator of the Democratic Party tells EL MUNDO, who after reading an article in a newspaper about those adventures, bound by his name (the same as the of the protagonist of Doctor Zhivago according to paternal commitment) and after having dived for a year for the declassified documents on the avatars of the novel he saw no other way out than to write this book, translated into 29 languages ​​and an editorial phenomenon.

Doctor Zhivago , which takes place between 1903 and 1929, in addition to an epilogue in World War II, is "the story of a poet in love in times of war and revolution," writes César Antonio Molina in his essay Zhivago (Editorial Trifolium). «David Lean's film [starring Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger and Alec Guiness, winner of five Oscars and shot in part at Canillas -Madrid-, Salamanca and Soria], affects this issue and avoids any other distractions, although the novel is much richer, more complex, where it reflects on existence, political ideas and human kindness and perversity, ”adds the writer and former Minister of Culture.

The writer Lara Prescott, yesterday in Madrid.BERNARDO DÍAZ

The secrets that we keep swing between how Pasternak (1890-1960) was writing his book and the adventures of a group of US women with studies working as typists (100 words per minute on pale green Royal Quiet Deluxe machines) or secretaries (jerseys of angora, pencil in the bun, disk phones) for the CIA, but none with real power. Between two of them emerges a love that serves Lara Prescott to influence the Lilac Terror: the persecution of homosexuals in the US. «In my book there is no black or white; if there was no freedom in the USSR, in my country there was harassment for reasons of sex since the 1950s. And it lasted for decades, ”he says.

If Pasternak enjoyed a certain immunity, it was because Koba the Fearful liked his poems: "Don't touch that angel," he said. Enlisted in a dacha (between a Swiss chalet and a hangar) of Peredélkino (colony of writers half an hour by train from Moscow), the dictator had him under control . There, they wrote and suffered Iliá Ehrenburg, Isaak Bábel, Yevgueni Yevtushenko ... There Pasternak pampered a garden, strolled among beech and fir forests, translated Shakespeare and died after suffering two heart attacks and rejected by Nobel pressures after being marginalized , accused of dissent and expelled by the almighty Union of Soviet Writers.

Who as a boy had met the great Tolstoy was humiliated and suffered harassment through whom he loved most, Olga Ivinskaya, and whom he immortalized as Lara in Doctor Zhivago . This woman, editor and 22 years younger than him, met a blond Pasternak, strong and marked cheekbones in a recital where he read verses, loved each other and everything, was arrested, suffered interrogations in the dungeons of the fearsome Lubyanka (KGB headquarters) where he lost the son they were expecting, he was sentenced the first time to five years of forced labor (he served three thanks to the pardon for Stalin's death) and, after his writer died, another eight (he left after having supported five). «He left everything related to his work in my hands: the contracts, the programming of the conferences, the payments for his translation work», reads The secrets that we keep . But they only looked startled. Pasternak continued sleeping with his wife. Pasternak and Ivinskaya both died of cancer. He in 1960, two years after the Nobel controversy; She endured 35 more.

In the little essay by Mario Vargas Llosa included in The truth of lies is the portrait of the character Zhivago, although it could also be read as the profile of its creator: "What the discreet Zhivago defends with determination, in his rugged existence, is his right to be as he is: a weak man, lover of truth, of science, of nature, of poetry, to be torn apart by the love of two women, perplexed by history, distrustful of dogmas, unable to get excited for any social reform that erases the individual and transforms it into that abstraction, the mass, the people. "

"The evidence of the Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago was prepared in New York, printed in the Netherlands and transported to a safe house in The Hague at the back of a van with wooden panels». Number of copies: 365 Objective: the Universal Exhibition of Brussels, the first one of relevance after the end of World War II, and where millions of tourists from all over the world were expected, it was not known that Washington was behind the operation and not it will be labeled as American propaganda.The Vatican pavilion housed the blue linen cover copies and some of them traveled inside the instrument cases of the musicians of the Russian Army Choir and in the makeup cases of the Moscow State Circus. This is what is told in the book by Lara Prescott, which at times has an air of a police novel, in the wake of John Le Carré (whose children have already bought the rights to, surely, a TV series).

A phrase from The Secrets We Keep About the tone of that tragedy sustained for so long and delves into abandonment and the anguish Boris Pasternak must have felt when he sensed that everything was over, that son of pianist and painter, of a young student of Philosophy in Moscow and Music at the University of Marburg (Germany) and traveler through Florence: «You have not lived like me. You haven't seen how they took your friends, one by one. Do you know what it is to save you when your friends are dead? ».

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