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Lara PrescottA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The power of literature to change minds, move emotions, and raise questions is well-known. For Teddy Helms, it was the words of Russian writers who got him through his depression after his brother died. Despite his parents’ best efforts, he reflects, “[I]t wasn’t my parents or the doctor they forced me to ‘just talk to’ that pulled me out of it; it was The Brothers Karamazov. Then Crime and Punishment, then The Idiot, then everything the man ever wrote. Dostoyevsky threw me a rope in the fog and began to tug” (195). Through literature, Teddy was able to reevaluate life and what was meaningful to him. He changed his major from prelaw to Slavic languages and thus was able to have a career in the Agency’s Soviet Russia Division. The idea of literature as a balm and a weapon appears here in the former sense.
Like Teddy, the CIA considered literature to have power over people and so hired agents “who believed in the long game of changing people’s ideology over time” by disseminating “books that made the Soviets look bad: books they banned, books that criticized the system, books that made the United States look like a shining beacon” (197). As Doctor Zhivago is a romance, the mission objective is not just to expose Soviet readers to the anti-Stalinist or anti-Revolutionist ideas within but to make the citizens wonder why the Communist Party “did not allow free thought—how the Red State hindered, censored, and persecuted even its finest artists” (130) and why it would ban a love story. The protagonist, Yuri, is a surgeon and poet and, like the author Boris Pasternak, is bound by affection and duty to his wife but drawn by passion and inspiration to his mistress, Lara. Yet the backdrop, which starts around the time of the 1905 Revolution and goes to World War II, shows the unfeeling mechanisms of the State. Thus, the CIA views it as “the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death,” a work with “‘great propaganda value’ for its ‘passive but piercing exposition of the effect of the Soviet system on the life of a sensitive, intelligent citizen’” (131).
Doctor Zhivago joins the ranks of novels like Animal Farm and 1984, both by George Orwell, as useful propaganda, but what makes it so important is that Doctor Zhivago’s author is Russian, not an outsider criticizing the Soviet systems from abroad. Teddy states that Doctor Zhivago is “not just a book, but a weapon—and one the Agency wanted to obtain and smuggle back behind the Iron Curtain for its own citizens to detonate” (131). It is internally a balm for the true people of the Soviet Union and a weapon against the false people of the country, the tools of the state apparatus.
Literature is also used against its creators and promoters. Both Boris and Olga know that the international publication of the book increases the chances that one or both of them will be arrested, imprisoned, or possibly even killed, and winning the Nobel Prize raises those dangers even more. When Ira brings home a bootleg copy of Doctor Zhivago, Olga is furious and asks her daughter if she realizes it’s “a loaded pistol,” to which Ira replies that Olga is “the one who bought the bullets” (309), referring to Olga’s help as Boris’s emissary and inspiration for Lara. It hurts those personally involved in it even while helping the public, the country of individuals.
The power discrepancies between men and women in the 1950s are on clear display in this story. The prologue primes the reader for an environment in which educated, skilled, and experienced women are relegated to secretarial positions while men with similar, or even fewer, talents are promoted above them. In situations where women are not allowed to succeed on the same playing field, it becomes necessary to use “soft power,” the term for less direct, less quantifiable talents. Add to the situation the demands of espionage work, and certain aspects of a personality that may not garner success in the outside world become hidden talents. In a gendered sense, particularly in the 1950s, female soft power and hidden is demonstrated.
During her time in the OSS, Sally learned that using her so-called feminine wiles was a valuable asset in spy-craft: “Surely the craft took more than smiling and laughing at stupid jokes and pretending to be interested in everything these men said. […] It was at that first party that I became a Swallow: a woman who uses her God-given talents to gain information” (66). With her red hair and stylish wardrobe, she draws men’s attention. Standing out could be a liability for a spy, but for a Swallow, it is an asset for seduction. She continued using those skills after the OSS disbanded, targeting wealthy men who could keep her in fashionable clothes and a nice apartment. To some, that may look like dependence, but to Sally it was using her power: “These men thought they were using me, but it was always the reverse; my power was making them think it wasn’t” (66). This repeats the bird imagery weaved throughout the story.
To her male colleagues, Sally’s method of spying may not seem respectable. Part of that opinion springs from the general milieu of sexist attitudes about what women are capable of. This is seen in the assessment of the women in the typing pool who look up to Sally, stating, “Her perceived power may have come from the tightness of her skirt, but her real power was that she never accepted the roles men assigned her. They might’ve wanted her to look pretty and shut up, but she had other plans” (226). Her talents are also downplayed, hidden, because of this male view of their lack of respectability.
Irina learns to develop her own hidden talents and soft power. She is uncertain why she was hired because she knows it was not for her typing. Her Russian background is a big part of the hiring decision, but so is what the other typists realize about her: “What made Irina stand out in the typing pool was precisely that Irina didn’t stand out in the typing pool. Despite the winning lottery of ingredients comprising her physical appearance, she had the ability to go unnoticed” (221). When, embarrassed that Teddy gives her roses, she stammers that she doesn’t like to be the center of attention, Teddy jokes that that is the “talent” that got her hired (121). Irina gets a taste of Sally’s skills in her relationship with Teddy. Though Irina is not against premarital sex, she claims to be abstinent to avoid having sex with Teddy, whose “restrained desire made [her] feel powerful, and that was a revelation” (160). In her life before joining the company, she felt unattractive and unnoticed, but she realizes that she does have an asset in manipulating men. The manipulation is not limited to Teddy, though. When confronted by Anderson about her suspicious involvement with Sally, Irina swears there is nothing between them and that she isn’t “like that.” This denial of who she really is and how she feels is an important moment for her because the Agency taught her to lie and how to be a different person, so “turning [her] new power back on them felt good” (260).
In essence, the soft power of the women in the story originates in their male counterparts’ underestimation of their abilities. It is a gendered power specific to their milieu and environment.
Different expectations of loyalty, and the accompanying sense of betrayal when it is broken, are at play in this story. There is loyalty to one’s spouse, one’s company, or one’s country. The author explores what inspires loyalty and what causes betrayal. The novel demonstrates various interweaving forms of private and public loyalty and betrayal.
Boris presents the most complex and pointed examples of loyalty and betrayal. A moment that haunts the writer is when Stalin personally called him to ask why he had not stood up for his friend and fellow writer Osip, who had been imprisoned. While Boris had refused to condemn him, he also did not defend him, even to Stalin. He considers himself a coward for that, someone who was disloyal not only to his friend but also to their shared art. His personal relationships also show a mix of loyalty and betrayal, as he openly has a mistress but will not leave his wife. Neither woman cares for the arrangement, but each gets some measure of what she wants from him—perhaps stability in Zinaida’s case and passion in Olga’s.
The most poignant question of loyalty, however, concerns his relationship to Russia. Doctor Zhivago speaks to the common person and acknowledges their suffering as well as their beauty as individuals. However, in an era when Russia is equivalent with Stalinism and the Communist Party, Pasternak’s writing that calls into question the October Revolution and Stalinist ideas is seen as heretical to the State. Party leaders, newspapers, and television broadcasts call him “a Judas, a pawn who’d sold himself for thirty pieces of silver, an ally of those who hated our country, a malicious snob whose artistic merit was modest at best” (291). Despite not being loyal to the Communist Party, Boris remains loyal to Russia, even when it would be safer for all if he emigrated, because “he’d be lost without Mother Russia. […] He’d rather die as a traitor on Russian soil than live as a free man abroad” (313). The novel shows the weaving interplay between loyalty and betrayal in public and private spheres.
Irina is on the reverse side of loyalty to Russia. Though she feels a fondness for the “Russianness” she sees in her mother, the death of her father at the hands of the State right before he was to emigrate to the US gives Irina a feeling of enmity toward the Soviet government. The CIA flagged that aspect of her background as a valuable asset, believing that “such deep anger ensures a type of loyalty to the Agency that patriotism never can” (116). Essentially, they believe she has a built-in hatred for the enemy that they can trust.
Loyalty, however, is a two-way street, especially when it comes to employment. Sally is a faithful government employee until she realizes that the Agency, or at least the individual men who make it up, does not respect her and will also turn a blind eye to her rape. She suddenly sees that it is not a fair exchange, stating, “I was certain they’d continue to use me until the honey dried up,” in reference to her work as a “honey-trap” or swallow (212). Not only does she become a double agent and inform on Henry for revenge; she also defects to the Soviet side, and she sees that that capability to turn disloyal was in her all along, stating of defectors that they “often defect because of their own interests—money, power, ideology, revenge” (285). If Sally can’t have respect, she’ll take revenge; if she can’t have loyalty, she’ll take betrayal.