= Both volumes with owner's inscription dated "Paris '66". Vol.1 first two text-leaves with some underlings in black ballpoint; vol.2 some very faint waterstains on frontwrapper. Very good copies. Doctor Zhivago, the masterpiece that won Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize in 1958, had its first worldwide edition in 1957 in Italian. The events surrounding its publication, whose protagonists were Boris Pasternak and the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, undoubdtedly count as one of the most fascinating stories of the twentieth century. It is a story that saw the involvement of governments, political parties, secret services, and publishers.
Preceded only by a near unobtainable hardcover edition in blue linen covers distributed by the Vatican stall at the 1958 Brussels World Fair (Expo 58). Following the successful distribution of this first thousand Russian-language copies of Doctor Zhivago, the agency decided to fund a second print run.
The CIA arranged this printing of the text specifically for circulation within the USSR, as an act of cultural propaganda against the Soviet regime. To this purpose, the format of the present issue might be considered the most perfect of the variant issues seen the use of India paper makes it the smallest of the 'at least four different formats' noted by Paolo Mancosu in his work Inside the Zhivago Storm. The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak's Matsterpiece (only a couple of which like this copy in two-volumes with the impriint and price printed on backwrappers). It conforms in that respect to the outline given in recently declassified CIA documents regarding this operation, where is described: a 'miniature edition (...) distributed primarily by legal travelers going to the Soviet Union (...) designed so that it could be easily concealed (...) inside a man's suit or trouser pocket', to be printed 'on bible stock (or similar light weight paper) (...) something like a small "pocketbook'".
The present edition was published after the true first edition printed at Mouton, The Hague (with imprint Feltrinelli) on which it was based and probably also after the Feltrinelli and the University of Michigan Press editions of 1959, but it is certainly the first edition intended exclusively for the Russian market and specifically designed for smuggling into the USSR. This two-volume miniature lightweight paperback edition (for ease of mailing or concealment) was again funded by the CIA in an edition of 7,000 copies for individuals who would take them into the Soviet Union and leave them for others to discover, and 2,000 copies that would be distributed at the 7th World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna later that year. Distribution of the miniature version began in April 1959. These fragile paper-bound volumes were particularly prone to damage or destruction an dnot many are copies are likely to have survived - let alone complete copies of the two-volume edition.
This pirated edition played a significant and distinct role in establishing the cultural status of the text, and encapsulates in a particularly visual way the use of literature as Cold War agent.