Doktor Zhivago's Cold War

My dissertation project, Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War, follows the global travels of Boris Pasternak’s novel as it becomes a key text in the propaganda politics of the 1950s. The story I tell contributes to scholarly understandings of literature as covert warfare by analyzing a primary archive and offering new insight into the cultural dimensions of the Cold War. I reimagine what a literary history means in a global frame by considering how different actors—CIA agents, publishers, and readers in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Italy—approached Doktor Zhivago as both a fictional text and a political weapon. Taken together, the chapters of Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War offer a global story of Pasternak’s novel in order to draw a more comprehensive picture of literature’s importance as propaganda during the Cold War. The history I offer revises our understanding of the globality of Cold War cultural politics.