Doktor Zhivago. [Doctor Zhivago] A novel.

True first Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.

When Doctor Zhivago was banned for printing in USSR, Boris Pasternak sold rights for the publication to Italian editor Feltrinelli. The further story is complicated and confusing. It was the cause of several monographs on the period of manuscript's travelling and the appearance of the first edition. Among them The washed Pasternak's novel by Ivan Tolstoy (Petersburg, Vremya, 2009, Russian edition) and Inside The Zhivago Storm by Paolo Mancosu (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2013).

The Central Intelligence Agency posted to its public website nearly hundred documents that clarified the CIA's role in publishing of this edition on April 2014.

According to these documents the CIA intervened because there was no Russian edition of the text that could serve as a formal obstacle to award the Nobel Prize to Pasternak.

Paolo Mancosu wrote about a stranger who came to Mouton with photostats of proofs of the typeset of this text in July, 1958. He ordered approximately one thousand copies to be printed in two months (p. 129).

So Feltrinelli's name was cited as a publisher to confirm his rights, but at the same time publishers forgot to print copyright information on verso of the title-page.

Ivan Tolstoy wrote about the man who typeseted this text in Germany in Central Union of Postwar Emerges.

Books were distributed to Soviet visitors at the Brussles International World Fair, CIA's website wrote about 355 copies of Doctor Zhivago that had been surreptitiously handed out by the end of the Fair.

Quite few copies were preserved in private collections till nowadays. Ivan Tolstoy noticed that his father's copy, which he brought from Brussels' Fair as a diplomat, had been lost "in the years of lending and relending". It was the life of the copies of this edition in Soviet Russia.