Stretching from the October Revolution to World War II, Pasternak’s novel exposes the reality of life in Russia in the first half of the 20th century, not the Soviet government’s propagandistic version.
Because he is an artistic man, Yuri Zhivago is especially vulnerable to the harshness of the Bolshevik government. Semi-autobiographical, the epic tells the story of Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and a poet, and the effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917 on Zhivago and his middle-class family. She says that “it is one thing to read about the history, but it is another to explore the same Moscow streets, walk the same village paths, see what Boris and Olga saw sixty years ago.”īoris Pasternak, a Russian poet and writer, completed his magnum opus, Doctor Zhivago, in 1956. Prescott’s research methodology subscribes to the thought: “Read a hundred books, write one.” When she decided to write a novel about the CIA and Doctor Zhivago, she devoured books on “the Cold War, propaganda, CIA history, the lavender scare, Russian history, Boris Pasternak, and much more.” In addition, Prescott traveled to Russia while she was in the middle of writing her first draft.
#The secrets we kept full#
Intrigued and wanting to know more, Prescott started to do some digging of her own and she says, “What I discovered was that the CIA had obtained the banned manuscript, covertly printed it, and smuggled it back into the USSR.” As she read the declassified files, she found them full of redacted names and details and she thought this was the perfect opportunity for her to write a novel that would fill in these gaps. Lara Prescott first learned about the history behind Doctor Zhivago in 2014 when her father sent her a Washington Post article about these declassified CIA documents. Up until that point, not many people knew about the story behind Doctor Zhivago and that the CIA viewed books as weapons during the Cold War, utilizing banned books to fight the Soviets and their propaganda. The true-life back story of Doctor Zhivago first came to light in 2014, when 130 documents and declassified CIA files were released, exposing the CIA “Books Program” of the Cold War era.
While Sally and Irina are fictional characters, the covert spycraft behind Doctor Zhivago is entirely factual. The other half of The Secrets We Kept is told from the perspective of Boris Pasternak and his lover Olga Ivinskaya, the inspiration behind the character of Lara in Doctor Zhivago. The goal of this mission is to make people in the USSR question their government and expose the realities of communist life. Sally, the veteran spy, trains Irina and their mission is to first smuggle Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR in order to publish it and then they must disseminate banned copies of Doctor Zhivago to Soviet citizens. Both women work as typists in the male-dominated CIA, but they are actually spies. Set mainly in the US and the USSR in the 1950s, the two main protagonists in The Secrets We Kept are Sally Forrester and Irina Drozdov. Prescott’s novel reveals the intriguing true-life espionage plot behind Boris Pasternak’s beloved novel, Doctor Zhivago.
#The secrets we kept tv#
The film and TV rights have already been optioned. Selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club for September 2019, the novel was also nominated as a Best Debut Novel in the 11th Annual Goodreads Choice Awards. One of the most highly anticipated historical novels to hit shelves this fall was Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept (Hutchinson, September 2019). The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott Reveals the Story Behind Doctor Zhivago
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