Senior Service – Carlo Feltrinelli, DTV, 2003

ISBN: 3-423-34016-9

Italian politics of the twentieth century was dominated by corruption and meddlesome failure, D'Annunzio, Mussolini, Andreotti, Berlusconi, all of the right. Once the fascist regime was removed, the post-war Italian left was dominated by the Communist Party, so even the most independently minded thinkers, like film-makers Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Francesco Rosi, found themselves building a critique in the shadow of its politics and ideologies.

The enigma of publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli lies in his rejection of the Party and his strange fate, when he was killed as explosives were being rigged to topple an electricity power line in 1972. Feltrinelli had been a rare asset to the Party, when as a wealthy young man developing a rapidly expanding publishing house, he provided funds and became a very active Party member. As a trusted publisher, Feltrinelli found himself approached by Sergio D'Angelo, an Italian journalist working in Moscow, and he became a key figure in the tragic events surrounding the international publication of Boris Pasternak's ‚Dr. Zhivago', which brought its author the Nobel Prize on one hand and the repressive ire of the Soviet regime on the other. Despite the death of Stalin in 1953, by 1956, the Soviet Union was under enormous international pressure following the invasion of Hungary. Feltrinelli found himself at the centre of an international ‚cause celebre' and in conflict with the Italian Party.

„Senior Service" is written by Feltrinelli's son Carlo, who now heads the publishing firm and brings into the open correspondence between Pasternak and Feltrinelli which had remained sealed in a trunk at the publishing house for forty years. Carlo Feltrinelli contextualises these private documents with reports from the KGB archives in Moscow, which have become available since the end of Communism. At first, the main issue was the possibility that the novel would be published abroad, before its publication in a Russian edition, but the correspondence reveals the lengths to which the Soviet regime went first to delay, then to obstruct publication completely. The novel was published in the autumn of 1957 and year later Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, initiating a campaign of villification in the Soviet Union. After threats to expell him from Russia, Pasternak refused the Nobel Prize, to international consternation that brought the Soviet Union ever deeper into disrepute. Carlo Feltrinelli provides the most detailed account we are ever likely to have of Feltrinelli's role in ‚Zhivago' and provides an insight into the difficulties both author and publisher had to contend with. Needless to say, Feltrinelli left the Italian Communist Party. Pasternak died shortly after in 1961 and a over quarter of a century would pass before the novel was eventually published in the Soviet Union in 1989.

After the intensity of ‚Zhivago', it would have been no surpise to find Feltrinelli pursueing the career of a successful publisher. Indeed, he fostered the ‚63 Group of Italian writers, but the political turmoil of the late nineteen sixties, Feltrinelli's life became a labyrinthine tangle of radical politics, Cuba, Bolivia, Vietnam and ‚permanent revolution' that forced him to live underground and led to his death in 1972. Carlo Feltrinelli was only ten years old when his father was killed and the later chapters of this biography have a poignant personal quality. There are letters from the absent father to his eight year old son, a family chronicle of events in 1968 contrasted with a litany of bombings and crisis, as Italy floundered between protest and violence from left and right.

Set against the compromise politics of European integration, which sees former student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit a member of the European Parliament and Joshka Fischer, German Foreign Minister, Carlo Feltrinelli successfully recaptures the strange logic of that politics of sixties confrontation and the character of an era both denatured and mythologised by the cliches of a generation who are now grandparents.

JC.