Italy Bookshops 2025: The Independent Bookshops Worth Seeking Out

How Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published the book the Soviet Union tried to suppress — and why it made him a suspect in Italian political violence

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli's publication of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in 1957 (in the Italian translation — the first publication of the novel anywhere in the world, as Soviet censorship prevented Russian publication) was the single most consequential act in Italian literary publishing history. Feltrinelli had obtained the manuscript through a complex arrangement involving Pasternak's own initiative (Pasternak gave the manuscript to a visiting Italian Communist and specifically requested its publication) and the Italian Communist Party's initial attempt to suppress the publication (fearing Soviet displeasure). Feltrinelli, himself a member of the Italian Communist Party at the time, overrode the party's instructions and published — the novel became an international bestseller, Pasternak was forced to refuse the Nobel Prize, and Feltrinelli's act established him as both the most important Italian literary publisher and a specific enemy of the Soviet cultural establishment. The political radicalization that followed: Feltrinelli's publication of Dr. Zhivago was not an anti-Soviet political act but a publishing judgment; the political radicalization that took him through 1960s revolutionary politics and eventually to direct action came afterward. He died in March 1972 in circumstances that remain officially classified as accidental (he apparently fell from the electrical pylon he was attempting to sabotage near Milan) but that have never been entirely satisfactorily explained.