Rather than a novel, I wish the author [of The Nobel Prize], Yuri Krotkov, had written a memoir on this subject which he knew at first hand, as a leading literary figure in Soviet Russia at the time and an insider to political circles…. Much of the detail I have no doubt is authentic: the houses and habits of life of Pasternak and Khrushchev, for example, I assume were as Krotkov describes them. Often he clearly departs from what he could have witnessed or reliably learned, but I'm willing to grant him this novelist's prerogative so long as he exercises it to good effect. Sometimes he does, as in the story he tells about the Khrushchevs's reading of Doctor Zhivago. The Soviet premier didn't bother to read the novel whose author he decided must be threatened, vilified, coerced by any means to renounce the Nobel Prize. Instead he...