Anna Akhmatova on the affair

Anna Akhmatova dismissed Pasternak's ordeal [after foreign publication of Zhivago and his joyful acceptance, and then coerced rejection, of the Nobel Prize for Literature] as inconsequential. . . .

Akhmatova continued to believe that Doctor Zhivago was a bad novel, "except for the landscapes," and that Pasternak was too self-satisfied with his martyrdom and his fame.

Pasternak signed a trumped-up public letter of contrition.

Say the authors,

In Ryazan, a schoolteacher named Alexander Solzhenitsyn "writhed with shame for him."

Still, some people thought a lot of the novel - though perhaps not actually as a work of literature.

Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker wrote,

Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history. 

Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state . . . who did not have the courage of genius.

Reading The Zhivago Affair.