In the summer of 1956, Russian poet Boris Pasternak - a favorite of recently deceased Joseph Stalin - delivered his epic Doctor Zhivago manuscript to a Soviet publishing house, hoping for a warm reception and a fast track to readers who had shared Russia's torturous half-century of revolution and war, oppression and terror.
Instead, Pasternak received one of the all-time classic rejection letters: A 10,000-word missive that stopped just short of accusing him of treason. It was left to foreign publishers to give his smuggled manuscript life, offering the West a peek into the soul of the Cold War enemy and winning Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature.
These days, Pasternak might not have fared so well.
In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.
The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.
"It strikes me as very odd," said Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University and former legal counsel to former Presidents Reagan and Bush. "I think the government has an uphill struggle to justify this constitutionally." [more]
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