Word: feltrinelli
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...more disconcerting I am, the better I like it," Italian Publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli once told a friend -and he disconcerted almost everyone. Born into one of Milan's wealthiest families, he was an avowed Socialist at the age of 20 and two years later became a Communist. But Feltrinelli scored his only real success as a capitalist publisher. In 1957 he smuggled the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago out of Russia, and published it in defiance of intense Soviet and local party pressures. After the Zhivago furor, Feltrinelli drifted further leftward, becoming a financial angel of Italy's militant...
Last week Feltrinelli's mutilated body was found at the foot of a power pylon five miles east of Milan. Police theorized that he had been killed by the accidental explosion of eight sticks of dynamite he had apparently been carrying. Feltrinelli, the police suggested, had been attempting to blow up the pylon and destroy part of Milan's electric-power system. Italy's far-leftists immediately charged that Feltrinelli had been murdered by political opponents on the right-a possibility that the police were also investigating...
Unkindly but perhaps accurately, one of Feltrinelli's ex-wives suggested that he was "a 45-year-old Boy Scout" who yearned for a revolutionary glory that was never to be his. The emotional high point of his career as a leftist came in 1967, when he was thrown into a Bolivian jail while attending the trial of Marxist Theorist Regis Debray. Feltrinelli later wrote an article about "my prison"; in fact, he had spent only eight hours in jail...
...turned out, Feltrinelli's inept sabotage attempt probably did a disservice to his Maoist sympathizers. The scandal over his misbegotten effort will presumably lend new appeal to the law-and-order campaign of Italy's neo-fascist party in the current election campaign...
...These good tidings were somewhat marred by word from Milan that Publisher Gian-giacomo Feltrinelli had forbidden the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Czechoslovakia on the grounds that he did not want the book, which has always been proscribed in Russia, to be used "as an instrument of anti-Soviet policy." Feltrinelli, who holds the copyright on the novel, has made a fortune selling Doctor Zhivago's book and movie rights around the world...