For the Ages

Defending Pasternak

The brown frame house with the green picket fence sits amid a clump of fir trees on a hill overlooking the writers' colony of Peredelkino, 15 miles southwest of Moscow. There, in the sparsely furnished second-floor study, Boris Pasternak wrote some of the greatest Russian poetry of the century and Doctor Zhivago, the epic saga of Russian life, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. On a nearby hillock, surrounded by three pine trees, is the grave where Pasternak was buried after his death from cancer in 1960. Since then, the house and the grave-site have become a shrine to thousands of visitors a year. "It is the only place in the world where the life of Pasternak is in place," says the author's only surviving son, Yevgeni Pasternak, 58. "It is the world's memorial to him."

But now Soviet authorities, who denounced Pasternak for his "reactionary" description of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Doctor Zhivago and coerced him into refusing the Nobel Prize, are proposing to dismantle the memorial. The house is owned by Litfund, the financial arm of the Soviet Writers' Union, which rewards approved authors with dachas, cars and access to special shops patronized by the country's elite. After spending 15,000 rubles ($22,000) to renovate the house, Litfund informed Pasternak that he would have to remove his father's belongings so that the house could be assigned to a "producing writer." Last week the family learned that the plans call for dividing the house into three apartments.

The news was bitterly received by Pasternak's family. Yevgeni Pasternak, a member of the research staff of the Institute of Literature, and his sister-in-law Natalya Pasternak, the widow of the author's other son Leonid, do not live in the house, but they have diligently kept it in repair and conducted tours for visitors. Everything has been preserved just as it was when Pasternak was living. Among the keepsakes: the piano where the noted Russian pianist Svyatoslav Richter played all through the night Pasternak died, and the worn kitchen table where Pasternak lifted toasts of vodka the day he learned he had won the Nobel Prize. Upstairs is the oak desk where he wrote, surrounded by shelves lined with hundreds of his books, including foreign language editions of Doctor Zhivago, which is still banned in the Soviet Union.

Yevgeni Pasternak rejects suggestions that Litfund's action is an officially inspired attempt to denigrate his father's memory. Indeed in recent years there have been modest efforts to "rehabilitate" Pasternak. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of his death in 1980, several poems from Doctor Zhivago were printed in the Soviet literary magazine, Novy Mir.

But Pasternak's son is sparing no effort to save his father's house and has challenged the Writers' Union to take him to court. Until it is legal to read Doctor Zhivago aloud in the Soviet Union, he says, he will fight in every way he can to keep alive the memory of the author who wrote of his countrymen, "You are eternity's hostage, a captive of time."

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