Homage to Pasternak, With Piano and Poetry

PEREDELKINO, Russia -- The sound of the piano -- Franz Liszt's "Consolation" -- floated gently through the open window and settled among the tall pines just as it did when Boris Pasternak lay in the drawing room in an open coffin surrounded by heaped flowers -- tulips and lilac, cherry and apple blossoms.

"Something in their hearts calls people," said Natalia Pasternaka, 71, the poet's daughter-in-law and custodian of his country home, which is now a museum. "We never advertise, but people always remember the date."

Pasternak, one of Russia's greatest poets and the author of the novel "Doctor Zhivago," died at age 70 on May 30, 1960.

And each year at his dacha and at his nearby grave, the Russians who come here on the anniversary of his death remember the man who was viciously persecuted by the Soviet authorities after "Doctor Zhivago" was published abroad and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958.

"You can feel the aura of his poetry here," said Julia Stadler, 43, a professional pianist who came to play a number of pieces.

A microphone was set up by the piano for anyone who wanted to say a few words or recite a poem, Pasternak's or their own.

"They humiliated you, but we will cherish you forever," said Tamara Grigorieva, 58, a retired teacher who read her own, "House," a homage to Pasternak's home in this onetime writer's colony, 20 miles from Moscow.

Outside, several dozen people sat on benches, mostly silent, absorbing the interchanging music and words, occasionally rising to wander around the brown, two-story dacha where Pasternak's hat, scarf and coat still hang in the upstairs bedroom and study where he wrote.

The 75-year-old poet Andrei Voznesensky, in a white suit and his trademark cravat, sat near the piano, smiling.

"It's always lovely to see people here," he said.

Voznesensky's voice once enraptured the thousands who filled stadiums to hear him read his own work. Now it is reduced to a struggling whisper. But still he read excerpts from a long poem devoted, he said, to "Pasternak's women" -- his wife, Zinaida, and his lover, Olga Ivinskaya, the woman whom Pasternak infused into the character of Lara in "Doctor Zhivago."

Voznesensky was a teenager when he first sent his poems to Pasternak, who cultivated the budding talent.