Homage to Pasternak, With Piano and Poetry

The dacha of Boris Pasternak, who won the 1958 Nobel Prize for his novel "Doctor Zhivago," draws devotees on the anniversary of his death, in 1960. (By Sergei L. Loiko)

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"I was more than his student, I was like his son," Voznesensky said.

The poet also attended the funeral in 1960. "I remember the KGB taking photos of the crowd," Voznesensky said.

Pasternak's death was all but ignored in the Soviet press, apart from two small notices that said nothing of the funeral arrangements. But handwritten notes with the details appeared by the ticket office at Moscow's Kiev Station, where there was a suburban train to Peredelkino.

"At four o'clock on the afternoon of June 2, the last leave-taking of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the greatest poet of present-day Russia, will be held," read one such note, according to a 1961 article in Harper's magazine by the journalist Priscilla Johnson, who attended the funeral.

On a blistering day, the garden, which Pasternak loved to tend, was packed.

"How many were there altogether?" wrote Alexander Gladkov in his memoir "Meetings With Pasternak."

"Two or three thousand, or four? . . . Who could have expected so many, when nobody had to come just for form's sake, by way of duty, as is so often the case. For everybody present it was a day of enormous importance -- and this fact itself turned it into yet another triumph for Pasternak."

The coffin was carried from the house to the cemetery, where the pallbearers lifted it above the crowd, Gladkov recalled. "For the last time I saw the face, gaunt and magnificent, of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak."

Pasternak's friend, the philosopher Valentin Asmus, gave a short oration, calling the deceased "a democrat in the true sense of the word."

When he finished, Johnson wrote, an actor from the Moscow Art Theater began to recite "Hamlet," a poem from "Doctor Zhivago." It had never been published in the Soviet Union, but, according to Johnson, "a thousand pairs of lips began to move in silent unison with those of the actor."

The acts are well thought out, the end

Foredoomed. Behold, I stand alone.

The Pharisees exult. How hard

This life, and long my way of stone.

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