Fans of Russian Writer Gather Every Year
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
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.
"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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