Борис Пастернак

After I’d visited Pasternak’s house I decided I didn’t want to see his grave. His home is kept in such a way that you would think that it is still inhabited. There’s a cat sleeping on the bed, and for being a museum, nothing is roped off or behind glass. His worn paperbacks are still on the shelf and his plain oak desk sits unvarnished and empty.
Nadya and I had spent a while trudging through the cemetery, getting snow in our boots, but we couldn’t find the author. Russian graveyards are a bit of a hodgepodge with a different motif for each headstone. Some are wooden orthodox crosses- a bit more ornate than the protestant variety, with an extra half-X at the bottom, but without the macabre crucified messiah of the Catholics. Others are of black and red granite like Lenin’s mausoleum. Most of the headstones had pictures of the deceased etched into them: one particularly morbid grave was topped by a black obelisk that had on one side a dramatic scene of a beautiful naked girl reaching up towards the sun, and on the other side, a life-size etching of the same girl. Seemed like a strange way to decorate a grave.
We eventually abandoned our search for Pasternak and resolved to go on to his home. Down a residential street with new construction on one side is the dacha where he wrote Dr. Zhivago and where he died. There are neighbors next door and they have barking dogs. Besides a small sign on the gate and another on the side of the house, there is no indication that anything out of the ordinary happened here. Nothing would suggest that one of the greatest novels ever written was penned in one of the upstairs rooms of the little barnyard-red house. Nadya and I were the only people in sight; there were no tourists and no food or Pasternak memorabilia stands outside.
It costs 50 rubles ($1.75) to come inside; an entrance fee is almost just a formality. A friendly Russian woman led us around the house, holding up photographs of the author and showing us exactly where they were taken. Everything is in the same place as in the picture, just as it would have been.
Whenever I’ve visited museums or old estates in the United States or Europe the tour guides claim that “this is just how it would have been.” Somehow though, it always feels a bit contrived. This is not how it would have been. The Vanderbilts wouldn’t have let hundreds of tourists traipse through the Breakers or Biltmore and gawk. There wouldn’t have been yellow grip-tape on the stairs, cameras in the corners of the ceiling, velvet ropes blocking off rooms, or EXIT signs above the doors.
Pasternak has pictures that his father sketched hanging up on the walls in the dining room. Colorful etchings of chubby women in the nude and a painting of a mother breast-feeding. A magnificent grand piano is crammed into his wife’s tiny room. When Boris was dying they moved it there.
Looking out of the upstairs window next to his desk, Pasternak invented Zhivago and Lara. Has it ever happened to you that you feel a strong, almost romantic attraction to a fictional character? How could Zhivago have let Lara go? I don’t understand Boris Leonidovich why you had to make him so miserable. The characters become real people over whose mistakes you can’t help but feel distraught.
Yury Zhivago is loosely based on Pasternak himself, perhaps not in deed but in thought and mindset. That is only natural for an author to make his protagonist in the image of himself. For me, this has the effect of blurring the line between fictional character and the man who created him so that I couldn’t help but picture Yury and Lara going about the rooms. Pasternak’s desk was where Yury wrote his poems and just outside the front door is where Strelnikov shot himself. Perhaps this was Lara’s room and off in the distance is where Yury caught his last glimpse of her.
In the room where Pasternak died, a plaster death mask stares into the dining room. In the corner is a pencil drawing of the corpse. On the opposite wall there is a centerfold from a French magazine with a picture of the author’s funeral procession. It all felt out of place in the house.
We sat at his table on his wicker chairs while our guide flipped through a book to show us a picture of his grave. The panoramic windows let in sun, and cast the room in a cheery springtime light. A porcelain samovar and matching saucers looked ready to be made use of. She told us that the headstone had originally been pure white but some zealous literary enthusiasts wanted to pay special tribute so they burnt flowers on top of it leaving it blackened. She pointed it out in the picture.
We left the house and stepped out into the yard, full of towering pines and the occasional bleached bark of a birch. Across the drive is a guesthouse, or maybe it’s a work shed. At the end is a tiny garage. Down a walkway cut in the snow there is an outhouse where I pissed in Pasternak’s toilet.
On the way back up the road, we walked past the graveyard again but I couldn’t spot the charred headstone.
I can’t help but feel some fraternity with the man, even though he’s been dead for fifty years and lived in a different time in a different country. I haven’t even read his work in its original language. Still, some ideas and emotions transcend time and place and even language so that more than half-a-century after Dr. Zhivago was published and almost a century since it took place, I can still be deeply impacted by a work and the man who created it.