Boris Pasternak Museum in Peredelkino


Дом-музей имени Бориса Пастернака

On May 30,2010 there were a lot of people at Peredelkino cemetery which is usually quiet and peaceful. People walked and walked along the fence towards the tomb of Boris Pasternak. They had come by train, by car and on foot. That was the day of the 50th anniversary of the poet's death. The tomb is covered with flowers. One of the bouquets of field flowers has a sign in English "From Manuel Dominguez" - a Spanish admirer of the poet. There were the collaborators of the house-museum of Pasternak in Peredelkino, a lot of young people, some charming Moscow old ladies in bonnets made sure about "the way to Boris Leonidovitch". A tall middle-aged man was standing near the tomb with a volume by Pasternak, reciting lyrics to himself in a whisper.

The lines from "August" came to memory: "You were walking in a crowd, on your own and in couples..."

50 years have passed and the people's chain is still walking.

Poetry is alive. The poet is immortal.

Дом-музей имени Бориса Пастернака

Peredelkino, a village in the suburbs of Moscow, is closely associated with Boris Pasternak. Here he lived, summer and winter, first in a big house, then in 1939, he moved into a smaller one where he spent the last 20 years of his life. The pre-war cycle "Peredelkino" completed in the spring of 1941 was called by Pasternak " the best I have ever written". It was in Peredelkino that he lived through the first difficult months of the war. He was a permanent resident here till his death. It was in this house that he finished his famous novel "Doctor Zhivago", wrote poems for the novel, translated Shakespeare and Goethe and worked at his last cycle "When It Clears Up..." In Peredelkino, he learned on October 23, 1958 that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature "for outstanding service to modern lyric poetry and traditional pursuits of great Russian prose". While he enjoyed world-wide fame, he was ostracized at home. Boris Pasternak died in the house on May 30, 1960. His play "The Blind Beauty" remained unfinished. He was buried at the Peredelkino cemetery. Thirty years later, on February 10, 1990 to honour the centenary of the poet's birth, the house of Boris Pasternak in Peredelkino was transformed into a museum.

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