Soviet Union: For the Ages

Defending Pasternak

The brown frame house with the green picket fence sits amid a clump of fir trees on a hill overlooking the writers' colony of Peredelkino, 15 miles southwest of Moscow. There, in the sparsely furnished second-floor study, Boris Pasternak wrote some of the greatest Russian poetry of the century and Doctor Zhivago, the epic saga of Russian life, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. On a nearby hillock, surrounded by three pine trees, is the grave where Pasternak was buried after his death from cancer in 1960. Since then, the house and the...

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