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Elite's villas blight village that inspired Dr Zhivago
Luke Harding in Peredelkino The Observer, Sunday June 8 2008
For nearly 30 years it was a source of inspiration for Boris Pasternak. From his first-floor study, the Russian poet and writer gazed out on a rich landscape of birch trees and pines. Beyond it was a field and then a gold-domed church.
Now, though, the Soviet writers' village where Pasternak lived from 1936 until his death in 1960 has been transformed. A housing estate for Moscow's super-rich is being built on the meadow, just 50 metres from Pasternak's historic wooden dacha. Developers were putting the final touches to a series of mansions last week. Instead of the 'clear, moist, fluting tune' of the thrush, as Pasternak put it, the village now hums with the banging and whistling of workmen.
Down the road from Pasternak's house, developers have built a giant sewage pipe next to a holy spring - apparently to whisk away waste from the neo-classical villas and mock 'English-style' brick townhouses that have sprung up on the nearby hillside.
'They are carbuncles,' Natalia Pasternak, the poet's daughter-in-law, said yesterday. 'The view from Pasternak's house was absolutely marvellous. It was a typical Russian landscape with a church on the hill. Now it's been ruined.'
Natalia Pasternak, who runs a museum in the house where her father-in-law lived and wrote his Nobel prize-winning novel Dr Zhivago, said the author would have been appalled at what had happened to Peredelkino, a village 25km outside Moscow. 'He would have been sad,' she said.
The dacha complex was founded in 1934 as a place where the Soviet Union's leading writers could live and work. Despite the fall of communism, the colony is still home to about 100 novelists and philosophers, who pay token rent to a literary fund. They have protested against the new estate, but to no avail.
The field used to belong to a collective farm. According to Natalia Pasternak, the two heads of the farm who opposed the sale of the land were mysteriously shot dead. The new estate obliterates the view between Pasternak's dacha and the cemetery where he is buried. A well-wisher left carnations there yesterday.
'It's terrible,' Leonid Latynin, a novelist who lives in a dacha next door to Pasternak's, said. 'This was a wild place.' Asked who could afford to buy the new mansions, on sale for around $1.5m to $4m each, he said: 'People with criminal money.'
Pasternak was often a guest in the wild-vine-covered dacha next door, he added. The house belonged to Lilya Brik, the muse and mistress of the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The village's new mega-rich denizens rarely mixed with the writers, Latynin said, adding: 'We live in two different worlds.'
Pasternak arrived in Peredelkino in 1936. The bucolic surroundings are credited with inspiring him to pen a cycle of lyric poems at a time when - depressed by the arrest of many of his friends - he had virtually stopped writing. They also infuse the astonishing group of 25 poems at the end of Dr Zhivago
One, 'August', evokes the author's ground-floor Peredelkino bedroom: 'The sun called me bright and early/As promised, I was not misled. /A slanting shaft of saffron/Extending from curtain to bed.' The poem notes the 'beggarly, bare, sparse trembling alder grove' and the 'grieving trees' hushed tops'. Pasternak frequently strolled across the field to the village church, Latynin said. He would also bathe in the lake. Since Pasternak's death, 48 years ago last week, Peredelkino has attracted thousands of literary pilgrims keen to see the Nobel prize winner's home.
'Pasternak loved this place,' Latynin's wife Alla - herself a literary critic - said yesterday. 'He was very tied to it. He thought about leaving the Soviet Union to receive the Nobel prize [which he won in 1958 for Dr Zhivago, but which the Soviet authorities refused to allow him to accept]. He could have left. The government wasn't pleased with him. It was the dacha that kept him here.'
The beleaguered community of writers in Peredelkino point out that the status of artists and intellectuals has dropped off in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. 'In Soviet times, writers were aristocrats. Now we are treated like writers in Europe,' Latynin said.
They accept that change is inevitable, given Russia's new prosperity. None of the residents, meanwhile, had been informed about the new development, which has been cloaked in secrecy. The firm that built it, Stolny Grad, confirmed that nearly all of the mansions had been sold. It refused to say how much they cost. 'We do not advertise,' a spokeswoman added.
Yesterday Natalia Pasternak recalled how the Soviet authorities closed Pasternak's house in the Eighties, throwing most of the poet's furniture into the garden. Dr Zhivago was published in the West in 1957 and was only permitted in the USSR in 1988. 'We kept the furniture safe. The house didn't become a museum until the Nineties,' she said.
One of the museum's tour guides said Pasternak had clearly been happy in Peredelkino - despite his ambivalent relationship for much of his life with Soviet power. 'He loved walking in that field,' Tatiana Neshumova said, gazing out of the window. 'This is a cultural landscape. Building here can't be right.'
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