FAMILY VACATES PASTERNAK'S HOME
AFTER LOSING APPEAL IN SOVIET COURT
Author: Associated Press
Date: Sunday, November 11, 1984
Page: 20
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
PEREDELKINO, USSR - The country house where Boris Pasternak wrote
''Doctor Zhivago" has been closed and the writer's belongings removed after
his heirs lost a court battle with the Soviet Writers Union.
Sources close to the Moscow literary community said last week that the
Nobel Prize-winning author's son and daughter-in-law were evicted last month
from the dacha where Pasternak died in 1960.
His family has been fighting to stay in the two-story dacha in this
writer's colony 15 miles west of Moscow and to preserve it as a museum to the
poet and novelist who fell into disfavor with the Soviet authorities.
Pasternak is buried in the village cemetery, and thousands visit his grave
every year to honor his memory. His family opened the house to visitors who
could see his study, his books, his desk and other personal effects.
The Soviet Writers Union owns the dacha and Litfund, the overseer of the
union's financial holdings, filed a suit two years ago to take possession of
it.
Writers Union regulations require that houses granted to members be vacated
within two years after their deaths and reassigned to other writers.
Despite the two-year limit, the Pasternak dacha is one of 22 aging homes
in Peredelkino occupied by survivors of deceased writers.
The poet's son, Yevgeny, and Natalya Pasternak, the wife of Pasternak's
late second son, filed several appeals asking for control of the dacha. A
Moscow court ruled this summer, however, that they were to remove all
Pasternak's belongings and leave the house.
Pasternak's relatives could not be reached for comment last week. The
Soviet Union is celebrating the 67th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution
with a three-day national holiday this week and courts and other government
offices were closed.
It was not known what would be done with the dacha, but Pasternak's family
said earlier they feared it would be divided into apartments.
Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" was denied publication in the Soviet Union
because of his sympathetic portrayal of Russians who opposed the 1917
revolution.
Pasternak was expelled from the Writers Union after the novel was
published in the West in 1957, but he continued to live in the Peredelkino
dacha. After he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Soviet pressure
caused him to refuse it.
In recent years some of Pasternak's poetry has received official approval
and some editions have been printed in Moscow.
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