I have driven or walked by this building at 3 Oruzheiny Lane dozens, maybe more than a hundred times, over the years and never noticed what I happened to glimpse one night as my wife and I were driving home from her parents’ house three blocks away: Boris Pasternak was born in this house. I saw the little blue plaque from the passenger’s seat of my wife’s car – Oksana’s the driver in this mad town, not I – and I felt like a kid who’d just been given 50 cents for no good reason at all. I felt excitement well up inside me and burble out into the open. “Oh, my God!” I said, “Pasternak was born there!” We had already turned left and were preparing to turn left again a long way away already. “Who? Where?” Oksana asked automatically, more worried about merging traffic. “Pasternak, for God’s sake!” I said, irritated. How could news like that fail to register the first time?
It’s no wonder, apparently, that I had not noticed the plaque earlier, although it actually was erected in 1990 in honor of Pasternak’s centennial. It seems that over the last 25 years or so various stores and cafes occupying the ground floor here essentially covered the plaque up with their own signs and advertisements. That information comes to me by way of a pretty neat website called Moscow Perspective. The plaque on the building, known historically as the Vedeneev House, is not a traditional memorial plaque; it is one of those plaques that goes up in conjunction with a great official website that tells the stories of hundreds of interesting historical sites in Moscow. The page devoted to this building – with more information than just that pertaining to Pasternak – can be found here. I’ll lean on it for some of the basic information that follows.
Pasternak’s parents Leonid, a well-known painter, and Rosa, an accomplished concert pianist, had married Feb. 14, 1889. They moved into the large, six-room apartment No. 3 on the third floor in the fall of 1889. The future poet Boris was born Feb. 10, 1890. By fall of 1891 the family moved to other quarters, largely because none of the rooms was suitable for a painter’s studio for Leonid, and because the price was higher than the young family could afford.
A relatively frequent visitor to the Pasternaks was pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Leonid would later sketch a pencil portrait of Rubinstein sitting in a chair, listening to music, perhaps in this very apartment as Rosa played the piano. But now I’m letting my imagination run a little too freely.
Still another cool site called Real Estate, and curated by the RIA Novosti news agency, points out that Pasternak had this building of his birth in mind when he described the fictional “Chernogoria” neighborhood where Lara (Larisa) lived in Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. The site quotes from the novel: “These were the worst places in Moscow, reckless drivers and dens of iniquity, entire streets given over to debauchery, slums full of ‘fallen creatures…'” The site also offers the following descriptive information: “According to the plot of Doctor Zhivago Lara’s mother Amalia Karlovna attempts to commit suicide by poisoning in ‘Chernogoria.’ This is where Yury Zhivago, who came in the company of Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko, sees Lara for the first time.”
For the last tidbit today I’ll go back to the Moscow Perspective site (link above). It quotes at some length a description of this building and the neighborhood contained in a biography of Pasternak by the poet’s son Yevgeny.
“They [Pasternak’s parents] rented an apartment located on the border between a wealthier neighborhood and the coachmen’s garages, where the prices were not as high – at the Old Triumphal Gates (now Mayakovsky Square). The Vedeneev House had a large courtyard and carpenters’ workshops, and stands between what is now 2nd Tverskaya-Yamskaya, Oruzheiny Lane and 3rd Tverskaya-Yamskaya. Apartment No. 3 consisted of six small rooms, all of which were badly suited to an artist’s workshop. This is what created the impression of cramped space throughout the whole apartment, as noted in Leonid Pasternak’s diaries. They paid 50 rubles a month for it.”
Russian Culture in Landmarks 