Everybody kept telling me, “it’s on the Crescent, but I don’t know exactly where.” That wasn’t doing me any good. I had no idea what a crescent was, at least in the local lexicon. It obviously meant something very specific. I only had two days to find it – and, in fact, I didn’t even have close to two days. I had a few hours spread out over a few days. I was busy at a conference that was running pretty much all the time I was in Oxford. I could only get away in the morning and, briefly, at meal breaks. But I wasn’t having any luck. I had a host of friends and colleagues telling me, “Oh, yeah, it’s right around here somewhere. You’ve been walking by it on your way to Wolfson. You’ve seen the Park Town sign?” Yes, I had seen the Park Town sign. I just saw it 20 minutes ago. “Well, it’s right there somewhere.”
“Somewhere” wasn’t good enough for me. I needed a photo. I needed a couple. I needed them to be specific and right. You can’t post a photo of just any old thing and say, “this is somewhere near what I’m talking about.” You need to know. And time was running out. In less than 24 hours I had a flight back to Moscow. In five minutes the next conference session would begin and then I’d be busy well into the dark night and my quest would be in vain. But sometimes little miracles happen.
What I am talking about is the apartment at 20 Park Town in Oxford where Leonid Pasternak lived for years and died in 1945. Leonid was Boris’s father. Everybody knows Boris because of Doctor Zhivago, in the English-speaking world anyway. They should probably know him for his poetry, because he was a great poet long before he wrote a novel that would win him the Nobel Prize. But that’s being rather picky. Especially when poetry translates about as well as a mud pie. This, by the way, is a word of warning to all you ambitious poets out there – write a novel, too, before you’re done. It’ll make it easier for people to find your poems.
But I was in search of Leonid, not Boris. Leonid was a marvelous painter, impressionistic in his often slightly blurred, dimly-colored images. But his drawings, I suspect, are what really set him apart as a major artist of his time. In his drawings he somehow maintains his impressionistic gaze while also bringing a paradoxical clarity to whatever his subject may be. Moreover, his drawings, especially, preserve for us a living glance at some of the great figures of his time – he drew portraits of Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Albert Einstein, Rainer Maria Rilke and many others. That is to say nothing of the enormous series of portraits and paintings he did of Boris from his childhood into his adult years. Many of these works, incidentally, are still held, and occasionally exhibited, at the Pasternak residence in Park Town.
I was not giving up, although there was every reason to do so. I simply had no time left, and there was no reason to think that, in 25 minutes’ time, I would be running around outside Pasternak’s apartment, photographing it from various angles. But, again, it was my friend, the translator Oliver Ready, who tossed out some last-minute information that gave me flickering hope that I might yet solve this self-imposed riddle. Now I needed the internet to check it, and, sure enough, sitting right in my line of sight was Maria Kozlovskaya Wiltshire, a translator of Olga Mukhina’s play Tanya-Tanya, whom I had just met. She was sitting with her computer open, dabbling around online. I raced to her, we plugged the new information in and – voila! – up came the address, 20 Park Town, Leonid Pasternak. I grabbed my coat and away I ran. I hated to miss the beginning of a panel devoted to Noah Birksted-Breen’s production of a documentary play called Grandchildren: The Second Act by Mikhail Kaluzhsky and Alexandra Polivanova, but there was no stopping me now. I trotted through the drizzling rain back to Park Town and took a couple of shots of the street sign. That was just in case I still couldn’t find the place I was looking for. I peered in at every address on every house, waiting to see that number 20 I was looking for. I was still a long way off. And then the street took a brief jog to the left and, once again – voila! – there it was! Now I knew what they all meant by “the crescent.” There stood a handsome pair of two long buildings that wrap in a curve around a small park between them. The addresses on one side are all odd numbers, the addresses on the opposite side are all even – and there was number 20, not quite in the middle of the building on my right. I had to play hooky to find it, but as anybody, anywhere knows, that only made my success all the sweeter.
Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945) was born Yitzhok-Leib Pasternak in Odessa. In that kind of thrashing way that seems to suit artists, he studied medicine and then law before dropping both of them in favor of art. His first exhibited painting was purchased by none other than the great collector Pavel Tretyakov (whose collection would become the Tretyakov Gallery) and he was quickly accepted into a prestigious circle of major painters, including Valentin Serov, Isaac Levitan, Mikhail Nesterov and others. He married the promising pianist Rosa Kaufman in 1889 and the young couple welcomed their first child Boris the following year. (See my blogs on the Tretyakov Gallery and on Boris Pasternak’s birthplace on this blogsite.) Pasternak went to Germany in 1921 for an eye operation but chose not to return to Russia. Anticipating danger in Berlin, Pasternak traveled to England in 1938, ending up at this address of 20 Park Town that I had to scramble so to find in such a short period of time.
Russian Culture in Landmarks 
This article makes it sound like an expedition to Lhasa or Timbuctoo. You can find Park Town easily on any street map of Oxford, and it is only a street, a very accessible street off Banbury Road. No problem. A small part of the street is crescent-shaped, like a crescent moon or any other crescent. You can see this on the map. “The addresses on one side are all odd numbers, the addresses on the opposite side are all even.” Just like most streets, then !
We lived opposite to Lydia & family. As children we played in the park with Ann and Catherine & Michael. Lydia became a very close friend of of my mother and they spent many many hours together. We have many signed books & prints. In the house were huge paintings and one of the children fell through one of them. Leonid’s room was locked but we were one of the few to be allowed to go in. It was set out exactly as it was when he died.
Wonderful addition. I love it when the story continues to fill out. Thank you for sharing!
Great post. I’m afraid I’m one of those who said vaguely that the Pasternak House was in Park Town. I’m glad you found it; I would never have remembered which house it was, although I was in it, once.
Here’s some more information about it. It’s now the home of the Anne Pasternak Slater, the granddaughter of Leonid Pasternak, and her husband, the English poet and critic Craig Raine. Both of them were Oxford academics, although they are retired now. Anne is the daughter of Leonid’s daughter, Lydia Pasternak Slater, who, along with her parents and her sister Josephine, left Russia in 1921, never to return. (There is a fascinating obituary of Josephine, written by her daughter, here.) Both Josephine and Lydia settled in Oxford with their own families, and carried on with extensive literary and academic work for many decades. Lydia published some notable translations of her brother’s poetry, while Josephine devoted much of her life to promoting her father’s work, which she felt had been unjustly eclipsed by the worldwide fame of Boris.
I went to 20 Park Town one Sunday afternoon 14 or 15 years ago. It was, I believe, the first time the family had opened up the house to exhibit many of Leonid’s works. (Perhaps they’d done it before, but at the time it was connected to a larger exhibition at the Ashmolean, and this was the first I’d heard of the house being opened.) It was, of course, simply the family home of Pasternak Slater and Raine, and their four children. So it was like walking through an ordinary house which just happened to have striking works of Russian impressionism — paintings, drawings, sketches — hanging here and there, on kitchen walls, in hallways, in the downstairs sitting room.
There also an added attraction that day: Boris Pasternak’s son, Yevgeny, who had come, presumably, for the opening of the Ashmolean exhibition. As I recall, he was a man of gentle gravitas, standing in the sitting room talking with a few people. He was speaking Russian, and my own Russian was so poor (despite having a degree in the language and having lived in Moscow for nearly three years), that I felt I couldn’t address him in that language. (Although it’s almost certain that he spoke English as well.) In any case, I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound gushing or insipid, or be an unseemly intrusion into the quiet personal conversation that was going on. It would be hard to overstate what Pasternak’s work had meant to me at a very formative period in my life, so to speak to Yevgeny, or at least shake his hand, would have felt like the closing of a very vital circuit. But I slipped away without saying anything.
For anyone interested in learning more about this remarkable family, I highly recommend “Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence 1921-1960,” which has been edited and translated by the Slater side of the family and published in a handsome volume by Hoover Press.
Thank you, Chris! This is great, a serious filling-out of the little I wrote. I’m told they open the house once a month or so to let people see the art work. You ought to go back by again and find another hand to shake. Circuits can be closed in many ways!