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Vandals desecrate Russian poet Pasternak's grave
2006-11-12
Unknown vandals have desecrated the grave of dissident Russian poet Boris Pasternak whose novel "Doctor Zhivago" won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Russian television channels said on Friday. The modest tombstone, at a cemetery in the famed writers' retreat of Peredelkino outside Moscow, was covered with soot after vandals put wreathes around it and set them on fire last night, said TV reports, featuring the monument. Pasternak's daughter-in-law Natalya told NTV channel she feared the fragile white-limestone monument with Pasternak's bas-relief and his signature could be lost forever. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, renowned as an epic of love amid the harshness of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and its cruel aftermath, won him the Nobel Prize in 1958 but also triggered a fierce campaign against him unleashed by the Communist party. A Jew who was stigmatized by Soviet leaders as a "literary traitor," Pasternak was forced by the Communist party to turn down the prize. Pasternak's summer house -- or 'dacha' in Russian -- is visited by thousands of local and foreign tourists each year. Peredelkino has survived three similar attacks on other writers' graves over the last year, NTV said.
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