Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 17, 1991 TAG: 9104170208
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH/ THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: SWEET BRIAR LENGTH: Medium
The 1,000-pound bench, made of 14 foot-long strips of pine attached to thick, black cast-iron armrests and legs, was transported from the Russian writers' colony in Peredelkino, about 15 miles southwest of Moscow. Its move to the Virginia center was financed partly by the federal government but mostly by private donors.
It's called the Pasternak bench because it came from near the house where the poet and novelist Boris L. Pasternak lived and wrote for more than two decades. Pasternak, who died in 1960, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but declined it under pressue from the Soviet government.
Vladimir V. Kvitnitsky, administrator of Peredelkino, noted at a ceremony at the artists' center here on April 5 that it was from this bench that the author of the novel "Doctor Zhivago" communed with the pines, birches, meadows, streams and other elements of nature that became part of his most evocative works.
Pasternak now lies in the Peredelkino cemetery. Admirers from around the world bring flowers to his tree-shaded grave.
Now ensconced here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia, at the largest year-round artists' colony in the United States, the bench stands as "a symbol of American and Russian writers communicating with each other," said Valery A. Dolgov, director of the Literary Fund of the Russian federated republic.
Dolgov told a gathering of directors, residents, fellows and guests at the ceremony that while Pasternak might have had proximity to the bench, he had not had exclusivity.
Dolgov said hundreds of writers, from Isaac Babel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, have sat, mused, argued, laughed, cried, scribbled notes and dozed on the gentle contours of the bench.
"It's hard to imagine who did not sit there," said Dolgov, who doles out the money for Peredelkino and other writers' hideaways, all of which get their support from Moscow.
While a piece of Peredelkino sits here, the Virginia center is sending off Lorca Morella, a New York sculptor who is one of its fellows, to create a work in the Russian village similar to those that lie scattered about the meadows here.
The center, which was founded in 1971, lacks the dachas of Peredelkino but offers each artist a room and a work studio and full board. It has a capacity of 24 artists at a time. In the last three years residencies averaging one month were provided for 855 artists from nearly every state of the Union as well as from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Strewn on the fragrant green slopes a half-mile from Sweet Briar College here are Morello's steles - upright pillars carved from limestone with round, organic, abstract motifs suggestive of prehistoric times.
The idea behind the exchange came from the Virginia center's executive director, William Smart, a teacher of creative writing at Sweet Briar. He said he got the idea last year, when he took a group of American writers to Peredelkino.
"Black-trunked lime trees leaned over the road, and then I saw that bench," Smart said. "It was an impossible dream, but I knew I wanted it for the center."
by CNB