This is a sculpture of Boris Pasternak, who died at his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow in May 1960. The family agreed they wanted a sculptor to capture his final facial expression. They contacted a family acquaintance, the sculptor Zinovi Vilensky. Alone in the room with the deceased, Vilensky made these sculptures of Pasternak’s face and hands over the ensuing days.
The sculptures were donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Vera Kovalskaya, a great-grandchild of Pasternak, and her husband Artem Platov. Kovalskaya sees capturing the final facial expression of a person as a contribution to history rather than anything personal. For this reason, she felt it was appropriate to donate the sculptures to the Nobel Prize Museum.
This samizdat booklet with “Yuri Zhivago’s poems” by Boris Pasternak was written in the late 1940s. Samizdat was underground literature that circulated in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the communist regimes. Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, which ends with a cycle of poems, was banned in the Soviet Union. In the booklet there are notes by Olga Ivinskaya, whom Pasternak lived with.
The booklet was presented to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Pasternak family in 2000.
