Dear colleagues!

We are happy to welcome you on the website dedicated to the creative heritage of Boris Pasternak.

Despite Pasternak’s popular phrase “One should not bother keeping archives / Or fussing over manuscripts”, his archive existed and was carefully kept by his family for a long time. First manuscripts were passed to RGALI (then TsGALI) during Pasternak’s life. His fund has been constantly replenished and at present contains more than 1400 storage items.

Among most valuable materials of the archive are manuscripts of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”, long poems “Spectorsky”, “Lieutenant Schmidt”, “The year 1905”, stories “The Childhood of Luvers”, “Safe Conduct”, books and poem cycles “Twin in the Clouds”, “Over the Barriers”, “My Sister, Life”, “When the Skies Clear”, “In Memory of Marina Tsvetaeva”, the unfinished piece “The Blind Beauty”, translations from Shakespeare, correspondence, albums.

The IRLI collection contains the materials relating to B. L. Pasternak of the 1950-1960s: poems of different years, autobiography, “Safe Conduct” (3rd chapter), letters and telegrams.

In 2008, together with the Peredelkino museum, RGALI released a DVD entitled “Boris Pasternak. My world, my Home”, which for the first time ever presented digital copies of the poet’s archive heritage. We would like to express profound gratitude to his relatives – Elena Vladimirovna and Elena Leonidovna Pasternak, who granted their permission to publish the poet’s archive on the DVD and the website. We would also like to thank Mariia Arkad'evna Rashkovskaia for creating the scientific description of Boris Pasternak’s archive and providing enormous help while working on the website.

How to work with the website

Search

The electronic catalogue of the website allows both context search and search on certain parameters, such as title of file, dates and names, place of storage, type of archive documents and their mode of implementation.

Registration

The websites of the portal require registration of researchers and scientific groups. Registration will allow you to access electronic copies of the documents in good quality (with high resolution) and conduct detailed textological research.

We would also like to understand who our audience is.

Map of website

The section “Digital archive” contains creative heritage that is kept in the funds of RGALI and IRLI, RAS. In the “Research” section scientists can familiarize themselves with both classic and contemporary scientific works dedicated to the poet’s heritage. The section “Inventory” contains scientific and reference materials of the funds.