EACH year at the end of May I secretly commemorate a poet who tried to stand apart; at a time when politics strove to build the world with much ado, he was trying to speak something else, refusing to believe that politics and history were all. He got knocked down, of course. And Boris Pasternak died at his home in Peredelkino, 30 kilometers from Moscow, on May 30, 1960.

He was the curse of his government. The power that Lenin and Stalin had