‘ZHIVAGO’ HOUSE FUELS SOVIET DEBATE

Leading Soviet writers seeking liberaliza tion in the arts have chosen an unlikely cause for their latest campaign--the uninhabited country house where Boris Pasternak composed “Doctor Zhivago.”

The brown, ramshackle dacha in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow, has become the symbol of a campaign led by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who has more than once had trouble with the authorities for his controversial stands.

At the recent congress of the official Writers’ Union, Yevtushenko presented a letter signed by 40 delegates calling for the dacha to be made into a museum in memory of Pasternak, who died in 1960 in disgrace with the authorities.

Yevtushenko told reporters earlier this month that the congress had approved the plan and this would guarantee its realization.

But other writers who attended the congress told a different story, saying the outcome of a long battle over the late writer’s country home was still far from certain.

They said delegates had been caught off guard during a vote on the dacha, which has been earmarked by officials to become a museum honoring the many Soviet writers who have lived at Peredelkino, and not just Pasternak.

The history of what has become an emotional tug-of-war over the Pasternak home dates back several decades to the founding of the writers’ colony at the suggestion of author Maxim Gorky, who said writers needed a place to write.

Authorities had about 30 dachas built at the village of Peredelkino. Selected writers were granted use of the homes on condition that they be turned over to the Writers’ Union two years after the death of the occupant.

Like other writers’ heirs in Peredelkino, Pasternak’s family resisted and were finally evicted in 1984 after a two-year legal battle in which the Writers’ Union sought to reclaim the house for use by a living writer.

Since then authorities have restored the large wooden home, from which three firs marking Pasternak’s grave can be seen on a nearby hill. But the dacha has stood empty despite attempts by the Writers’ Union to assign new occupants.

“I was offered the house,” Georgy Aitmatov, a leading Soviet novelist, told journalists. “I thought about it, but I would rather keep this house as a museum.”

Writers who attended the congress say opinion is split between those favoring a Pasternak museum and others who agree with the latest official plan to make the home a common monument to all the writers who have lived in the colony.

But the argument has acquired a symbolic dimension for liberals among the literary establishment, who hope Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s drive for openness in all spheres of life may lead to an easing of control over the arts.

Choosing the Pasternak home as the center of their campaign, they are making a sharp statement about the fate of Soviet writers who have faced censorship, or, in the worst cases, exile or even death for the power of their word.

Although selected works by Pasternak were recently issued for the first time here, “Doctor Zhivago,” his work best known in the West, has never been published in the Soviet Union.

The novel, an epic saga of Russian life in the years around the 1917 revolution, was fiercely denounced as anti-Bolshevik when it appeared abroad in 1957.

Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year but rejected it under intense pressure, fearing he could be forced to emigrate.

But recent signs of posthumous recognition for major Soviet writers--including poets Nikolai Gumilyov, shot as a counter-revolutionary in 1921, and Osip Mandelstam, who died in custody under Stalin--have spurred the Pasternak cause.

“Today is a turning point in time,” Yevtushenko told the writers’ congress, “a time of hopes and restoration of justice.” He said it would shame writers if a Pasternak museum were not ready by the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1990.

Andrei Voznesensky, like Yevtushenko one of the Soviet Union’s “angry young poets” of the 1950s and a leading figure on the contemporary literary scene, called at the congress for the full publication of Pasternak’s collected works.

Another senior figure in the Writers’ Union said the state publishing agency was reviewing whether to print “Doctor Zhivago” after the strong support voiced for Pasternak at the congress.

Yevtushenko told reporters he saw no major obstacle to publication of the novel and other works by Pasternak, who is chiefly revered as a poet in the Soviet Union and is gaining recognition as one of the country’s greatest men of letters.

“I am not a publisher. I cannot give you a date,” he said, adding his opinion that the most important recent development was the vote supporting his letter on the Pasternak dacha.

“This gives us a guarantee that we will have a museum devoted to this great poet,” said Yevtushenko who, like Pasternak in the past, today has a dacha at Peredelkino.