For 24 years it was a source of inspiration for Boris Pasternak. From his first-floor study, the Russian poet and writer gazed out on a rich landscape of birch trees and pines. Beyond it was a field and then a gold-domed church.
Now, though, the Soviet writers' village
where Pasternak lived from 1936 until his death in 1960 has been transformed.
A housing estate for Moscow's super-rich is being built on the meadow, just 50m from Pasternak's historic wooden dacha. Instead of the "clear, moist, fluting tune" of the thrush, as Pasternak put it, the village now hums with the banging and whistling of workmen.
"It's been ruined," said Natalia Pasternak, the poet's daughter-in-law.
Natalia Pasternak, who runs a museum in the house where her father-in-law wrote his Nobel prize-winning novel Dr Zhivago, said the author would have been appalled at what had happened to Peredelkino, a village 25km outside Moscow.
The colony is still home to about 100 novelists and philosophers, who pay token rent to a literary fund. They have protested against the new estate, but to no avail. The field used to belong to a collective farm. According to Natalia Pasternak, the two heads of the farm who opposed the sale of the land were mysteriously shot dead.
The new mansions are on sale for around US$1.5 million to US$4 million ($1.9 million to $5.2 million), well out of the range of the local artists.
So who can afford them? "People with criminal money," Leonid Latynin, a local novelist said.
The writers say that the status of artists has dropped off following the collapse of the Soviet Union. "In Soviet times, writers were aristocrats. Now we are treated like writers in Europe," Latynin said.
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