Peredelkino is 20 kilometres from Moscow's Red Square and a world away in atmosphere. You drive out the main western route through Kutuzovsky Prospekt and past the Poklonnaya Gora, the hill from which Napoleon caught his first glimpse of the city.
The place is well signposted and when you turn left from the main Moscow-Berlin highway, you find yourself suddenly in what appears to be the heart of the Russian countryside.
This is something of an illusion, for Peredelkino is almost surrounded by the grim high-rise apartment blocks in which most Muscovites live. An odd and fortunate quirk of the topography keeps the buildings from view and the atmosphere is one of rural tranquillity.
Set in this tiny patch of rural Russia, with a stand of silver birch in front and the mixed forest of pine and fir behind, is the house in which Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) spent the last 20 years of his life.
It is a charming wooden dacha, quite large with an extensive front garden where Pasternak, a man of intense frugality, grew his vegetables and planted his flowers.
The house is now a museum. The entrance fee is posted in the hallway as 25 roubles (about 70p). But, if you are not Russian, this can rise to 50 roubles.
Almost everything has been left as it was when Boris Leonidovich Pasternak died on May 30th, 1960. A death-mask hangs on the wall of the little back room where the writer passed away but little else has changed.
Upstairs in the study, a brown herringbone tweed cap rests on a cabinet , a pair of boots nearby. In the corner is a fragile bed of monkish proportions, proof of the writer's spartan lifestyle.
A big surprise is the number of books. Many writers read voraciously but Pasternak's library is contained in six small shelves.
There are copies of Doctor Zhivago in the 18 languages into which it was translated. In Russia the book was denounced as representing "in a libellous manner the October Revolution, the people who made it, and social construction in the Soviet Union". In the West, it won him the Nobel Prize.
On the shelves too are the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work Pasternak translated into Russian, and a biography in English of W.B. Yeats.
There are other clues to Pasternak's character. An early television set from immediately after the war and a refrigerator of similar vintage mark him out as a man interested in new inventions.
The piano and the portraits conjure up his family background. His father Leonid Pasternak was a celebrated painter and art professor who painted Tolstoy, Rachmaninov and Rilke, his mother, Rosa Kaufman, a pianist of distinction.
It is about a 15-minute walk from Pasternak's house to his grave. From the front garden the golden domes of the local church beckon in the distance. The walk takes the visitor past the dachas of other Russian writers, many of whom retained their privileges by writing to please the system.
There is a sign at the churchyard's entrance pointing to Pasternak's grave. The journey is an awkward one. Russians who spend their lives often in garrulous communion with their neighbours find themselves neatly railed off from each other in death.
The gaps between the railings are narrow and in parts the walk runs precipitously downhill. It is a journey to be taken with care. The white tombstone which weathered badly over the years has been restored for the 40th anniversary of his death.
Despite all the changes of recent years, Russians still hold their poets in higher esteem than their pop stars. There are always fresh flowers on Pasternak's grave.