Свеча горелаSvecha gorela

This is, of course, Dad’s “main” song.

As Aunt Olya — the wife of Uncle Vitya “Nixon,” who, alas, is also gone now — once told me, “Volodya plus a guitar means ‘The Candle.’”

That is why restoring and reworking it was especially daunting, and I put it off for a long time, but at last I made up my mind.

Others set “Winter Night” too: Alexander Gradsky, in the late seventies, and Alla Pugacheva, in 1999. Dad had no love for either version — and neither did anyone else, once they had heard his.

Boris Pasternak wrote “Winter Night” in 1946; its earliest autograph is dated December. In mid-January 1947 he enclosed it in a letter to the poet Vera Zvyagintseva. It closed his Selected Poems, printed by Sovetsky Pisatel in 1948 — but the whole print run was destroyed.

It is one of the poems of Yuri Zhivago that close the novel. In the novel itself, young Yura, riding in a sleigh to a Christmas party, sees a candle burning in a window on Kamergersky Lane — Lara is behind that window. The poem was first printed in 1958, in Milan, in the Russian text of Doctor Zhivago.