What I liked in particular was that the book began with a train death. The death hearkens back to the end of Anna Karenina .Here the death represents a beginning. Not an end. But overall the death, like the book, speaks to an ongoing conversation that Russian literature has with past authors. Pasternak, writing in the 1950s about the first decades of the twentieth century is in conversation with Tolstoy, who wrote <I> Anna Karenina in the 1870s. That book in turn is probably about the daughter of Pushkin. And there we have a connection between Pushkin, the fountain spring of Russian literature and Pasternak.