Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) was a Russian poet, novelist, and translator born into an illustrious Jewish artistic family in Moscow (his father was painter Leonid Pasternak; his mother was concert pianist Rosa Kaufman). After studying musical composition under Scriabin and philosophy at Marburg, he dedicated himself to lyric poetry, publishing his breakthrough collection My Sister, Life in 1922.

Surviving Stalin's purges partly by retreating into peerless translations of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Georgian poets, Pasternak spent a decade composing his epic novel Doctor Zhivago. Rejected by Soviet publishers, the manuscript was smuggled to Milan, where Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published it in 1957. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, Pasternak was forced by Soviet authorities to decline the award under threat of expulsion from his homeland.