Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (/ˈpæstərˌnæk/; Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к; IPA: [bɐˈrʲis lʲɪɐˈnʲidəvʲɪtɕ pəstɛrˈnak]) (10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Soviet Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences. Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel which takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the First World War. Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR. At the instigation of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957 and distributed with the help of the CIA in the rest of Europe. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988. 2Early life Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February, (Gregorian), 1890 (Julian 29 January) into a wealthy assimilated Ukrainian Jewish family. His father was the Post-Impressionist painter, Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist Isadore Kaufman and his wife. Pasternak had a younger brother Alex and sisters Lydia and Josephin