Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak (Moscow, 1890 - Peredelkino, near Moscow, 1960) was a Russian poet, novelist and literary translator. He wrote in Russian, lived through the last years of the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. He is best remembered for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which was rejected for publication in the USSR and which political pressure forced him to decline the Nobel Prize to accept.

He was born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in Moscow. His father, the painter Leonid Pasternak, taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist. Visitors to the family home included Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Shestov and Rilke. The Pasternaks were drawn to the Tolstoyan movement, and Leo Tolstoy became a close family friend; Leonid illustrated several of his books. In 1910, when Tolstoy died in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, Leonid went there with his son and made a drawing of the writer on his deathbed.

Boris first aspired to be a musician and briefly studied at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910 he left for the University of Marburg, where he attended the lectures of the neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp. Cohen encouraged him to stay and pursue a doctorate, but he gave up philosophy and returned to Moscow around the start of the First World War. There he joined the Futurist group Centrifuge as a pianist, since poetry was still little more than a hobby for him. His unanswered love for Ida Wissotzkaya, from a family of tea merchants, inspired the poem 'Marburg' (1917). He also kept up a close friendship, carried on through letters for more than forty years, with his cousin Olga Freidenberg.

During the war he taught and worked at a chemical factory near Perm. After the October Revolution he chose to remain in Russia, unlike much of his family. His book My Sister, Life, composed in 1917 and published in Berlin in 1922, transformed Russian poetry and made him a model for younger poets such as Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. He then produced the lyric cycle Rupture (1921), which many critics regard as his masterpiece. By the late 1920s, worried that his dense, colourful style was out of reach for many readers, he simplified parts of his poetry and turned increasingly to autobiographical prose, including the stories 'Safe Conduct' and 'The Childhood of Luvers'.

He was also a distinguished translator, and his versions of Goethe, Schiller, Calderon and Shakespeare remain popular in Russian theatre. Doctor Zhivago spans the period from the 1905 revolution to the Second World War and follows a doctor and poet through the upheavals of Russian history. Rejected for publication in the Soviet Union, the manuscript reached Italy and appeared there in 1957. The following year he won the Nobel Prize, an honour the Communist Party regarded as an insult and which forced him to refuse it. His son Yevgeny accepted it on his behalf in 1989. Since 2003 the novel has been part of the main Russian school curriculum. His legacy lies in a poetry of startling images and alliteration and in a novel that became a symbol of artistic freedom under state pressure.