Boris Pasternak Novelist

• Gender: Male
• Citizenship: Soviet Union
• Born: Feb 10, 1890
• Died: May 30, 1960

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.

Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of Doctor Zhivago, a novel which takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Given its independent-minded stance on the socialist state, 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. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It forced him to refuse to accept the prize. His descendants accepted it in his name in 1988.