Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 into a cultivated Jewish family: his father, Leonid, was a painter who illustrated Tolstoy, his mother, Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist. Rilke and Scriabin were among the visitors to the household. Inspired by Scriabin, he first trained as a composer, then abandoned music for philosophy, studying in 1912 at Marburg with the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen before abandoning that, too, for poetry.

My Sister, Life, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917 and published in 1922, established him as one of the major Russian poets of his time: its lyrics fuse love, landscape and weather in a torrent of metaphor. The prose memoir Safe Conduct followed. As Stalin’s terror deepened, open publication became precarious, and Pasternak earned his living largely through translation, producing celebrated Russian versions of Shakespeare and Goethe’s Faust. Over the postwar years he wrote Doctor Zhivago, a novel spanning revolution and civil war through the life of a physician and poet, which affirmed the claims of private life, love and faith against historical necessity.

Refused by Soviet publishers, the manuscript reached the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who issued it in 1957, and translations spread rapidly. When the Nobel Prize was announced in 1958 Pasternak accepted it with gratitude, but an official campaign of vilification and his expulsion from the Writers’ Union forced him to renounce it days later. He died at Peredelkino in 1960. Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988, and in 1989 his son Yevgeny received the medal in Stockholm.