Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a well-known painter and illustrator, and his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a concert pianist; Leo Tolstoy and the composer Alexander Scriabin were among the family's acquaintances. Boris first studied music composition, then philosophy at Moscow University and briefly at Marburg in Germany, before turning to poetry. His collection My Sister, Life (1922) made him one of the leading Russian poets of his generation. Under Stalin he survived the purges that killed many writers and earned a living largely by translating, including Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust. His novel Doctor Zhivago, the story of a doctor and poet caught up in the Russian Revolution and civil war, was rejected for publication in the Soviet Union and first appeared in Italy in 1957. In 1958 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but, under heavy pressure from the Soviet government, declined it. He died near Moscow in 1960.

Boris Pasternak is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Grew up in a Russian Jewish household; Christianity became a theme of his later work. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica