Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow to a wealthy Jewish family. Pasternak’s father and mother, a painter and a concert pianist, respectively, were close followers of Leo Tolstoy and his spiritual-revolutionary movement. The young Pasternak was fascinated by both Christianity and modernist literary movements like Futurism. An injury kept Pasternak was kept out of World War I and, like many other intellectuals, he refused to leave Russia during the civil war. Pasternak found success as a poet after the war. Unlike many of his literary peers, he survived the purges of the 1930s and World War II. In 1956 Pasternak, submitted Doctor Zhivago to a Soviet literary magazine, but it was rejected on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet. The novel was published in Italy in 1957, and it won Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Pasternak’s success was bittersweet, as the award kicked off a furious denunciation campaign in the Soviet Union that ultimately led the author to reject the prize to avoid being deported. Pasternak died of lung cancer in 1960.