Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak Pasternak at the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934. Born Boris Leonidovich Pasternak 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 Moscow, Russian Empire Died 30 May 1960(1960-05-30) (aged 70) Peredelkino, USSR Occupation Poet, writer Nationality Russian Ethnicity Jewish Notable works My Sister, Life, The Second Birth, Doctor Zhivago Notable awards Nobel Prize in Literature 1958 Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (/ˈpæstərˌnæk/; Russian: Бори с Леони дович Пастерна к; IPA: [bɐˈrʲis lʲɪɐˈnʲidəvʲɪtɕ pəstʲɪrˈnak]; 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), 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 (1958), a novel which takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Due to the novel's 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, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988.