Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak, (1890-1960). Russian novelist and poet. From a cultured Jewish background, he made his name after the Russian Revolution as an avant-garde poet. During the 1930s he published translations of several Shakespearean tragedies. His major novel, Doctor Zhivago, was rejected by publishers in the Soviet . Union for its political content but was published abroad in 1957. It won Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize but after the award was denounced as a “hostile political act” in the official publication of the Soviet Writers’ Union and on Moscow radio he was obliged to decline it.
