Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich 1890-1960
Russian lyric poet, novelist and translator

Born in Moscow, the son of Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945), painter and illustrator of Tolstoy's works, he studied law at the university, then musical composition under Aleksandr Scriabin, abandoning both for philosophy at Marburg, Germany. A factory worker in the Urals during World War I, he was employed in the library of the education ministry in Moscow after the Revolution. He published three collections of verse between 1917 and 1923, and under the influence of his friend Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote the political poems Devyat'sot pyaty god (1927, 'The Year 1905'), on the Bolshevik uprising. Vtoroye rozhdeniye (1932, 'Second Birth') is autobiographical. Among his outstanding short stories are Detstvo Lyuvers (1922, Eng trans The Childhood of Luvers, 1945), a delicate presentation of a girl's first impressions of womanhood, and Provest' (1934, Eng trans The Last Summer, 1959), in which Pasternak's imagery is at its freshest and most unexpected. Under Stalin, Pasternak became the official translator into Russian of Shakespeare, Paul Verlaine, Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist, but with Khrushchev's misleading political 'thaw' he caused a political earthquake with his first novel, Doktor Zhivago (1957, Eng trans Doctor Zhivago, 1958), banned in Russia. A fragmentary, poet's novel, it describes with intense feeling the Russian revolution as it impinged upon one individual, both doctor and poet. Its strictures on the post-revolutionary events are those not of an anti-Marxist but those of a communist, disappointed that history has not conformed to his vision. Expelled by the Soviet Writers' Union, he had to take the unprecedented step of refusing the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature.

Bibliography: R Hingley, Pasternak, a biography (1983)