Boris Pasternak

Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960), Russian novelist, poet, and translator. His poetry Over the Barriers (1916) and My Sister, Life (1922) brought him his first successes. During the Stalinist repression of the 1930s, he stopped publishing his own work and turned to translating the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. Doctor Zhivago, his epic novel of 20th-century Russian history, was denied publication in the USSR but was published in Italy (1957) to worldwide acclaim. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1958), Pasternak was forced to decline it as a result of Soviet pressure. Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the USSR in the late 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost.