Boris Pasternak

Origins and early life

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February 1890 into an assimilated Jewish family, the eldest child of the painter Leonid Pasternak, raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in Odessa, and of the pianist Rosa Kaufman, daughter of a Jewish industrialist.

Work and career

Tolstoy, whose novels his father illustrated, and Scriabin were visitors to the house, and he studied composition from 1904 to 1910 before giving up music for philosophy at Marburg in 1912. Back in Moscow he chose literature, and My Sister, Life, written in 1917 and published in 1922, made him one of the leading poets of his generation. His parents and sisters left for Berlin in 1921, while he stayed, and from 1936 he lived in his dacha at Peredelkino, outside Moscow.

When his own poems could not be printed he turned to translation: Georgian poets, Goethe's Faust, Schiller and the major dramas of Shakespeare, whose versions remain popular with Russian audiences. Doctor Zhivago, his only novel, follows a doctor and poet from the revolution of 1905 to the Second World War; refused by the journal Novy Mir in 1956, it first appeared in Italian, in Milan, in November 1957. Born a Jew, he was drawn to Christianity from his youth: he wrote in 1959 that his nanny had baptised him as a child, his post-war poems took up the Gospels, and the Posen Library notes that he probably joined the Russian Orthodox Church as an adult.

Recognition

On 23 October 1958 the Swedish Academy awarded him alone the Nobel Prize in Literature for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition; he accepted, then the Soviet authorities forced him to decline it. He died of lung cancer at Peredelkino on 30 May 1960, and thousands braved police surveillance to attend his funeral there. In December 1989 his son Yevgeny received the Nobel medal on his behalf in Stockholm.