biography
| name: |
Pasternak, Boris (Leonidovich)
|
pronunciation:
[pasternak]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1890–1960)
|
| biography:
| Lyric poet, novelist, and translator, born in Moscow, Russia. He studied law and musical composition, then switched to philosophy. He wrote autobiographical and political poetry, and some outstanding short stories, some of which were collected in The Childhood of Lyuvers (1924). Unable to publish his own poetry during the years under Stalin, he became the official translator into Russian of Shakespeare, Verlaine, and Goethe. He caused a political earthquake with his first novel, Dr Zhivago, which was banned in the Soviet Union, but became an international success after its publication in Italy in 1957. A fragmentary, poet's novel, it describes with intense feeling the Russian revolution as it impinged upon one individual. Expelled by the Soviet Writers' Union, he had to take the unprecedented step of refusing the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. |
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