Russian · b. 1890
Nobel Prize in Literature (1958, declined under Soviet pressure)
Boris Pasternak was a Russian poet and novelist whose Doctor Zhivago, refused publication in the Soviet Union and smuggled abroad, won the Nobel Prize and became one of the defining novels of the twentieth century.
Boris Pasternak spent the 1930s and 1940s in a precarious position: a Jewish Russian poet whose work was tolerated but whose independence made him vulnerable during the Stalinist purges. He survived partly by making himself useful as a translator — his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe remain standard in Russian — and partly by publishing little of his own. My Sister, Life, the poetry collection published in 1922, had established him as a significant poet; the intervening decades produced relatively little original work.
Doctor Zhivago, the novel he worked on throughout the late Stalin years, was submitted to a Soviet literary journal in 1956 and rejected. An Italian publisher obtained a copy of the manuscript and published it in Milan in 1957, over Soviet objections. The novel — about a poet-doctor trying to survive the Revolution and Civil War while maintaining his integrity and his love for a woman who is not his wife — became an immediate international sensation. When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, Soviet pressure forced him to decline it.
The poet Yuri Zhivago embodies the values Pasternak most cared about: the primacy of individual experience over collective ideology, the insistence on seeing reality rather than receiving its official version. The novel’s poems — published at the end as Zhivago’s own work — are among the finest in twentieth-century Russian literature. Pasternak died in 1960, without seeing his novel published in his own country. It appeared in the Soviet Union for the first time in 1988.
by Boris Pasternak
Pasternak's 1922 poetry collection — written in the summer of 1917, during the revolutionary period — made him immediately famous in Russian literary circles. The poems are extraordinarily sensuous: nature, weather, rain, and the body are rendered with a precision that owes something to Rilke and something to no one. The poetry at the end of Doctor Zhivago belongs to this tradition.
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by Boris Pasternak
Pasternak's autobiographical prose combines memoir of his own development as a writer with extended meditations on Scriabin, Rilke, and Mayakovsky — the three presences that shaped his aesthetic. The book ends with Mayakovsky's suicide, rendered with grief that is also a kind of self-examination: the poet who chose visibility and the poet who chose obscurity, and what each choice costs.
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by Boris Pasternak
Set against the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the ensuing Civil War, Doctor Zhivago follows the poet-physician Yuri Zhivago and his consuming love for Larissa Antipova across years of revolution, separation, and survival in a Russia being remade against its own will.
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Where to start with Boris Pasternak — whether to begin with Doctor Zhivago, My Sister Life, or Safe Conduct. A complete reading guide to the Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer.
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Pasternak's Nobel-suppressed epic of a poet-doctor surviving the Russian Revolution while loving Lara is one of fiction's great statements on the individual caught inside historical catastrophe. These books share its sweep and its insistence on private life.
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