Boris Pasternak was one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century, a poet and novelist whose masterpiece Doctor Zhivago brought him the Nobel Prize and made him a figure of international controversy in the Cold War. Born in Moscow into a cultivated artistic family — his father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist — he studied music and philosophy before devoting himself to poetry.
He won early renown as a poet of dazzling originality, and his verse was admired throughout Russia. But the Soviet authorities grew suspicious of his independence and individualism, and through the harshest years of Stalin's rule Pasternak survived in part by turning to translation, producing celebrated Russian versions of Shakespeare and Goethe while much of his own work went unpublished.
His great achievement was the novel Doctor Zhivago, a sweeping story of love and survival set against the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and civil war. Banned in the Soviet Union for its unorthodox view of the revolution, it was smuggled abroad and published in the West in 1957 to enormous acclaim.
In 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Soviet government, enraged, forced him to refuse it under threat of exile and denounced him as a traitor. Broken by the campaign against him, he died two years later, in 1960. His funeral became a quiet act of defiance, and Doctor Zhivago endures as a landmark of world literature.