Boris Pasternak, Russian writer, 1890-1960

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, "My Sister, Life", was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak is the author of "Doctor Zhivago" (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. It was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy for publication. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize.