Modern Russia - Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (10 February1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences. Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of Doctor Zhivago (1958), a novel which takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Due to the novel's independent-minded stance on the socialist state, Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.