Boris Pasternak

Pasternak began as a poet; his 1917 collection My Sister, Life, published in Berlin in 1922, became a landmark in Russian verse. He spent years translating Goethe, Schiller, Calderón, and Shakespeare — versions that still hold Russian stages. Then came Doctor Zhivago, a novel spanning the 1905 Revolution to the Second World War, rejected by Soviet publishers and smuggled to Italy, where it appeared in 1957 as part of a CIA effort to embarrass the regime. The Nobel Prize followed in 1958. The Communist Party erupted, and Pasternak was compelled to decline. He died in 1960. His son accepted the…