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Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890, into an artistic Russian-Jewish family. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was a renowned artist who converted to Christianity, and his mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a celebrated concert pianist. Their home welcomed family friends such as composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aleksandr Skryabin, as well as writers Rilke and Lev Tolstoy. Pasternak enjoyed a happy childhood, raised by prominent intellectuals in a cosmopolitan environment. He studied music at the Moscow Conservatory and philosophy at the University of Marburg in Germany. In 1914, he returned to Moscow and published his first poetry collection. His work at a chemical factory in the Urals during World War I later inspired material for his novel "Doctor Zhivago."
In 1917, he fell in love with a Jewish woman and wrote "My Sister Life," a collection of passionate, metaphorical poems that gained international acclaim and influenced Russian Symbolist and Futurist poetry. Pasternak cautiously supported the Russian Revolution but was shocked by the communists' brutality. His parents and sisters emigrated to Europe in 1921. During the "Great Terror" of the 1930s, Pasternak became disillusioned with Soviet reality. Facing severe political attacks, he focused on translating classic works such as Shakespeare's "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "King Lear," Goethe's "Faust," and poetry by Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other Western poets. His translations of Georgian poets favored by Joseph Stalin likely saved his life. In 1934, Stalin spoke with Pasternak by phone and questioned his connection to poet Osip Mandelstam, who was executed on Stalin's orders. Later, Stalin removed Pasternak's name from an arrest list, reportedly saying, "Don't touch this cloud dweller," referring to his book "The Twin in the Clouds."
In the 1940s and 1950s, Pasternak wrote his autobiographical novel "Doctor Zhivago." The character Lara was modeled after his muse, the beautiful and kind Olga Iwinskaja, an editor at "Novy Mir" magazine. In 1949, while pregnant with Pasternak's child, she was arrested by the KGB on false spying charges and spent four years in a prison camp. Their unborn baby was lost, and Pasternak suffered a heart attack. After Stalin's death in 1953, Olga was released and reunited with Pasternak, who completed "Doctor Zhivago." He attempted to publish it in the Soviet magazine "Novy Mir," but it was rejected. The manuscript was secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in Italy in 1957.
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. However, Soviet authorities branded him a "traitor" and launched a campaign of persecution that terrorized him until his death in 1960. The harassment prevented him from accepting the Nobel Prize, forcing him to decline the honor. He lived in fear and insecurity under the Soviet totalitarian regime, ending his life in poverty and virtual exile in the artist community of Peredelkino near Moscow. His final poems focus on love, freedom, and reconciliation with God. Pasternak was posthumously rehabilitated in 1987. In 1988, after being banned in the Soviet Union for three decades, "Doctor Zhivago" was published in "Novy Mir" magazine as a sign of changing times. In 1989, Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel Prize medal in Stockholm.
