Crossword Dictionary
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, (born January 29 [February 10, New Style], 1890, Moscow, Russia—died May 30, 1960, Peredelkino, near Moscow), Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international best seller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land.
Pasternak grew up in a refined, artistic, Russian Jewish household. His father, Leonid, was an art professor and a well-known artist, portraitist of novelist Leo Tolstoy, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, all frequent guests at his home, and of Lenin. His mother was the pianist Rosa Kaufman.
Young Pasternak himself planned a musical career, though he was a precocious poet. He studied musical theory and composition for six years, then abruptly switched to philosophy courses at Moscow University and the University of Marburg (Germany). Physically disqualified for military service, he worked in a chemical factory in the Urals during World War I. After the Revolution he worked in the library of the Soviet commissariat of education.
World War II provided some respite from the ideological and physical repression and planted the seeds of hope, ultimately unjustified, in the liberalization of Stalin’s regime. Pasternak’s earlier poetry was reprinted, and he was allowed to publish his new collections of patriotic verse: Na rannikh poezdakh (1943; “On Early Trainsâ€) and Zemnoy prostor (1945; “Expanse of the Earthâ€).