Facts about Boris Pasternak
- 09
A 1958 plane crash in Georgia killed Pasternak's close friend and fellow writer Konstantin Paustovsky, devastating the aging novelist during his final years of declining health.
- 08
Pasternak's mother Rosa was a concert pianist who performed across Europe before settling in Moscow, influencing her son's lifelong passion for music and the arts.
- 07
During his final decade, Pasternak maintained a correspondence with British philosopher Isaiah Berlin during a secret 1945 Moscow meeting that lasted several hours.
- 06
Pasternak worked as a translator of Shakespeare for decades, producing complete Russian versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet between 1940 and 1948.
- 05
Pasternak's father Leonid was a renowned painter and illustrator who designed sets for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in early 20th-century Europe.
- 04
In 1935, Pasternak attended a Soviet Writers' Congress where he famously refused to denounce fellow writers persecuted during Stalin's Great Purge.
- 03
Pasternak's 1913 collection My Sister, Life established him as a major modernist poet before he became known primarily as a novelist in his later years.
- 02
Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak's masterwork novel completed in 1956, was first published in Italy in 1957 because Soviet authorities refused to allow its domestic release.
- 01
The 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Boris Pasternak forced him to decline acceptance due to Soviet government pressure and threats of exile.