Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich (1890–1960)

Russian poet and novelist. His novel Dr Zhivago (1957) was banned in the USSR as a ‘hostile act’, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 (which Pasternak declined). The ban on Dr Zhivago has since been lifted and Pasternak's reputation as a writer has been revived since his death.

Born in Moscow, he remained in Russia when his father, the artist Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), emigrated. His volumes of lyric poems include A Twin Cloud (1914) and On Early Trains (1943), and he translated Shakespeare's tragedies into Russian.