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 (18621945), emigrated. His volumes of lyric poems include
A Twin Cloud (1914) and
On Early Trains (1943), and he translated Shakespeare's tragedies into Russian.
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