Boris Leonidowitsch Pasternak
(1890 -1960)
| Boris Leonidvich Pasternak was born in Moscow on the 10th February 1890, into a Russian-Jewish family. His father was an artist and his mother was a concert pianist, and they numbered Tolstoy, Scriabin and Rilke as personal friends.Pasternak received a classical education and began initially to study music. By 1912 he had dropped music and started to study philosophy in Marburg, but eventually decided to concentrate on writing poetry and returned to Moscow. |  |
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Pasternak briefly flirted with the Futurist movement, and in 1914 his first volume of poetry “Twin in the Clouds” appeared with much acclaim, however, with the arrival of his second publication “My sister – the life” in 1922, he had started to become marginalised by the changing tone of the Communist Party. He would over the next years, attempt to write ‘epic’ styled poetry in an attempt to appease the regime. During this period he began to translate European literature into Russian and due to ever increasing difficulties, this became his only source of income. Although idiosyncratic at times, his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe are now acknowledged as masterpieces of the translator’s art. |
| However, it would be with the publication of “Doctor Zhivago” in the West (1957/8) that Pasternak achieved world-wide fame; and although accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, official pressure from the Party intensified to the point he had to renounce the award. He was married in 1921, and again in 1934, and lived most of his life in Moscow, and died on the 30 th May 1960 at Peredelkino. |
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