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Pasternak Boris 1890 - 1960 (70)

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Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was a Russian poet, writer and theater translator. He was born in Moscow in a wealthy upper-class artistic family, on February 10, 1890. His father was a famous painter, his mother a pianist with international recognition. Boris started initially music studies; from 1909 he studied law in Moscow for 3 years and in 1912 he attended philosophy classes. During World War I he was not recruited due to a deformity in his legs. During the October Revolution, unlike relatives and friends of his class, he remained in Russia, excited and impatient for the torrent of new ideas and possibilities of this world-historical change. In 1922 he published the collection of poems "My sister, life", which made him famous in literary circles and he married a young art student. In 1923 the Bolshevik regime confiscated the Pasternak family home, allowing them only one room in their huge mansion.

Pasternak continued to publish poetry but the income was meager and his family (his son Eugene was born in 1923) was constantly in poverty. After the final domination of Stalin in 1928, a wave of violence broke out in the country, with forced collectivization in the Russian countryside and food shortages in urban centers. The intense politicization of the time made Pasternak's cautiously neutral stance seem like active resistance to the regime. He escaped exile and forced labor because Stalin, who came from Georgia, liked some translations of traditional Georgian poems he had published.

Exhausted financially, Pasternak worked as a translator for 5 difficult years. His translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences. In 1943 he went to the front line with other writers to inspire their compatriots who were fighting the German occupier. Immediately after the end of the war he began to prepare a novel called "Doctor Zhivago", where he would summarize all his experience. He worked tirelessly for this purpose for 12 whole years, constructing a story full of love, poetry, the beauty of the Russian land and many autobiographical elements. The masterpiece "Doctor Zhivago" was considered anti-Marxist by Soviet censors and it was banned. The work was published in 1957 in Italy, and caused a sensation around the world. It became a bestseller and one of the most popular novels of all time, earning Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following pressure and threats from the communist regime, he refuse the award. He spent his last years in a restraining order at his home in a Moscow suburb. From the beginning of 1959 he began to collapse, physically and psychologically; he tried to commit suicide and he was in constant fear that he will be sent into exile. On May 30, 1960, he died of lung cancer.