Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian and Soviet poet, novelist, and literary translator whose first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and became an important collection in the Russian language. He is the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), set between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War, which was rejected for publication in the USSR and smuggled to Italy for its first printing as part of a CIA operation to undermine the Soviet Union in the eyes of its citizens. He was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and forced him to decline the prize; his son Yevgeny finally accepted the award on his father's behalf in 1989, and Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.