Boris Pasternak
BORIS LEONIDOVICH PASTERNAK (Moscow, 1890 – Peredelkino, 1960), Russian poet, novelist and literary translator. His education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. He studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, Germany. His first book of poems, Sestra moya zhizn (My Sister, Life), appeared in 1922 followed by Temy i variatsii (Themes and Variations) in 1923. Pasternak’s reticent autobiography, Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct), appeared in 1931, and a collection of lyrics, Vtoroye rozhdenie (Second Birth), followed in 1932. He translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist and Ben Jonson, and poems by Petőfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley and others. In 1957 Doktor Zhivago, Pasternak’s only novel first appeared in Italian. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
