77 Facts About Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak was the author of Doctor Zhivago, a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War.

Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February, 1890 into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family.

Boris Pasternak's father was the post-Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, who taught as a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

Boris Pasternak's mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist Isadore Kaufman and his wife.

Boris Pasternak had a younger brother, Alex, and two sisters, Lydia and Josephine.

From 1904 to 1907, Boris Pasternak was the cloister-mate of Peter Minchakievich in Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, in Western Ukraine.

Minchakievich came from an Orthodox Ukrainian family and Boris Pasternak came from a Jewish family.

Some confusion has arisen as to Boris Pasternak attending a military academy in his boyhood years.

Boris Pasternak went to the Moscow Conservatory to study music, and Minchakievich went to Lviv University to study history and philosophy.

Shortly after his birth, Boris Pasternak's parents had joined the Tolstoyan Movement.

In 1910 Boris Pasternak was reunited with his cousin Olga Freidenberg.

Boris Pasternak fell in love with Ida Wissotzkaya, a girl from a notable Moscow Jewish family of tea merchants, whose company Wissotzky Tea was the largest tea company in the world.

Boris Pasternak had tutored her in the final class of high school.

Boris Pasternak returned to Moscow around the time of the outbreak of the First World War.

Boris Pasternak turned him down and he told of his love and rejection in the poem "Marburg" :.

Unlike the rest of his family and many of his closest friends, Boris Pasternak chose not to leave Russia after the October Revolution of 1917.

Boris Pasternak remained in Moscow throughout the Civil War, making no attempt to escape abroad or to the White-occupied south, as a number of other Russian writers did at the time.

Boris Pasternak continued to write original work and to translate, but after about the middle of 1918 it became almost impossible to publish.

Boris Pasternak attempted to make his poetry more comprehensible by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Boris Pasternak turned to prose and wrote several autobiographical stories, notably "The Childhood of Luvers" and "Safe Conduct".

In 1922 Boris Pasternak married Evgeniya Lurye, a student at the Art Institute.

In 1932 Boris Pasternak fell in love with Zinaida Neuhaus, the wife of the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus.

Boris Pasternak continued to change his poetry, simplifying his style and language through the years, as expressed in his next book, Early Trains.

Devastated, Boris Pasternak went immediately to the offices of Izvestia and begged Nikolai Bukharin to intercede on Mandelstam's behalf.

Boris Pasternak refused to sign, even after leadership of the Union visited and threatened him.

Boris Pasternak was certain that he would be arrested, but instead Stalin is said to have crossed Boris Pasternak's name off an execution list, reportedly declaring, "Do not touch this cloud dweller".

In 1943, Boris Pasternak was finally granted permission to visit the soldiers at the front.

Boris Pasternak bore it well, considering the hardships of the journey, and he wanted to go to the most dangerous places.

Boris Pasternak read his poetry and talked extensively with the active and injured troops.

Boris Pasternak watched as ex-POWs were directly transferred from Nazi Germany to Soviet concentration camps.

In October 1946, the twice-married Boris Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya, a 34 year old single mother employed by Novy Mir.

Deeply moved by her resemblance to his first love Ida Vysotskaya, Boris Pasternak gave Ivinskaya several volumes of his poetry and literary translations.

Boris Pasternak gave him the phone number of her neighbour Olga Volkova who resided below.

Boris Pasternak asked Luisa Popova, a mutual friend, to tell Ivinskaya about his promise.

In 1948, Boris Pasternak advised Ivinskaya to resign her job at Novy Mir, which was becoming extremely difficult due to their relationship.

Boris Pasternak's apartment was ransacked and all items connected with Pasternak were piled up in her presence.

Boris Pasternak found him sitting on a bench near the Palace of Soviets Metro Station.

Boris Pasternak worked intensively on the second part of Doctor Zhivago.

The critic accused Boris Pasternak of distorting Goethe's "progressive" meanings to support "the reactionary theory of 'pure art", as well as introducing aesthetic and individualist values.

Boris Pasternak further declared that, despite the attacks on his translation, his contract for the second part had not been revoked.

When Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953, Ivinskaya was still imprisoned in the Gulag, and Boris Pasternak was in Moscow.

In conversation with Ivinskaya, Boris Pasternak explained that the pig dictator Napoleon, in the novel, "vividly reminded" him of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Boris Pasternak submitted the novel to Novy Mir in 1956, which refused publication due to its rejection of socialist realism.

Boris Pasternak believed that Feltrinelli's Communist affiliation would not only guarantee publication, but might even force the Soviet State to publish the novel in Russia.

Boris Pasternak refused to change his mind and informed an emissary from Feltrinelli that he was prepared to undergo any sacrifice in order to see Doctor Zhivago published.

At the time, Boris Pasternak had been regularly attending Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy.

Boris Pasternak guessed at this from the growing waves of criticism in USSR.

Meanwhile, Boris Pasternak wrote to Renate Schweitzer and his sister, Lydia Boris Pasternak Slater.

Boris Pasternak wrote that he was wracked with torments and anxieties at the thought of placing his loved ones in danger.

On 23 October 1958, Boris Pasternak was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize.

The anti-Pasternak campaign was organized in the worst Stalin tradition: denunciations in Pravda and other newspapers; publications of angry letters from, "ordinary Soviet workers," who had not read the book; hastily convened meetings of Pasternak's friends and colleagues, at which fine poets like Vladimir Soloukin, Leonid Martynov, and Boris Slutsky were forced to censure an author they respected.

Furthermore, Boris Pasternak was informed that, if he traveled to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Medal, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union.

Yevgenii Boris Pasternak believes that the resulting persecution fatally weakened his father's health.

Meanwhile, Bill Mauldin produced a cartoon about Boris Pasternak that won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

Boris Pasternak wrote his last complete book, When the Weather Clears, in 1959.

Boris Pasternak informed Olga Carlisle that, at the end of The Blind Beauty, he wished to depict "the birth of an enlightened and affluent middle class, open to occidental influences, progressive, intelligent, artistic".

However, Boris Pasternak fell ill with terminal lung cancer before he could complete the first play of the trilogy.

Boris Pasternak died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on the evening of 30 May 1960.

God marks the path of the elect with thorns, and Boris Pasternak was picked out and marked by God.

Boris Pasternak believed in eternity and he will belong to it.

Meanwhile, Boris Pasternak continued to be pilloried by the Soviet State until Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed Perestroika during the 1980s.

In December 1989, Yevgenii Borisovich Pasternak was permitted to travel to Stockholm in order to collect his father's Nobel Medal.

When Yevgeny Borisovich Pasternak was questioned about this, he responded that his father was completely unaware of the actions of Western intelligence services.

In 1990, the year of the poet's 100th anniversary, the Boris Pasternak Museum opened its doors in Chistopol, in the house where the poet evacuated to during the Great Patriotic War, and in Peredelkino, where he lived for many years until his death.

In 2009 on the City Day in Perm the first Russian monument to Boris Pasternak was erected in the square near the Opera Theater.

In memory of the poet's three-time stay in Tula, on 27 May 2005 a marble memorial plaque to Boris Pasternak was installed on the Wormann hotel's wall, as Boris Pasternak was a Nobel laureate and dedicated several of his works to Tula.

In 2012 a monument to Boris Pasternak was erected in the district center of Muchkapsky by Z Tsereteli.

In 2015, as part of the series "125th Birth Anniversary of Boris Pasternak", Maldives issued a miniature sheet depicting Boris Pasternak.

On 1 October 2015, a monument to Boris Pasternak was erected in Chistopol.

Reluctant to conform to socialist realism, Boris Pasternak turned to translation in order to provide for his family.

Boris Pasternak soon produced acclaimed translations of Sandor Petofi, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Taras Shevchenko, and Nikoloz Baratashvili.

Boris Pasternak instead advocated observing each poem from afar to plumb its true depths.

Whenever [Boris Pasternak Leonidovich] was provided with literal versions of things which echoed his own thoughts or feelings, it made all the difference and he worked feverishly, turning them into masterpieces.

Boris Pasternak was a composer, and had a promising musical career as a musician ahead of him, had he chosen to pursue it.

Boris Pasternak came from a musical family: his mother was a concert pianist and a student of Anton Rubinstein and Theodor Leschetizky, and Pasternak's early impressions were of hearing piano trios in the home.

Boris Pasternak's father Leonid was a painter who produced one of the most important portraits of Scriabin, and Pasternak wrote many years later of witnessing with great excitement the creation of Scriabin's Symphony No 3, in 1903.