BORIS PASTERNAK belonged to a generation that gave Russia its twentieth-century poets—Blok, Esenin, and Mayakovsky. He was born in Moscow in 1890, the eldest son of Leonid Pasternak, the painter, and Rosa Kaufman Pasternak, the musician. Early in life he became interested in music and the study of composition, but later abandoned music for philosophy and went to study with Professor Cohen in Marburg, Germany. During the First World War he returned to Russia and worked in a factory in the Ural Mountains; after the Revolution he was employed in the library of the Commissariat for Education. He joined avant-garde poetry groups, experimenting in new techniques of rhythm and composition. His poems, most of which appeared between 1917 and 1932, gave him an eminent and unique position in the world of letters. In 1932, an autobiographical poem, Spectorsky, gave rise to violent accusations of “anti-sociability.” From 1933 on, Pasternak lived a retired life, devoting himself mainly to translations of foreign poets. He also translated a number of Shakespeare’s plays; his versions are considered the most outstanding and popular in the Russian language.

Doctor Zhivago was the first Original work published by Pasternak after twenty-five years of silence. It was announced for publication in Russia in 1954 but subsequently withdrawn. In the meantime an Italian edition was already on press and it could not be withheld from publication. Thus it happened that one of the most important works of contemporary Russian literature appeared first in translation. Doctor Zhivago has still not appeared in Russia, but has been published in Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian (University of Michigan Press), Spanish, and Swedish.

In October of 1958, one month after the American publication of this novel, Boris Pasternak was awarded The Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mr. Pasternak died in his sleep on May 30, 1960 at his home in Peredelkino, a writer’s colony about twenty miles outside of Moscow.