page_title: Boris Pasternak
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Boris Pasternak / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Boris Pasternak (left) with his brother Alexander. Painting by their father, Leonid Pasternak
context_page_description: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.
  Pasternak is the author of Doctor Zhivago, a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy for publication. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were able to accept it in his name in 1988. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.
context_section_description: Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February (Gregorian), 1890 (29 January, Julian) into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. His father was the Post-Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist Isadore Kaufman and his wife. Pasternak had a younger brother Alex and sisters Lydia and Josephine. The family claimed to be descended on the paternal line from Isaac Abarbanel, the famous 15th-century Sephardic Jewish philosopher, Bible commentator, and treasurer of Portugal.
caption: Boris (left) with his brother Alex; painting by their father, Leonid Pasternak
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