Jennifer Gehrlein

                                             Boris Pasternak was a Russian poet and writer.  He was born in Moscow, Russia in 1890.  His parents worked in the art industry.  His father was an artist and his mother was a well known concert pianist.  The first college he went to was Moscow University.  There, he took up the art of music.  He worked on music for six years.  Once he gave up on music, he went to the University of Marburg, Germany to study philosophy.  He spent four months there and then went to Italy.  After a couple of trips to Italy, he decided to dedicate his life to literature.  The first book he wrote was not very popular and did not get off to a good start.  One of his books was My Sister Life which he finished in 1917.  It was one of his most influential books in his poetry collection.  He worked on the poetry for 3 months, and he was to embarrassed to publish it because of it's novel style.    ^[1]

     Before the beginning of World War II, he and his wife settled down in Peredelkino.  It is a small village in Russia  populated by writers.   In 1957, Pasternak published his famous novel, Doctor Zhivago.  The novel was published first in Italian and English, then in many other different languages. The novel is about a man torn between two women.  The navel was set in 1917 Russia during the Russian revolution.  It was not completed until 1956 and made into a movie by David Lean in 1965.  The novel won the Nobel prize in literature in 1958.  In Russia, Pasternak was a famous poet but his book was banned from the USSR for a couple of years.  In 1960 Boris Pasternak died of lung cancer at the age of 70.^[2][3]