Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian and Soviet 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 was the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War.