bio notes:
born: 2/10/1890
died: 5/30/1960
born as: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
nationality: USSR

Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honor. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international best-seller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land. - Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature