Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a distinguished Russian poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator. His early education took place in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and continued at the University of Moscow. Influenced by the composer Scriabin, he initially pursued musical composition from 1904 to 1910. However, by 1912, he had abandoned music and, after a brief period studying philosophy at the University of Marburg in Germany, decided to dedicate himself to literature.

Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, composed in 1917 and published in Berlin in 1922, soon became a seminal collection in the Russian language. His translations of stage plays by notable authors such as Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca, and Shakespeare have remained profoundly popular among Russian audiences.

Perhaps most famously, Pasternak authored Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel set between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II. Despite its rejection by Soviet publishers, the manuscript was smuggled out of the USSR and first published in Italy. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, Pasternak was forced by the Soviet government to decline the prize, but his son Yevgeny accepted it on his behalf in 1989. Since 2003, Doctor Zhivago has been included in the Russian school curriculum.