Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago was published in 1957. It was not published in Pasternak's native country of Russia, but in Italy. The USSR did not allow the publication of the novel because some believed that it showed a 'nonacceptance of the socialist revolution." (1) Today, Doctor Zhivago is considered to be one of the greatest Russian novels written.
             Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in 1890 in Moscow. His father was an artist and a professor at the Moscow School of Painting while his mother was a concert pianist. Both his parents were of Jewish lineage. Through his parents' friends and associations he was often around well known writers and poets. Pasternak entered the Moscow Conservatory but dropped his musical ambitions to study philosophy at Marburg University in Germany. His first published works, BLIZNETS V TUCHAKN, went unnoticed. This was a collection of poems Pasternak had written but he did not give up. With his poems Over the Barriers and My Sister – Life, he gained attention and fame as a promising fine new poet. Most of his poetic works from the early 1920's were autobiographical or political poems. In the mid twenties he shifted from this and focused on the Revolution and focused on history and the moral problems facing the Russian people. As Socialist Realism was more and more imposed on Russian writers, Pasternak stopped publishing new and original material. Throughout the 1930's and 1940's officials did not favor his work and refused to allow its publication. He began to work translating literature from writers such as William Shakespeare and J.W. von Goethe. During the World War II period, he wrote primarily patriotic poems. In 1954, a group of poems was published in a Russian journal under the title "From a Novel" referring to Doctor Zhivago. It was not until 1957 that his novel was published first in the Russian language ...