PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. His first two ebullient collections of poetry, A Twin in the Clouds and Above the Barriers appeared in 1912 and 1917 respectively. But it was not until 1922, with the appearance of My Sister, Life that he triumphantly achieved his own distinctive voice. He was married in 1921, and again in 1934, and lived most of his life in Moscow. In the twenties and thirties he began writing fiction, including The Childhood of Luvers and The Last Summer, as well as attempting more epic poetry in an effort to stay in touch with the literary requirements of the new regime. The results included Nineteen Five, Lieutenant Schmidt and Spetorsky. At about this time, he began translating European literature into Russian; his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe are regarded as masterpieces of the translator's art. Second Birth, published in 1932, appeared to mark a new beginning. However, it was not until the early forties that this truly came about. The clear, restrained, but still evocative style of On Early Trains would serve him well for his last works: Poems 1955-1959, An Essay in Autobiography and his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but, after a savage campaign of denunciation, was forced to renounce the award. He died on 30 May 1960.
The first work of genius to come out of Russia since the Revolution -- V.S. Pritchett One of the great events in man's literary and moral history -- Edmund Wilson Belongs to that small group of novels by which all others are ultimately judged -- Frank Kermode Spectator Not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communicated -- Isaiah Berlin Sunday Times Clearly a novel by a poet, occasionally messy, sometimes clumsy...yet somehow vastly greater than the sum of its parts The Times
