Boris Pasternak: Google Doodle celebrates Russian poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner’s 131st birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 131st birthday of Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator Boris Pasternak (Бори́с Пастерна́к) on Feb 10, 2021.

Who was Boris Pasternak (Бори́с Пастерна́к)?

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к) was born in Moscow on 10 February (Gregorian), 1890 (29 January, Julian) in Moscow, Russian Empire into a rich, acclimatized Jewish family. He was brought up in a family unit overflowing with artistic influence.

The son of a painter and a concert pianist, he dabbled in drawing and devoted years to music composition, but eventually, Boris Pasternak left from his family’s heritage pursuit of literary significance.

Pasternak’s education started in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was proceeded at the University of Moscow. Pasternak went to the Moscow Conservatory to study music (later Germany to study philosophy).

Affected by the composer Scriabin, Boris Pasternak took up the study of musical composition for six years from 1904 to 1910. By 1912 he had revoked music as his purpose in life and went to the University of Marburg, Germany, to study philosophy. Following four months there and an outing to Italy, he got back to Russia and chose to devote himself to literature.

Boris Pasternak’s first books of verse went unnoticed. With Sestra moya zhizn (My Sister Life), 1922, and Temy i variatsii (Themes and Variations), 1923, the last set apart by an outrageous, however calm style, Pasternak initially acquired a spot as a leading poet among his Russian contemporaries.

Made in 1917, Boris Pasternak’s first book of poems, “My Sister Life” (“Sestra moya zhizn”), was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became a significant collection in the Russian language.

Boris Pasternak’s interpretations of the stage play by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca, and Shakespeare remain extremely well known with Russian crowds.

In 1924, Boris Pasternak published Vysokaya bolezn (Sublime Malady), which depicted the 1905 revolt from his perspective, and Detstvo Lyuvers (The Childhood of Luvers), a lyrical and psychological depiction of a little youngster on the threshold of womanhood. A collection of four short stories was published the next year under the title Vozdushnye puti (Aerial Ways).

In 1927, Boris Pasternak again got back to the revolution of 1905 as a subject for two long works: Leytenant Shmidt, a poem communicating threnodic distress for the destiny of Lieutenant Schmidt, the leader of the revolt at Sevastopol, and Devyatsot pyaty god (The Year 1905), an incredible however diffuse poem which focuses on the events identified with the revolution of 1905.

Pasternak’s hesitant autobiography, Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct), showed up in 1931 and was followed the following year by a collection of lyrics, Vtoroye rozhdenie (Second Birth), 1932.

Boris Pasternak (Бори́с Пастерна́к) is the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel that happens between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Doctor Zhivago was dismissed for publication in the USSR, however, the composition was smuggled to Italy for publication.

In 1957 Doktor Zhivago, Pasternak’s just novel – aside from the prior “novel in verse”, Spektorsky (1926) – first showed up in an Italian translation and has been acclaimed by certain pundits as a successful effort to consolidate lyrical-descriptive and epic-dramatic styles.

By 1958, the year of its English edition, the book had been converted into 18 languages and, along with his accomplishment in lyric poetry, procured its writer the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Boris Pasternak (Бори́с Пастерна́к) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an occasion that incensed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which constrained him to decay the prize, however his relatives had the option to acknowledge it in his name in 1989. Doctor Zhivago has been important for the primary Russian school curriculum since 2003.

Boris Pasternak (Бори́с Пастерна́к) died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on the evening of 30 May 1960.

On February 10th, 2021, Google observes Boris Pasternak’s 131st Birthday with a Google Doodle.