Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian writer, poet, and translator, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

The future poet was born in Moscow into a creative Jewish family. Pasternak’s parents, his father the painter and academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts Leonid Osipovich (Isaak Iosifovich) Pasternak and his mother the pianist Rozaliya Isidorovna Pasternak (née Kaufman), moved to Moscow from Odessa in 1889, a year before his birth. Boris was born in the house at the intersection of Oruzheiny Lane and Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, where they settled. Besides Boris, the eldest, Alexander, Zhosifina, and Lydia were born into the Pasternak family. Approximately until 1920, Pasternak’s patronymic in documents was Isaakovich.

At the age of four, Boris Pasternak moved with his entire family to the government apartment of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture on Myasnitskaya Street.

The Pasternaks’ apartment at that time was frequented by well-known, famous, and even brilliant people—not only from artistic circles. Small private concerts were improvised in the Pasternaks’ apartment, with Scriabin and Rachmaninoff taking part. Pasternak called the beginning of his conscious childhood the night he awoke to the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s piano trio, which was being played for Leo Tolstoy and his family.

In 1903, the Pasternak family rented a summer house in Obolenskoye near Moscow. There they met the family of the composer Scriabin. That same summer Pasternak broke his leg, which healed with shortening. By a constant effort of will, Pasternak was able to conceal his limp.

Boris began writing poetry in the summer of 1909, but at first he did not attach serious importance to it and did not reveal his poetic pursuits.

In 1908 he graduated from classical gymnasium, and then studied in the philosophy department of the history and philology faculty of Moscow University, graduating in 1913. But in addition, while still at gymnasium, he completed in six years the