Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) was primarily a poet, though he is best known for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. His poetic style shows influences of Russian symbolism, which involves elements of mysticism and defamiliarization (viewing familiar things from a different perspective) as well as futurism, which promoted the breakdown of forms and the praise of mechanism. His first collection of poetry, Twin in the Clouds, was published in 1914, but it was his 1922 collection titled My Sister, Life that made him an influential poet. By the 1930s, he reworked some of his poems to make them easier for a wider audience to understand. Pasternak also wrote translations of works by Goethe and Shakespeare, among others, to support his family.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 is a recurring subject of Pasternak’s writing, including Doctor Zhivago. Vladimir Lenin called the 1905 revolution “The Great Dress Rehearsal” for the October Revolution, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, in which Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed. In both cases, social revolt sprang from anger toward the tsar and the ruling classes over widespread poverty and the need for workers’ rights.