Boris Leonidovich Pasternak Author

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Russian poet and writer, was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Born in Moscow, Pasternak is best known in the West for his monumental tragic novel on Soviet Russia, Doctor Zhivago. It is as a poet, however, that he is most celebrated in Russia. He fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities in the 1930s but somehow was spared arrest and imprisonment. He died on May 31, 1960.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater is the son of Boris Pasternak’s sister Lydia, to whom many of the letters in this collection are addressed.  He has divided much of his life between working as a medical specialist in hematology and as a translator, publishing both scientific and literary translations, including Boris Pasternak’s autobiographical essay People and Propositions.

Maya Slater, wife of Boris Pasternak’s nephew Nicolas Pasternak Slater, is a widely published writer and a senior research fellow of Queen Mary College, University of London.