Boris Pasternak, Soviet poet and Nobel Prize winning author was one of the foremost literary figures in the USSR. Pasternak was born on February 10, 1890 in Moscow. He studied music during his youth, but later returned to writing poetry. His collections of poems, Over Barriers (1916), My Sister Life (1922), and Second Birth (1932) established Pasternak as the leading Soviet poet. Pasternak's only novel, Doctor Zhivago (1956) won international acclaim when it first appeared in the West in 1957 and was translated into 18 languages, then won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature.—G. Forman