Dissident and Postcolonial Fiction

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), a Russian poet and novelist, completed his novel Doctor Zhivago — a sweeping love story set against the Russian Revolution and Civil War — in the mid-1950s, but Soviet publishers rejected it for its ambivalent, unheroic portrayal of the Revolution. The manuscript was smuggled out of the USSR and first published in Italian translation in Milan in 1957, becoming an international sensation. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, Pasternak was forced by intense pressure from the Soviet government, which threatened him with expulsion from the country, to decline the prize; he died two years later, and his son accepted the Nobel medal on his behalf only in 1989, after the fall of Soviet communism.