Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 and after briefly training as a composer resolved to be a writer. He published a large number of collections of poetry, written under the burden of Soviet Russia's stringent censorship, before publishing his most famous work, Dr Zhivago , in 1958. This novel won him the Nobel Prize for Literature but the USSR's hostility to the West meant he was forced to turn it down. He died in 1960.