Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light.

The leadership of the Union travelled to Peredelkino and severely threatened Pasternak who refused to sign the statement and returning to his dacha. Censors also regarded some passages as anti-Soviet especially the novel's criticisms[citation needed] of Stalinism Collectivisation the Great Purge and the Gulag. Pasternak aspired first to be a musician.

Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. S. In his native Russia Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life is one of the most influential collections ever publiBoris Pasternakd in the Russian language.