Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

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.