But most of Pasternaks family left Russia for Germany, never to return.

His father taught art at the school which essentially served as Pasternaks childhood home.

His parents received constant visits from prominent Moscow writers, artists, and intellectuals, including, the yet unknown Rainer Maria Rilke in 1899, whose writing greatly influenced Pasternak.

In addition to his parents, Pasternaks teachers were private tutors until he entered high school in 1901, where he received a classical education.

While he drew well, to the delight of his father, his first love was botany and second, music.

Inspired by the composer Scriabin, who was a friend of the family, Pasternak devoted six years to the study of composition.

Three finished piano pieces composed by the young poet have survived from these years.

Although everyone assumed that Pasternak would become a professional musician, he was wary of his lack of technical skill.

In 1909 he gave up his musical career for good when he entered the Law Faculty at Moscow University.

He soon turned to philosophy, and although he appeared to be heading toward an academic career, he ultimately gave it up in 1912 to pursue his true calling: poetry.

Yet his poetry and prose would always bear the mark of his youthful enthusiasms for music and philosophy.

The years preceding the Revolution were a time of great intellectual and artistic richness in Russia.

Since the turn of the century, the country had been enjoying a philosophical and religious revival in which the symbolist poets played a leading part.

In the arts the Russian avant-garde was closely linked to new movements in Western Europe; it was the age of Kandinsky and Chagall, of Scriabin and Stravinsky.

The great poet of the age was Alexander Blok, a symbolist who came of age prior to the flourishing of the great generation of Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak.

The outbreak of the war found Pasternak on the Oka, a river eighty miles south of Moscow, and in his letters of this time his descriptions of the peoples grief foreshadow his later prose and verse.

Pasternak was unable to serve in the army, a childhood fall from a horse having left him with one leg shorter than the other.

Much of the time between 1914 and 1917 he spent as a clerk at a chemical works to the far east of Moscow.

At the time of the February Revolution of 1917, Pasternak left for Moscow.

During the period between his arrival in Moscow and the October Revolution, Pasternak wrote two books, My Sister Life and Themes and Variations, although the circumstances of the war didnt allow for either volume to be published for five years.

My Sister Life, published in 1922, immediately won Pasternak a place among the leading writers of the time.

After the revolution, all Russians had to choose between emigrating and living with the new Bolshevik order.

Pasternak, who held no enthusiasm for the Revolution, stayed in Russia, living in an overcrowded communal flat in Moscow.

Pasternak Boris