The author of Doctor Zhivago. His Nobel Prize winning book is caused all sorts of controversy in the Soviet Union. It was published in the "West" in 1956 and won the Nobel Prize in 1958. Pasternak's novel was only read through samizdat books in the Soviet Union. It was eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was published for all the world to read. To add insult to the Soviet government's injury, it won the Nobel Prize for literature. Instead of viewing this with pride, the government, although in the process of opening up to various ideas (Stalin died 1953 and the new leader, Khrushchev, immediately began attempting to liberalize, to a degree, the oppressive regime that Stalin had built), refused to allow Pasternak to go the presentation of his Nobel Prize in 1958. He died 2 years later, of lung cancer.