This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Boris Pasternak’s classic novel, Doctor Zhivago. Problems with Russian censorship meant it was first published by an Italian company, Feltrinelli. The English translation followed in 1958, which was the year I first encountered it, aged 12. This was the year that Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an event given an ominous dimension when he was forced by the Russian authorities to either renounce the prize or be exiled. Pasternak, for whom to live outside his homeland would have been unthinkable, chose the first option. Expelled from the writers’ union, he died, disgraced, in 1960.