Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago

Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago in 1946:
[H]e didn’t complete it until 1955, by which time he’d already published ten of the poems contained in the novel’s final chapter. Hoping to see the book appear in the Soviet Union under the terms of the Khrushchevite cultural “thaw,” he submitted the manuscript to the liberal journal Novy Mir in 1956 and asked the state publishing firm Gosizdat to consider bringing it out. He was rebuffed by both because of the subjective nature of the novel and its rebellion against Marxist orthodoxy. Instead, Pasternak agreed to hand it off to an Italian Communist journalist who had visited him that same year at the poet’s home in the Moscow suburb of Peredelkino, announcing grandly but not entirely without reason, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”
...
The repercussions, however, were dire for Pasternak’s kin. After his death in 1960, his mistress Olga Ivinskaya—the woman upon whom part of the novel’s heroine Larissa Fyodorovna, or Lara, is based—was arrested along with her daughter, Lyudmila. Their crime was the “illegal” receipt of foreign royalties for Doctor Zhivago. Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia, more or less following the fate of her fictional counterpart, while her daughter was sentenced to three.
...
When Stalin’s wife N. S. Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932, an obsequious letter of condolence, signed by thirty-three prominent Soviet writers—all of them subsequently executed in the Great Terror—was sent to the Kremlin. Pasternak was offered an opportunity to add his signature but declined, instead choosing to append a postscript to the letter saying:
I had been thinking, the evening before, deeply and persistently of Stalin; for the first time from the point of view of the artist. In the morning I read the news. I was as shaken as if I had been present, as if I had lived it and seen it.
...
Pasternak again chanced fate when he lobbied to free the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934 for writing a satiric epigram about the “Kremlin mountaineer” with “cockroach whiskers.” Stalin rang Pasternak on the phone at 2 o’clock in the morning, asking why the Soviet writers’ organizations hadn’t appealed to him directly on Mandelstam’s behalf, clearly wanting to scandalize the poets who wouldn’t stick up for their friend. Pasternak explained that it was no longer the custom of these organizations to interfere in such matters. There followed this exchange:
STALIN: But is he [Mandelstam] or is he not a master?
PASTERNAK: That is not the issue!
STALIN: What is the issue then?
PASTERNAK: I would like to meet with you . . . and for us to talk.
STALIN: About what?
PASTERNAK: About life and death . . .
(Stalin then hung up.)
...
No other Soviet writer had the same breadth of vision, the same hopefulness, in the midst of so many human catastrophes. If Pasternak endures beyond the century that didn’t deserve him then it is because, as Robert Conquest noted in 1961, he “saw the human experience more sub specie aeternitatis than is possible to most of us.”