He won literature's highest honor and was forced to give it up within a week.

On October 23, 1958, Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Doctor Zhivago had been published abroad after Soviet authorities refused to print it at home.

The reaction in Moscow was fierce. Pasternak faced public attacks and expulsion from the Soviet Writers' Union. On October 29, 1958, he sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy declining the prize.

His case became one of the best-known symbols of art under censorship during the Cold War.

What do you think a writer's work can achieve when it cannot be published at home?

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